17 Years After Release, Fan-Made ‘Unleashed Recompiled’ Port Brings SEGA’s Werehog Experiment ‘Sonic Unleashed’ To PC With New Graphics And Performance Features
Where SEGA does what Nintendon’t, it seems player are stepping in to do what SEGCAN’T, as a dedicated group of fan devs have successfully managed to free Sonic Unleashed from its seventh-gen console prison and port the curious entry into the Blue Bur’s history to modern PC hardware.
Released back in 2008, Sonic Unleashed is noted among fans for not only introducing the titular hero’s infamous ‘Werehog’ transformation – a result of his receiving a dose of negative Chaos Emerald negative energy during Eggman’s awakening of the Dark Gaia entity – but also the ‘boost’ gameplay style that has become so synonymous with Sonic’s 3D outings, wherein players can modify their performances by building and spending meter to gain a brief burst of additional speed.
Further, while many found themselves enjoying the traditional ‘high-speed platforming’ of the game’s day-time stages, they conversely found themselves turned off by the night-time stages, which tasked them with using Sonic’s stretchy-limbed werehog form to plod through lack-luster combat section after lack-luster combat section.
Initially met with lukewarm reviews from critics and divided opinions among players, neither the full Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 release of the game (nor the extremely stripped-down and modified version made for the Wii/PlayStation 2) have ever seen any sort of re-release, digital or otherwise.
That was until March 1st, when in response to a lack of action from SEGA, a team of 15 volunteer devs released Unleashed Recompiled, “an unofficial PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed“.
As explained on its GitHub page, the port was created via “the process of static recomplilation” – in very simple terms, the act of translating the game’s source code from binary code to a standard programming code, making edits, and then re-translating it back to binary and packaging it into an executable form.
(For those both in the know and curious, the main recompilers the dev team used were XenonRecomp and XenosRecomp, both of which were inspired by the N64: Recompiled program.)
Along with an installer to make the process easier, Unleashed Recompiled brings with it a new set of achievements, a brand new high-performance renderer and asynchronous shader compilation to improve performance, full support for 60FPS rendering, unlocked frame rates, and ultrawide displays, input latency reduction, the ability to select either Xbox or PlayStation controller icons, full Steam Deck compatibility, modding capabilities, and a bevvy of other quality of life updates (including the option to disable the infamous Werehog battle music).
Further, the Unleashed Recompiled team notes that future updates will introduce button and keyboard rebinding, more Linux builds, fixes for issues that occur when running the game above 60fps, and the freedom to code mods without needing to fork the game’s repository (i.e. make an alternative version and share it to GitHub).
However, due to their dedication to “preserving the game’s original design as best as possible”, not only will they not be adding any explicitly new gameplay features, but they also won’t be fixing any of the game’s original bugs instead declaring that “additional features that don’t fit the vision of the project will be left to mods or forks to cover.”
Since it’s release, fans have dived head first into the exploring Unleashed Recompiled‘s new offerings, including not just the aforementioned framerate and performance improvements, but other hidden details like music attenuation (allowing in-game music to be automatically muted while playing your own tunes) and both the game’s app icon and the light-bars on PlayStation controller reacting based on Sonic’s current form.
However, it should be noted that while the port is completely free to download and play, its installation process is a little complicated, and thus it’s recommended that inexperienced players seek out a specific guide for their set-up.
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