FOSSPicks
3D Sonic
Sonic Robo Blast 2
Sonic the Hedgehog appears quite often in open source gaming remakes. This must be because Sonic was a mainstay of 1990s console gaming, a decade that saw the creation of Linux, and is long enough ago to make teenagers of that time senior developers today. Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a perfect proof of this theory, combining not only open source with Sonic, but also with another behemoth of the era, Doom. The game itself is entirely fan-made and even has its own roots back in the late 1990s. It features over 25 levels that are entirely created by the community and feature the same manic, sugar-fueled platforming style of the originals, but with one important difference. The game play has been transposed into three dimensions. And not just the tidy polygonal three dimensions of Super Mario 64 either. These are the pseudo three dimensions of the crude textures and large sprites of Doom, or more accurately, the updated Doom Legacy engine.
If you've ever played the 2D original, then the gameplay will be familiar. There's a significant introduction sequence that provides a chunk of backstory, complete with cartoon-style graphics, before you're launched into the game proper. You get to play as any of the main characters, each with their own abilities, and your mission remains the same – collecting rings while traversing each zone as quickly as you can. You still get to tackle many of the same enemies, challenges, and hurdles as the original, only now with the ability to move in all directions. It might sound like an unnatural fit for two different styles of game, but Sonic Robo Blast 2 plays remarkably like the original and with similarly high-quality production values. Before long, you'll be riding lifts, clinging on to out-of-control mining carts, and flying across canyons like it's 1992.
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