How Fans FIXED Sonic Unleashed ... and Made it BETTER

[00:00:00]We all know Sega has a massive modern Sonic problem. If you watched my channel before, you saw exactly how we exposed the automated uninspired hallway design of Forces. How we broke down the community overhauls needed to save Sonic Frontiers. But today, we have to look back at the absolute blueprint of this entire struggle. A game that is widely considered the most visually stunning yet fundamentally broken disaster in Sonic history. Welcome to Sonic Unleashed. [music] Heat. Heat. Heat.

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[00:00:51][music] >> [music] >> Well, for nearly 20 years, Sega basically treated Unleashed like a family secret they wanted everyone to forget. While the lesser games like Sonic Colors and Generations got multiplatform remasters, Unleashed remained entirely abandoned on ancient hardware. And many fans actually expected to unleash to get a remaster after Generations. But no, nowhere to be seen. Sega's corporate excuse was always the same. That the engine was too specialized, the code was a nightmare, maybe they lost the code, which would be very embarrassing, and a native PC port that was completely impossible. So, what happens when a billion dollar gaming company says something can't be done?

[00:01:46]Well, you guys know Chaos X with the whole PO6. I'm going to make a video on that. But remember, the fans, they stepped in and did it anyway. Well, a team of brilliantly communic community coders didn't just make this mod and they didn't just build another heavy emulator setup that bugs all the time.

[00:02:01]They pulled off this kind of historical engineering engineering miracle and Shadow Drop Sonic Unleashed Recompiled.

[00:02:09]And I remember when this came out, people were hyped. This was a literal native PC port. And honestly, it changes everything. And I promise you, I'm not exaggerating because if you've played the Series X and Series S version of Sonic Unleashed, you may think that's okay. But this is a different kettle of fish. Now, if you're already a massive Sonic fan like me, you've probably already tried ways to make this game playable over the years. And for a while, the best option we had was on modern consoles. If you played the backward compatible versions of the Series X and S, you know what I'm talking about. Microsoft's engineering team rolled out their official FPS boost feature for the game. And to be completely fair, it felt like magic at first. Took the original 2008 Xbox 360 code, which was permanently locked at a choppy 30 frames per second, and it routinely tanked down to a painful 15 fps at the heavy speed runs. And when it smoothed out, it was still barely hitting those 20s. And suddenly, the Series X was pushing a crisp 4K resolution at 60 fps. And the Series S was handling an upscale at 1440p at 60.

[00:03:10]It made the game kind of playable. It fixed the lag, but the more time you actually played, especially with Generations, too, you start to realize that Microsoft gave us a massive performance upgrade, but was heavily restricted. The game was strictly capped at 60 fps. There was no much extra power that you could use from the Series X to enhance the game. The conso's engine bumps into a hard ceiling. It's definitely an improvement over the 360 and PS3 versions, don't get me wrong, but it still feels like you're playing a game that's trapped inside a very pretty box. The physics are still tied down.

[00:03:41]The loading times are still tied to the old code structures, and the gameplay flaws remain entirely untouched. But it gets worse because brute forcing an old 360 engine to run at 60 fps on a backwards compatibility introduces massive input latency and completely breaks the game internal physics. Sonic Unleash was fundamentally designed around its original uh 30fps, but if you actually push a 30fps game on the 360 to 60 without it being actually optimized, the engine starts dropping and misinterpreting your button inputs. So, if you've played Daytime Stage Dragon Road, you know the absolute horror of the homing attack latency. For example, sometimes the homing attack would overshoot itself or sometimes the homing attack wouldn't even work. You'll press a button to chain a jump across a death pit, but the engine delays the input by a fraction of a second, which causes you to slide right past the target and plunge into oblivion. It turns the pre precise platforming into a total guesswork. And it's not even just the daytime levels because in the Werehog night stages, your combat combos will suffer from massive input lag. You'll smash the buttons, but the latency delays the Werehog's punches, which makes the combat feel incredibly sluggish, heavy, and unresponsive. Now, to be fair to them, this doesn't happen extremely often, but sometimes it can.

[00:04:53]And for example, if I'm on a run, especially in a modern level, and the homing attack doesn't work. It completely messes up my run. And I promise you guys, if you play Dragon Road enough, you'll notice that the homing attack sometimes just won't work.

[00:05:06]Well, we've seen this exact engine breaking mess before with Sonic Generations because if you guys go on that backwards compatible version of the 360 Generations and go on Chemical Plant Modern, whenever you go onto that pulley mechanic at the end of the stage, Sonic goes flying and goes into an unscripted death. And also, the emulated console ports just throw more frames at the broken foundation, which destroys the game stability in the process. So, this is exactly what fans responded to Microsoft and Sega. This was a legendary community de developer known as Sky. And alongside a dedicated team, they didn't just want an uncapped buggy mock console experience. And they didn't just want to use emulators like Zena. I mean, I know how much of a pain that was to set up in 2022. emulation does but demands a massive amount of hardware power just to translate 360 code into a PC language real time which results in this really unstable experience which I really don't want you guys to experience. I mean I have my issues with heroes on emulation.

[00:06:04]Instead the team used a groundbreaking development technique which is called static recompilation. Well, if you guys aren't really into this science stuff, in plain English, they built a highly sophisticated software tool that took the raw compiled machine code straight into the 360 game disc and completely translated it into C++ negative code that the Windows modern original Linux systems can read directly. So, if we sink that in for a second, this isn't an emulator. This is the game itself that is actually running on a native PC as if Sega built it for Steam because the emulation layer is entirely erased and the game is beautifully optimized. It runs flawlessly on a mid-range setup and the handhelds like the Steam Deck. But the absolute kicker, well, the frame rate is completely truly uncapped. And it's not just upscaled. It actually works with the input responses that make the game feel so smooth. If you have a high refresh rate monitor, you can run Unleashed at blistering 240 FPS or completely unrestricted frames per second. Running through these levels without a single artificial hardware restriction completely fixes the physics loop at all. And you can really tell the difference. But this project isn't just a win for the visual purist. The real magic of the uncap native PC port comes down from everything that isn't visual.

[00:07:17]Because when you uncap the frame rate on a native build, the first thing you notice is the near zero input latency.

[00:07:23]Because on the original ones, it was crazy. At 300 miles per hour, that split-second delay is the difference between an S rank and a death pit. And on PC, the PC actually registered your inputs instantly, which means the homing attack chains on Dragon Road work flawlessly every single time. Remember, unleashed is incredibly harsh when it comes to getting those Sranks, and you need to be getting those without a kill dying once. So, it's very important. But more importantly, the uncap performance fixes the actual game's logic. Because if you actually have built the game natively and entirely back from scratch, the community has decoupled the core physics from the frame timing. So, for example, Sonic's momentum, the camera tracking, and the environmental collision maps are completely stable, no matter how fast you're moving. And the loading screens, well, they don't exist because on the 360, you spend a massive chunk of your time staring at them. And now, you just press a level and it immediately goes running. And also speaking of the pacing of the actual game, the port actually addresses the gameplay flaws that drove the entire entire fan base insane when this game came out because we all know that the biggest complaint of Unleashed was the Werehog. And the daytime stages were just the pure speed perfection, but the nighttime stages dragged on forever. I mean, in my in my opinion, the combat wasn't terrible, but the audio design was a nightmare. Every time there was a tiny, insignificant minion that sworn on your screen, the gorgeous atmospheric orchestral midnight music instantly played, but was violently cut out by the incredibly loud, repetitive, jazzy battle theme. It played constantly and became a bit of a meme over the years.

[00:08:51]Because Unleashes Recompiled is a native PC executable, the team actually built a highly accessible built-in manager directly into the launcher. So, right out of the box, the community included a simple toggle that you can actually turn it off. So, you can finally walk into these night stages and hear the beautiful music without your interruption. They also added options to fix the Werehog's unleash gauge mechanics and entirely patch out the annoying autosave warning delays. And also, the fans didn't just port the game, but they went through Sega's old design choices and cleaned up the mess.

[00:09:20]So, in general, the port of of the self is brilliant, but I didn't really want to just go into that into this video because, you know, this this game is amazing. I know it's been out for a while, but I wanted to go through a couple of mods because like I know a lot of you want the definitive experience.

[00:09:36]That's a a dig at Sonic Frontiers DE, but there's a couple of mods that I've left in the description when you guys want to check out this port. And genuinely, it's amazing. Now, the first one is the momentum based physics because basically this makes it so Sonic can go flying. It's sort of like the homing dash from Sonic Frontiers, but it just feels a lot more polished because obviously you're utilizing momentum and it's not just you speeding across the map, but you need to make some pretty cool plays. If you guys have ever used Mspeed in Sonic games, it's sort of similar to that, but it feels so much better and it makes the game feel like you're going faster than the original Unleash, which gives you kind of a reason. Even if you've loved Unleash and played it before, [music] this is the best way to play it, especially with these mods. You know, Sonic's homing attack can become faster just in general, the map, the game just feels faster, and whenever you go down a slope, Sonic actually increases his speed, and that's kind of crazy for being in a boost game. The next mod that's crucial is the Unleash HD by Pupsy mod. Basically, this increases the resolution for all of the UI elements and just makes the game feel a little bit more polished than it already is. I mean, Unleash is already beautiful, but you want to make sure you have this so everything is a bit more crisp. For the definitive experience, you're also going to want to have the Faithful HD characters mod by Macross. And what this does is it just makes the game look more prettier with the models. All of the models have had an increase um from the actual polygons. So the models of all of the characters just look so much more polished. So the game has like this less like fuzzy features that just makes the game look more gorgeous than it already is. The next mod is by King Galactics and it's called the foreign input system. I'll leave this in the description. What this does is it makes the Werehog's gameplay feel a lot more consistent with the frame rate. It also reduces the input lag and gives you a couple of beta attack moves for the Werehog. So, it's kind of cool to actually play the Werehog with as it was intended to do with its full potential, as well as just making the Werehog's gameplay and the platforming feel more connected. So, you're not accidentally throwing yourself off the stage and being able to trail some pretty cool combos. The next mod that's optional, but I personally adore is the Sonic Dream Team skin mod. And what this does is it just makes Sonic look cooler.

[00:11:39]There are some brand new animations, and just like in general, the mod just looks really cool for Sonic bobbing around. It actually looks like he's picking up speed and there's momentum in his force.

[00:11:48]And last but not least, you need the Sonic Unleash Visual Overhauls mod because that just makes the game look so much better. There's just better textures and just the game just looks like a genuine remaster that Sega could make. So, let me know what you think of this mod in the comments, guys. And I wanted to make this video because I've covered about how fans have fixed many things in in the past, and this is no different. But this is a completely different step up because everything's customizable. Make sure to like and subscribe only if you like me as a person. Maybe check out one of these videos. Check out my brand new channel that like is checked there. You can if you want to. It's It's completely optional. But yeah. or click the bell if you want to cuz I still do make content.