Nights into Dreams is the theme for this year’s annual Sonic Amateur Games Expo — aka SAGE — and a new trailer Sunday highlighted three fan-made homages to the iconic Saturn action game.
The trailer kicked off with “Nights Moonlight Dreams” by Marco Medina. It appears to recreate the original Nights gameplay but in a more 2D sidescrolling form using a polygonal Nights character with 2D sprite objects and backgrounds.
A few minutes later, the trailer showed off “Nights Open Dreams,” a fully 3D behind-the-back flying game in which players guide Nights through rings over floating islands to collect blue chips.
The last Nights homage in the trailer was a mod for the popular indie 2D platformer Pizza Tower that released on PC in January. The mod, called “Nights Into Dreams Pizza Tower,” replaces the playable character with a manic-looking rendition of Nights.
All three projects appear to be running on PC. In fact, only one fan game in the trailer is confirmed to be running on Saturn hardware: Slide Hop.
Shown about 15 minutes in to the 27-minute trailer, Slide Hop is a project that SegaXtreme member Ponut has been working on for the Saturn since last November.
Ponut describes it as a “3D almost-platformer” in which the player guides a pony through gates on a track while finding collectibles like rings and a flag. It supports the 3D analog controller.
You can download the latest playable alpha build for the game from SegaXtreme, although it doesn’t run on some emulators. It’s recommended that players use only Bizhawk or the latest version of Mednafen. Real Saturn hardware works, too, of course.
Readers may remember Ponut for entering a 3D pony game in previous SegaXtreme Sega Saturn Game Competitions as well as creating the Ponesound audio driver.
It’s unclear whether any other projects highlighted by the trailer were running on Saturn, but we’ll find out when SAGE begins Sept. 1. That’s when all the fangames will be made available to try out for free on SAGE’s website, with streaming coverage continuing on the expo’s Twitch account through Sept. 8.
The Sonic Amateur Games Expo is an annual non-profit event put together yearly by the people at the Sonic Fan Games HQ forums to support, promote and celebrate the community’s creative efforts. It prominently features fan-made games that are homages or sequels to existing properties like Sonic or Mega Man, but it also shows off completely originally indie games.
Last year, SAGE featured a pair of Saturn projects — Sonic Ringworlds and Voxel’s Sonic Xtreme — as well as a PC game that’s an indie homage to Sega Rally, Over Jump Rally, as SHIRO! reported.
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