How would a 2D Sonic game have looked on the Sega Saturn in 1996? We’ve seen Sonic 3D Blast, the Mega Drive game that was ported to Saturn. There’s the tragic tale of Sonic Xtreme, as well as the side projects that were Sonic R and Sonic Jam. But how a true mainline 2D Sonic game may have looked on Sega’s fifth gen console is an interesting question, especially given that the Saturn was a sprite-moving powerhouse.
Sonic Mania gave us some insight, but with SAGE season in full flow, a new fan game has its own interpretation of what Sonic may have looked like on the Sega Saturn.
Sonic UltraSaturn is a new full game from Un Sonic Ryu and contains several zones, three playable characters and the sort of visuals that would have been beyond the 16-bit original games.
UltraSaturn is currently a PC-only experience, so it’s sadly not something you’ll be able to play on your real Sega Saturn console, it but looks and sounds like something very much in the spirit of what you would see on that system.
This is a full game, so you get over half a dozen zones, bosses, and even an ending.
When you start the game, you’re greeted to this fantastic intro that combines elements of both the Sonic CD intro, complete with the Sonic Boom opening song, and the 1996 Sonic the Hedgehog Anime. The two work spectacularly together, with animated images that appear to have been downscaled in order to give them a look of their era.
It represents a pretty astounding level of attention to detail and, outside of the game, you can see that ’90s aesthetic in the commercials created for this game.
Once past the title screen you can see that the game has a save function not unlike Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic Mania, where you similarly track your progress and select your characters.
Once into the game proper, you’re treated with an extremely solid fan game. Stages are by and large created from assets of previous games. Madness Mountain has parts of Mystic Cave, Hill Top, and the Marble Zone, Dynamite Plant is a Sonic the Fighters stage with assets taken from Chemical Plant, Metropolis, Oil Ocean, Scrap Brain and Wacky Workbench.
That said there’s a fair bit of original imagery in here that keeps things fresh. It all gels quite nicely together.
At this stage, it may not sound like anything new, but there’s a few things that already set it apart. The Sonic sprite is extremely well detailed, expressive and animated, far beyond anything see on the Mega Drive or Genesis and even than Mania, which used the Sonic 1 sprite. In fact, this is probably pretty close to how a post Sonic 3 ’90s Sonic would have evolved.
Beyond that, the HUD seems to be inspired by Sonic Xtreme and there’s assorted transparency effects as well. Lots of sprites, including Sonic himself, display rotation effects, once again, something well beyond 16-bit games.
But the real show-stealers are the 3D areas. It’s here that you see the sort of sprite work the Sega Saturn and Sega System 32 excelled at. In the title screen and indeed the first boss fight, the ground exhibits the sort of infinite planes you’d be familiar with on the Saturn.
Often there’s not an abundance of scaling sprites — this isn’t an Outrunners level representation of the visual concept, but it certainly seems to be something that the Saturn could have done in its sleep.
Sound also has had a bump, with a load of sampled speech from Dr. Robotnik bringing the boss battles to life a little bit more. Some jingles have huge jumps in quality like the extra life theme and by and large the music is great.
There is a caveat, though. The music is all borrowed from other games. That’s not something uncommon with these types of projects, since unless there’s an attached composer, you can’t expect these homebrew developers to do everything. What’s here is, by and large, fantastic, from Sonic Fighters tunes to the Sonic 4 boss theme, which sounds better here than in its own game.
How does it play? Well, it’s Sonic, the physics are pretty much intact, and Sonic moves as you’d expect him to.
The only issue, and again, it’s not specific to this project, is that the level design can make certain stages a chore. There are acts that have a single path but feel maze like as you explore them for ages. There are sections that feel cheap, where you avoid one trap to fall directly into another.
In honesty, it feels like it aims for a Sonic CD approach for act design, a game which wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of the series in that respect.
This can apply to bosses too. The first boss is visually impressive but it took me a good while before I realised I needed to bounce his lasers off of the stones to hit him, same with the Metal Sonic fight, and the bottomless pit in the zone 2 boss area can get in the bin.
The Sky Chase act is fun though, a nice callback to Sega’s sprite-scaling greats like After Burner and Space Harrier.
Overall this is a great looking fan game and one that’s enjoyable enough to see though.
What would Sonic have looked like on the Sega Saturn? This feels pretty close! And while we can’t change the past and put this on our Sega Saturn’s in 1996 when it may have had an impact, and we currently can’t play this on our Saturn’s in the here and now, it’s certainly an experience we can play with smiles on our faces wondering, what if?
This is awesome. I reeeeallly would love you play this on my Saturn though. Hopefully someday they will make it playable on our favorite console. Or at the very least, the Dreamcast. Also, I’ll volunteer to create a full original soundtrack to the game if the dev’s bring it to Sega’s black (or white) box! 🙂