Sonic has been Unleashed on the PC that's right Sonic Unleashed also known as Sonic World adventure has arrived sort of unofficially on the PC it got its first Native PC Port which is something that's very very exciting to me and also even though he's not much of a Sonic fan I think from a technology standpoint it's also interesting to Alex patalia yeah this is amazing John I was wondering when this was happening I heard about something moving in this direction a couple of months ago and now we're seeing it in the flesh that's right so
the first thing to be excited about obviously for me is that I think this is a pretty cool game it has some flaws of course but there's good stuff here but until now it's been limited to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 uh there was also a Wii and PS2 version that is a completely different game by the way with its own engine and visual style and obviously you weren't going to do this on those platforms because this is one of the earlier examples of really high quality pre-calculated Global Illumination in a real time game
uh which there's a whole GDC presentation about this which I recommend checking out um and it drastically altered the look of the game and because it's such a bright sunny game it now means that when you know light sort of give you get that illusion of light sort of bouncing in and around the crevices and filling in things and you got like natural Shadows everywhere and it just it's awesome and in addition to that you have this beautiful post effect Suite uh they did per pixel motion blur there's depth of field color grading and more
I thought this game was absolutely stunning at the time oh yeah and I still think it looks great today yeah I loaded this up on my PC uh to be able to even comment about it with John and I was immediately struck by how good looking this game still is kind of like um you know when you load up a halflife 2 due to its use of based Global illumination you get it also a similar sense of this is a bit more Timeless than other games from its time period exactly same with something like mirrors
it precisely uh that that was the same time when you started to see the sort of more experiments with Advanced though baked lighting as opposed to what was common that generation with just like the very hard fully real-time lights but like no real indirect lighting solution uh so you just had that super dark grimy look so we're past that and in the original version as well um it was stuck on those platforms there was Xbox backwards compatibility support but it with FPS boost n less but it was still limited to the 880x 720 resolution uh
which all of this has been overcome with this recompilation project right mhm yeah and so this is something you've started you actually covered one of these I think it was the Zelda one the Major's mask one right yes so so basically the the concept of a recompilation is that the code that was supposed to be running onto on the Xbox 360 as an executable I think they're like XEX files or something like that instead ofex they're converted into C++ code then they can be recompiled for any platform uh using something called Zenon recm I think
that's how you pronounce it uh and then the that would only cover like the game code and the stuff that's going to be running on the CPU the graphics though obviously were very specific to Xbox 360 which was kind of from a hardware level something in between dx9 and dx10 with some special stuff that made it run quite a bit faster for the time period and there they're using something called xenos recm which converts 360 Shader binaries into hlsl and then that can be recompiled into other things such as uh DX and spurv for Vulcan
and uh using the DirectX Shader compiler cuz now that's a new feature actually of the DirectX Shader compiler um so you can use it with dx12 and Vulcan in the case here I think it defaults maybe to dx2 12 onload uh I'm actually not 100% sure I'm actually not 100% sure either but it does just uh default up into running completely fine on a modern PC when you load it up the first time there was nothing finicky about this like going into for example like in an emulator where you'd maybe have to choose a render
before it starts you'd have to do all these things uh to once again reiterate it the entire point of a recompilation is that it becomes essentially a native PC Port of the game exactly and that's that's key here but of course uh these guys are not at Liberty to distribute this game legally right and the recompilation project does not include Sega code or assets or anything like that really um so in order to set this up they've actually developed this very clever and cute installation process that I I found really Charming I like this a
lot essentially you do need to get the original game data so you need the original DVD files from the Xbox 360 version because this is recompiled from the 360 game not the PS3 game but that won't matter as we'll get to um you also need the title update which is what they call the just regular update files for 360 and then you can also install the DLC and it basically when you set this up and you saw this too Alex you basically go through this nice frontend menu system that resembles the the game's own menu
and you sort of like connect the pieces of data and it sort of lights up these little like icons here to denote that hey you have now installed this bit of data and you just go through that process and once it has all the data it installs the game properly extracts the data it needs and then it boots up exactly like the original game which brings us to basically the first big new addition the options menu so obviously the key here is that resolution is now variable you can do whatever you want it supports things
like Ultra wide as well both for cut scenes and gameplay which is great you can even adjust the position of the icons uh the frame rate cap has been removed uh though they do caution that there are some tiny glitches apparently running at a higher frame rate I didn't notice anything personally myself but uh that is possible there is a color grading option so separate so the PS3 and 360 version had a slightly different look to it there was like this like orangish filter they used on 360 to give it a warmer appearance on PS3
that wasn't there so it kind of had a brighter like more blue Hue to it uh you can now choose which is cool some people like one or the other the options now there uh Shadow resolution can be massively boosted uh it's insane how much of a difference this makes Shadows are much much sharper at the higher resolution also the global illumination the the light maps and everything they can now be filtered using by cubic filtering as opposed to normal bilinear which makes them look significantly smoother there's also you can increase the number of samp
in the motion blur or turn it off though don't be a sicko and turn it off cuz it's good in this game it's good in this game it's nice looking uh they also got the depth of field to scale properly to high resolutions which is something that if you tried to emulate this game it never really worked right at high reses for that reason yeah so that's actually really cool uh you even get freaking transparency multi- sampling anti-al scene so msaa is here and with transparency so things like foliage fences and and all those little
like fiddly bits are super clean so basically like when you combine that with the fact that there's also like a resolution scaling slider so I was able to run this with 4K 200% scaling on the resolution 4X msaa with transparency multi sampling at 120 frames per second without a single hiccup I mean the image quality you know I I do like ta TAA in the modern era I think it is a good thing overall especially with the way modern games work but when you see something like this running at that resolution that Clarity it just
reminds you like dang manage quality yeah it's crazy I also like you I loaded it up at 4K immediately adjusted everything to 8X uh and was blown away another thing that I did uh was since I have a monitor that's capable of it with like the Dual mode switch I tried it out at 480 HZ as well um running out a 9800 x3d with very powerful GPU and the funny thing is uh you can get the game pretty easily above 120 and even into the 200 240 FPS range on something like a 9800 x3d uh
but you start becoming CPU limited uh I think for obvious reasons when you try and go up to 480 Herz it's just a matter of uh well even though the game is an Xbox 360 game there's only so much you can do to fit everything into a 2 millisecond window uh so yeah uh so like uh it's like between 250 and 480 and and higher depending upon what you're doing in the game but uh it's still obviously extremely fast Sonic goes fast uh to say the least um but so really I mean the big takeaway
from all this Beyond like just the technical impressiveness of it all is just it's just Man the game really holds up so well visually speaking and I also love how they implemented some very slight sort of like quality of life features in there for instance uh I think you were confused when I first wrote this but the the battle music in the Werehog stage can now be turned off and it's like wait why would you want that well and the original so they have this awesome background music for the stages but they would have a
single battle song that would play every time you engage in combat you engage in combat a lot and uh so it was constantly ping ponging between the stage music and the battle music and it just gets old after a while so being able to disable that is awesome and it just makes the whole thing feel better to my uh ears anyway mhm yeah I think that would bother me used to bother me and old jrpgs actually now that I think about it so that's nice uh another thing that we didn't talk about is this is
since it is actually running on lowlevel um uh apis here uh the game would then have to manually take care of Shader compilation right in this case they're using an asynchronous Shader compiler much like an emulator would have uh and just one thing to say I did not notice any Shader compilation wos while playing the game at all at least for the first 35 minutes uh can't obviously imagine it would happen later on but due to the way the system set up but this is not something you have to worry about like some with some
emulators uh Shader compilation can be a big pain but since this isn't an emulator they know everything up front and they can asynchronously compile them exactly and gosh thinking about that that that's probably my first real understanding of what Shader compilation stutter was was back when I first got into dolphin like so many years ago before they implemented all the modern stuff right the old version of dolphin uh you would get so much Shader compilation stuck playing everything and I was like oh this is awful uh they have since addressed that of course mhm so
there's that kind of stuff that's been improved I guess you know one complaint we can level is that uh you can't skip cutscenes which is annoying on a first playthrough if you're if you've already seen them or you don't want to watch them yeah I was I was sitting there I was like you know I don't know much about Sonic lore but I just want to play this game and I couldn't skip through it uh but you know it's you know it's it's a very of the era thing that only became like uh something you
would see kind of later in the generation I would say exactly exactly so also loading um times are improved uh significantly they were already improved on the Xbox backwards compatibility version but now they're even faster they even implemented things like the you can choose which version of the day night cycle video you want Oh Yeah so basically the the way the game works is once you get a certain way in you have this world map which is the globe behind the title screen so when you continue your game you just see the globe You Spin
The Globe you choose where you want to go you can go to the village and explore on foot or essentially you can just go directly into a stage if you just want to play a stage right which is cool uh you can also spin spin the planet changing the position position of the sun which uh determines whether it's day or night but within the stages if you're like actually in the village I guess I mean you can hit these little sort of like hourglass things to swap between day and night instantly uh because it's not
real-time lighting they don't do it in real time they actually have to load the night or the day map on 360 they would have this uh sort of video cut scene of Sonic transforming into the wear hog but on PS3 they just showed a spinning Moon Sun icon in the middle that would like spin around real fast and then zoom off screen which is actually much faster so like if you want that longer video you can have it but if you just want the quicker PS3 transition you can use that as well oh that's very
happy which is cool so they really did a good job of sort of implementing all the different sort of features between the two versions into this which is cool as well and yeah the PS3 version of this game is also kind of weird uh in that for whatever reason and if I recall they run with an uncapped frame rate oh so but we're talking this was a 30fps game not a 60fps game on the consoles and the triple ain't doing 60 FPS in this game so you often ended up when it's running smooth you're often
like just above 30 oh my good and it's like why would you do that like why just lock it at 30 it just makes it feel less smooth than it should have because of that so many bizarre decisions in that generation uh oh I hate that stuff yeah but I guess one of the other things to that I'm really happy about with this project is beyond the game itself being ported is that this um the uh developers behind this have also made it so that the tools they've used to handle the recompilation process have been
um kind of Open Source to other people to use and this potentially means in the future that we'll be seeing kind of like with the with the Nintendo 64 recompilation tools that will reling more native PC ports of games that were previously either exclusives to Xbox 360 or had PC versions that weren't so great and the Xbox 360 version might be actually be something that would be better uh to be ported to PC so there's you know there's tons of games where I'm just like really like the Xbox 360 catalog and they're kind of stuck
on the console and it' be amazing to see them finally come to PC let me just put one out there if if anybody from this development team is watching or somebody that wants to T tackle this Project Gotham Racing guys three or four doesn't matter do it it's still stuck on 360 it never got backwards compatibility support and it never will yeah uh these games are amazing they're legendary very 30 FPS too right like 30 FPS limited um pgr3 itself is only 1024 by 720 I think something like that or 648 I I guess it's
like 102 by 648 pgr4 went up to full 720p but still these would be awesome as native PC versions oh my God I would if possible yeah honor the legacy of bizarre Creations please exactly in the wake of them being yeah like the things that Bobby kodic said about them oh yeah we need this justice but anyway that's pretty much it and hopefully you've enjoyed seeing the game running here and just appreciating like how beautiful this is still is today and yeah if you have uh a copy of this lineing around be sure to give
it a shot but thanks for joining me on this one Alex anytime there John and hopefully you guys all enjoyed it and we'll see you next time
