Crawl around looking for medals in 4k.
Some may remember Sonic Unleashed. While the day levels of the game were praised, the night levels were… less so. None of that really matters, however, as recent events have brought the game back to the fore; it now has a native PC port of the Xbox 360 version.
You might remember last year saw the release of a native PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. That was accomplished with a new tool that allowed for a static recompilation of the game into an executable for PC or really any other platform you so choose. Compared to decompilations, which often take years due to the amount of research necessary to take a game (even an N64 game) and convert to a native PC port, recompilation takes much less time. Modern Vintage Gamer put out a video on the subject, below:
Why is this important? Well, inspired by that same French excellence that project, Sonic fans put together a similar tool aimed at doing the same for Xbox 360 games titled XenonComp, with their first game, naturally, being Sonic Unleashed.
So what’s the difference between this and emulation? Well, while emulation does offer bonuses (save states probably being at the forefront), there are a number of benefits a native port offers, most of which are mentioned in that announcement video above. They can take the game and really pump up the visuals, among a number of other quality of life upgrades. And, let’s be honest, Xbox 360 emulation has never been all that great to begin with; things have advanced little compared to, say, PS3 emulation. So being able to take Xbox 360 games and circumvent the need for years more development is a pretty big win, especially considering the fact that the Xbox 360 store shut down last year.
If you want to play this port, though, you will need an Xbox 360 copy of Sonic Unleashed. After all, we here at GAMbIT would never advocate for the cool act of media piracy for a 17-year-old version of a game that’s no longer available firsthand at retail. And we certainly wouldn’t tell you to copy that floppy. You can, however, download the recomp at the group’s Git here.
As for XenonComp, that can be found here. And if it’s anything like N64Recomp, it’s going to take the right people playing around with things for there to be more game recompilations released.
All said, though, it’s easy to see this as a win for preservation.
Source: GamesRadar+
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