Out of all the magazines to have a cover story on Sonic Unleashed, Play Mag takes the cake with their May 2008 issue featuring 10 pages of Sonic Unleashed goodness. In celebration of their lengthy publication, we’re going to recap a few of the things they mentioned about the game.
Oh yeah, and we have scans from the Sonic Unleashed Article in Play Magazine.
The real meat of the article was the exclusive interview with Sonic Team Producer, Yoshihisa Hashimoto (that guy we mentioned a few days ago). To get started, Hashimoto reveals to us that Sonic Unleashed is under new management, which ought to bring a sigh of relief to many of us losing faith in the series. While the Sonic Team is still in charge of development, the core development team in charge of design is completely new. What does all this verbage mean for you? A fresh, NEW Sonic experience, unlike any of the recent installments!
The team has decided to divide gameplay into two different views, which would be the 2D sideview, and the 3D forward view. According to Hashimoto, the two mechanisms are split about half and half throughout the game, and “fills the void” us classic Sonic fans have experienced ever since the hedgehog ever made his way into the 3D realm. Also, to put to rest any rumors about Sonic Unleashed being restricted to rails (ie: Secret Rings), he will have complete ability to roam around in immersive 3D environments.
To our delight, Hashimoto also revealed that “Silver won’t make an appearance in this game“. That’s one more excessive character we can mark off our Not Wanted list. Rather than focusing much on new characters, Sonic Unleashed will focus on “Sonic and his travels around his world in a big adventure“. Phew!
Sonic Unleashed will feature hub like stages (similar to towns in previous titles), that will act as a means of adding “color and background to Sonic’s adventures“. While we’re not entirely thrilled of this concept, Yoshihisa assures us that the hubs will not hinder the tempo of the game. SEGA has learned from their mistakes in the past, and are making sure they address them to provide us with an awesome Sonic experience, and so far, we’re impressed.
We highlighted some of Sonic’s new moves in Sonic Unleashed a few days ago, but we’ve been clueless as to how new moves are going to function in the title. Apparently, new moves can be found within stages and added to Sonic’s abilities as you are playing (versus a purchase system introduced in previous games). Some abilities mentioned in the article that we haven’t seen before include stomping and wall jumping.
What about graphics? We’ve heard that Sonic Unleashed is coming to 4 consoles, but how will each console compare visually? The team has been working for the past 3 years on the Hedgehog Engine, which is being used to power both the Xbox 360 & Playstation 3 versions of the game, while developers will be working hard to develop visuals that mimic the engine on the Nintendo Wii. This may come as a hard hit to Wii players who up until now have thought the Wii will be getting the stunning visuals we’ve seen so far.
For the full read, we highly suggest you go pick up a copy of the magazine yourself. It’s really worth the read, and we’ve only covered a portion of it here. Our hopes are high for more information coming soon!
Scans after the jump!
Sonic Unleashed Play Magazine Scans
@DarkChaos: Sounds great! I only have Wii!
I love SU! And some more serious thing isn’t wrong.
By default, Silver has the best character design without arguement. Sonic is original but still, kinda bland. Shadow’s plain old boring, and mostly, only girls like him. Still, Silver and Chip are the only new characters I like. Nobody liked Silver just because he was introduced in the worst Sonic Game known to man, and that he had 1/2 of Sonic’s Speed, and that Sonic wasn’t very fast in that game to begin with.
I SHOULD BE IN THERE IT SHOULD BE ME VS SONIC IN THERE!
I wonder what Shadow will be like in here……..hmm……..A bad *** as usual! =^_^=
No Silver…in all honesty I was mildly intrigued to learn more about him, yet…if Shadow isn’t in this game…that would eat at me pretty badly. And to those that comment that Shadow has -died- multiple times, I’d love to reference that in Sonic and Knuckles of the original series, Sonic fell to earth at the end of the game, though survived that as well… >_< I can’t say I’m familiar with him dying at any other point in the canon storyline so…
is endless possibilities the unleashed main theme if u havent seen the video go to this address
www2.sega.com/gamesite.unleashed
there should be a brand new charecter for unleashed that would rock but silver should have made a charecter in unleashed he was awesome no questions silver is the best charecter ever
yes! this game is going to rock! i like how they have gone back to their old ways like in SA and SA2 and how they made it so any newcomers can get ahold of the idea. but i have something to say about your comment yamiseto. i agree totaly, but blaze does exist actualy. she was in sonic rush and sonic rush adventure. but still you are correct.
AllHailSilver: The reason Shadow keeps coming back after he died 3 times is cause he can’t die. SA2 stated that with project shadow with trying to create a being with immortality. And I got nothing bad with Silver but the voice actor killed his character. Plus, unleashed is made with no relation with SH2006 or secret rings so Silver and blaze don’t even exist in unleashed.
I read the full article off the scans. Here’s the videeo for the Europe level.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mtYLeQwjqis