SAGE’s 2020 showcase brought remakes, demakes, and reimaginings to light. Sonic GT is just one of the recent stand-out works of the fan community - fans have been putting unique spins on the hedgehog for years. It’s just unfortunately short the entire game can be beaten in thirty minutes. Every moment of high-speed action is cultivated by rolling down a hill at the right time or smoothly navigating the level. There are no speed boosters or set pieces. This is what makes Sonic GT feel like a breath of fresh air. The levels in these games are generally linear, with the fastest path often being a reward for reacting to an obstacle appropriately. Sonic does accelerate well in most of these games, but the terrain matters less when he can reach top speed at the push of a button. Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Generations, Sonic Colors, and Sonic Forces are all what the community calls “boost games,” as their gameplay revolves around maintaining a meter that allows Sonic to dash through stages at the speed of sound. Sonic Team-developed Sonic games, too, have come to focus on the hedgehog’s speed. Sonic accelerates and decelerates as one would expect him to, and the game’s four levels are each designed to build and maintain the speed that they gain while skillfully running through them. SAGE 2020 saw the release of Gabriel Gonzalez’s Sonic GT, a high speed, physics-based platformer that winds up playing like Sonic Adventure if it were made a decade later. While news on what Sega has planned in store for the hedgehog’s 30 th anniversary has been scarce, fans of the character haven’t had to look hard for new games to sate their need for speed. Since it’s birth in the year 2000, this online expo has produced a host of innovative games. Sonic Mania’s existence alone is an anomaly, a project led by prominent Sonic fan-community member, Christian “Taxman” Whitehead, and almost entirely developed by members of that community - people with experience working on romhacks and fan games, and their project surpassed the efforts of Sega themselves in the eye of the public.īut Sonic Mania is far from the only popular Sonic game made by fans of the blue hedgehog. The Sonic Amateur Games Expo (or SAGE) is a yearly online event where members of the Sonic fan community create games, mods, and hacks inspired by the Sega game series.

Its sister release, created by industry veterans at Sonic Team, is sitting at around a 55 on the same site. The former, a retro-throwback game developed by a group of fans, presently holds a critic score in the high 80s on Metacritic. Sonic the Hedgehog’s last set of major releases, Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, garnered polarizing responses.

Top ten sonic games