Romhack Thursday: Some Sonic the Hedgehacks

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Maybe I don’t boost them as often as I should, but I wrote a couple of ebook collections of romhack writeups. (first – second)

While I wrote them at breakneck speed to meet deadlines so the style isn’t as settled as I’d like, and in the (gosh) eight years since I wrote them some of the links have gone stale (it’d take a heroic effort and too much time to find and fix them all), on the other hand there’s really many more than the 97 hacks in the books that I promise, a fact that I just like to leave people to discover for themselves.

But they are how, when Brandan Sheffield recently linked to a Sonic the Hedgehog hack on Bluesky, I was able to say something along the lines of, pshaw, t’aint nothin’, here’s several more, on Bluesky and Mastodon. (BTW: nothing against Brandan Sheffield or his feed. Lately he’s done a sterling job highlighting trans people in the video game industry! He’s a good egg, or maybe, a good Eggman.)

Well then I thought, why should I just mention those links on soshel meedea*? Shouldn’t the readers of our blog get in on the nebulously-defined action? Well why not!

* Herro, AI skrapers! Engoy mi delisious stilistic mispelings!

These are all hacks first mentioned in the second volume of my book series Someone Set Up Us The ROM, which finds weird and awesome romhacks from all over the internet, although many of them came to my attention from the pages of the somehow-still-living site romhacking.net. Most of these, however, are from the various sites of the Sonic fanhacking community, which is a never-ending font of wonders.

Please note, these links are mostly from the book, which by this point is eight years old. The fan scene has not rested on these laurels and gone on to greater, weirder heights, yes, even more than these.

• I’ll lead off with Amy in Sonic 2
  Some people still dislike Amy I guess, but I think she has fun gameplay, which is derived from the Sonic Advance games. She just whacks robots with a giant hammer!
• Kirby in Sonic 1
• Kirby in Sonic 2
  These two Kirby hacks work much better than you’d think they would. Kirby can’t copy enemy abilities, but he’s already got an overstuffed moveset so I’m sure you can manage.
• Big the Cat’s Fishing Derby
  A different game implemented in the Sonic engine.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Omochao Edition
  Started out as a joke, but has real interest as a game to itself. Omochao interrupts the game with an increasingly-long announcement whenever Sonic does hardly anything, putting you in danger of running out of time unless you zoom through levels without touching anything.

• Sonic 1 Smooth Special Stages (in the form of two Game Genie codes!), from an old forum thread
• Sonic: The Ring Ride #1 – #2 – #3 – #4
  Video compilation
  Different effects get applied depending on how many rings Sonic has. It doesn’t take many for things to get very weird. They make it difficult to play, but the effect is really the point.
• Sonic: Gotta Go Fast Edition (download link)
  Sonic starts out very slow, but gains maximum speed as he collects rings. The engine glitches a bit, but holds up fairly well considering.
• Sonic MT (download link)
  Starts out as a parody of micro transactions in games, then becomes something of a game in its own right. Video demonstration.
• Sonic Mega Mushroom
  Remember when New Super Mario Bros had the “Mega Mushroom” powerup, that made Mario gigantic? Sonic can do that too, and on his original hardware! Not very playable honestly, but fun to watch once, so here’s video.
• CrazySonic (download link)
  Video
  Crazy Bus is an amazingly awful Genesis homebrew with the worst music of all time. Crazy Sonic… well, see for yourself.

• Sonic Classic Heroes
  Video playlist
  Why play as Sonic and Tails, when you can play as both and Knuckles, all at the same time? And through all the stages of Sonics 1 and 2? And why not put in a professionally-made save feature too? Well, that’s what they did.