Hey, it is me again. You might remember me from the update that I did yesterday and I am back again oh so soon to bring you some community updates here from over the past week. This is something I find quite important to be doing, so this is more or less now a trial run of that. I hope that this article won't be too much of a bore to read since it is rather long and if I missed anything important I apologize in advance.

That aside, the past few weeks have been quite eventful for the Sonic community in terms of what has been going on, at least in terms of conventions. For the first time ever at the Leipzig games convention has Sonic Unleashed been playable to the general public, as well as a fan run convention that showcases the games of many talented people within the fanbase.

To read more, click the title of this article and it'll bring you the big long article I have written up for you guys to read. I hope you guys aren't afraid of a lot of text!

-Spark

Hey, it is me again. You might remember me from the update that I did yesterday and I am back again oh so soon to bring you some community updates here from over the past week. This is something I find quite important to be doing, so this is more or less now a trial run of that. I hope that this article won't be too much of a bore to read since it is rather long and if I missed anything important I apologize in advance.

That aside, the past few weeks have been quite eventful for the Sonic community in terms of what has been going on, at least in terms of conventions. For the first time ever at the Leipzig games convention has Sonic Unleashed been playable to the general public, as well as a fan run convention that showcases the games of many talented people within the fanbase.

So Let me kick things off here with the Sonic Amateur Games Expo, or more commonly referred to as SAGE. The expo this year had gathered quite a bit of attention amongst the fans, clocking in with about 74 336 hits to the site within the week that it was open. That is pretty impressive if you ask me. SAGE was home to many great fan-games that I had the pleasure of playing games much like Emerald Ties: Crossing Fates, Sonic : The Fated Hour, and Sonic Time Twisted and even the Sonic Zenith demo. Of course I had played a few more than that, but those were the ones that I had the most time to play since I've been quite busy recently. Next SAGE I'm not going to be quite as busy and can properly review some games next time, as well as play a whole lot more than I did. This isn't to say however that there wasn't a strong showing at the event by any means, there were many games present, even a few non Sonic titles as well such as Everlasting Song and Nothing (yes, it is named Nothing). I regret that I haven't had a chance to play either, but I'll be getting right on that. I urge you to go check out these games, which can be found right on the Sonic Fan Games HQ forums.

I was personally quite excited for Sonic Nexus, as one of the team members Slingerland had told me about the game when I asked him about getting into fan-gaming and it looked amazing from what I've seen. I was a little bummed because the demo for it was not available during SAGE but I've heard it will be coming out sometime real soon and I couldn't be more excited for it. The guys over there would really appreciate I'm sure if you'd follow their development over at the Sonic Nexus website , where they'll be posting regular updates.

Not only was there a strong showing of games at SAGE this year, but the event was brought to a whole other level with many different guest speakers present at the event. Once again I wasn't able to catch any of them, but some of the people present was fan favourite Ryan Drummond, Richard Jacques, and even Jun Senoue popped by unexpectedly on one of the days during the event. The only guest portion I was able to listen to was a recorded version of a trivia show that had Mike Pollock as a guest. It was quite entertaining to listen to despite the technical difficulties. The questions were really thought out, but the participants were hardly able to answer them - but it sounded like everyone had a lot of fun anyway.

This was essentially the first SAGE event that I've been able to kind of be around and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. If there was something that I really liked about the event it was the dedication that people had to their projects, which I really respected. As I said, next SAGE I will be a little more prepared and I'll be able to cover it in full as well as mention more games. I am really sorry to anyone who had a game at SAGE that I didn't list, I didn't have a lot of time to play through all of them and I promise next SAGE I'll get around to a lot more than I did this time.

Aside from SAGE, this seemed to be the week of Game Conventions. Over on the other side of the world Leipzig was going on, in which Sonic Unleashed was playable to the public for the first time since it was announced. Sonic Unleashed, the next game in the Sonic franchise for consoles, is a 2D and 3D hybrid that takes the best aspects of the series and mashes them together to make an entirely new engine. It was originally supposed to be the much wanted Sonic Adventure 3, but the team decided to go into a new direction. So just how did the game hold up at Leipzig? Sonic Unleashed was very well received all around by many game sites, one of the first previews from Gamespy had gone so far to say it had perfect controls'. Many of the other gaming sites also thought that this game had really solid controls as well. The Werehog portions were more or less subject to the reviewers taste, some found it to be fun and others found it to take away from the experience.

This isn't to say that the game is completely perfect yet, as there is still one complaint that many have about the game still at this point. The frame-rate from time to time will drop a bit when things get going in the game, but that is something hopefully that SEGA will fix up during the final stages of the game. As it stands though Sonic Unleashed looks to be the next great Sonic game, but I can't actually say that without playing the game first. I'm sure a demo will be around sometime within the next month or two however, so I guess we can find out then (or when the game is released).

So that just about wraps this all up, this is the second update that I've made on the site here so hopefully it wasn't too hard to follow. In the future I'll be trying to keep you guys updated on things more or less as they happen, rather than trying to recap as best as I can what has already happened. It'll also make the updates shorter because of that.

'Till next time,

Spark