You may be thinking “Wasn’t there an article about this already?” Yes, but I wanted to share my thoughts on it. Anyway…
On March 1st, 2025 YouTube user and Sonic modder Melpontro, streamed a modded copy of Sonic Unleashed. It was a seemingly normal stream where he and a few other people were playing through the game with a bunch of silly mods thrown on top of the game. But the game was running smoother, it was running at 60 FPS. Melpontro claimed that it was because he managed to overclock the Xbox 360 he was playing the game on. He did a full playthrough of the game, and at the end of the 7 hour stream he played a trailer and revealed that he wasn’t playing it on a 360, or any sort of Xbox. It was being played on PC. The trailer was showing that Sonic Unleashed got a full unofficial PC port through static recompilation. And that it was already out for people to play.
The port was built using two tools. One that aided in translating the Xbox 360 executable into C++, called XenonRecomp and another that took the game’s shaders and converted them into HLSL, which allows them to be recompiled into either Direct X 12 or Vulkan, called XenosRecomp. These tools and the port were inspired by Mr.Wiseguy’s N64: Recompiled, a tool that allows you to take N64 games, and convert them to C code for recompilation on PC.
And like the recomp port of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, they added a lot of new features to push the game beyond it’s original limitations. Things like high frame rate support and better anti-aliasing are nice, but they went above and beyond with things like Bicubic filtering on lightmaps, higher quality motion blur, and enhanced dynamic shadow resolutions. You can crank the shadows up to 8K if you wanna. It looks so good. And if you’re like me and love playing your games on an ultrawide display, then this port supports that too. With the ability to center the HUD into the 16:9 boundary, and expand the cutscene aspect ratio to fill the whole screen, but that can lead to artifacts on the added space because they were made to be seen in 16:9. And that’s just the graphics settings, they added a few quality of life options and some nice small extra features. Like the ability to turn off the main Werehog battle theme in levels, as it can get grating for a lot of people.
*I don’t have a way to capture the game on a 360 so all I could do was set all the graphics settings to match the original, though it’s still running at 2560×1080. I’m doing my best, I swear.
It also got day one mod support with the HedgeModManager, the standard mod manager program used by every Sonic game using the Hedgehog Engine on PC (Generations, Forces, Frontiers etc.), and it’s super simple to use as well. It’s backwards compatible with mods for the 360 version of the game, but the recomp has its own page on Gamebanana with mods that are specifically made for it. And some mods for the console versions may have bugs when run with the recomp as they were made for the game without the title update needed for the recomp, so try to stick to mods made for the recomp.
Setting it up is pretty simple, you do need a 360, but you don’t need a modded console. Because the 360 supports installing physical games to the hard drive for faster loading. There’s a section about how to install it on the GitHub page, and they link to an in depth guide on how to dump your files in that section, and it’s pretty easy to do. Then once you have the files needed, just open the recomp and an installer wizard will guide you through installing the game, the title update, and the DLC if you have it. It is reccomended to grab the DLC as Sega included higher quality graphics (such has higher res lightmaps) in the DLC files. It also has an installer program that launches on the initial boot. .And it’s really easy to use, you just gotta point it to the game files it needs and then it compiles and installs everything, it’s pretty quick and painless.
Now like I mentioned, this port was made with two tools allowing for the ability to recompile 360 games for PC, which I think has a lot of potential. There’s a lot 360 games that never got released on PC, and even games that had PC releases at the time are starting to suffer from compatibility issues. So I could imaging a lot of recomp projects like the one for Unleashed popping up in the future. My dream recomp ports that I can think of are the XBLA version of Daytona USA, and Saints Row 2. Daytona because I enjoy some of the extra features that version has, and it’d probably be easier to set up then an emulator with the arcade version, and SR2 because the PC port that did come out is terrible so it’d be better off if a new port was made. I also hope the modding scene for Unleashed gets as big as the scene for Sonic Generations is.
Overall, this recomp port is amazing and a great way to play the game if you haven’t, and I would recommend it. The team that put it together did an amazing job, and I recommend giving them their due by watching the credits at the end of the installer. I will admit that Unleashed is not for everyone. And I’m sure most people will be put off by the Werehog sections being a God of War clone. But I very much enjoyed it this time around. Though it did help that for this playthrough I was using the Improved progression mod by King Galactix, which streamlines the game’s progression because Sega wanted to pad out the runtime with the medal collecting. But I still thing Sonic Unleashed even in its vanilla form has some of the best boost stages in the series. You can find the recomp on it’s GitHub page linked below. Please, check it out!