IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR ONCE AGAIN!! The Sonic Hacking Contest is back for another year.
In case you don’t know, the Sonic Hacking Contest (or SHC) is a fan run event where a bunch of modders and ROM hackers submit what they’ve been working on to be voted on and judged for awards. But unlike past years it seems they have gotten rid of the expo category and replaced it with a judged and unjudged filter on the entries page, which is a lot cleaner in my opinion. Alongside the contest itself there will also be people streaming themselves playing and showing off the submitted entries this year. You can find the stream schedule here if you’re interested.
Playing the entries will either require a way to play console ROMs (look for what the ‘game’ tag is on the entry’s page) for the entries tagged as ‘ROM Hack, ‘ but for the ‘Modern 2D’ and ‘3D’ tags, you’ll need to one the requisite game on PC and get the setup a mod loader for the game (with some exceptions for games like Shadow the Hedgehog which has a mod in the contest, and the instructions can be found on the entry page). You can find the entries on this page here or you can go to shc.zone and click the ‘entries’ button on the top bar. And while you’re here, I’ll show off an entry from each of the 3 main categories.
Have you ever wanted to play Sonic but with all the text rendered in lower case Comic Sans? No? Well now you can with Sonic install Comic Sans by LaterSingTogethe which can be found in the ROM Hack category. What it does is self explanatory, all text in the game is replaced with Comic Sans. Everything from the HUD to the background text in Spring Yard Zone have all been redrawn in the font and I think it’s kinda funny. Then again my sense of humor is completely broken. I recommend checking it out if you wanna replay Sonic 1 sometime.
The entry from the 2D category that I picked is Sonic Mania: Ruby Chronicles Final Edition by DigitalPhantom. It’s a mod for Sonic Mania that alters the level designs significantly. You’ll notice it from the start because instead of mirroring the layout from Sonic 1’s Green Hill zone act 1, it starts with a loop and the ziplines from Mania’s Act 2, and the Chemical Plant also adds the bouncy goo from its act 2 and the levels I played were great. Except I think I ran into a dead end in Chemical plant Act 2 and I forgot to record it soooo, my bad. Just beware when you play this. It’s really freaking good though.
And for the 3D category, I have a twofer with Animated Sprite Rings by ItsEasyActually, and SM64 Adventure by Sora-yx, both are mods for the 2004 PC version Sonic Adventure DX . Animated Sprite Rings is a simple mod that replaces the 3D rings with sprites and it has a lot choices for what you want the rings to be, including red, blue, and yellow SM64 coins. Which leads into SM64 Adventure, which is a mod that ports Mario Super Mario 64 into Sonic adventure, and it’s not a simple model swap, it’s based on libsm64, a library based on the SM64 decomp, and it’s pretty amazing. The levels are longer because you’re playing as Mario, but it’s kinda fun to go through the levels as a character from a completely different game. Plus it’s just really cool, so I recommend giving this a try.
And this isn’t even scratching the surface of what’s in this year’s SHC. Counting everything, there’s a total of 88 entries in this year’s contest. That’s including judged and unjudged entries. There’s a lot here and I recommend heading over to shc.zone and checking everything out yourself. I promise you’ll have a great time.