The Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit Fan Remake is... good

[Kazin]

Can be downloaded here.

I'm only in the third zone, and apparently the special stages suffer a huge difficulty spike starting with the third emerald which I haven't gotten yet, but I am really enjoying this so far. Really feels sorta like a Genesis/Mega Drive Sonic 4, you know? The level design builds and expands on what was in the Game Gear game, but does quite a bit more than you'd think. There was new mechanics in Sunset Park!

Give it a shot, it's free, and can run on Steam Deck too if that's your thing (add the .exe as a non-Steam game and enable Proton and it runs no problem at full screen).

 

[muteKi]

It's quite charming. I do think it's strange that only some stages get act 3s and that those act 3s are so unrelated aesthetically to the previous two that they could have been entirely new stages, though. This is most doofy nitpick I can imagine anyone making, granted, but I presume it's this way because SUNSET PARK 3! IT HAS TO BE SUNSET PARK 3! IT CAN'T BE ITS OWN LEVEL despite the fact that like the next stage after that...it's exactly what they do.

It's just kind of a weird, inconsistent pacing to it all, when (at least as Sonic and Tails) Sonic 3 was almost singularly focused on keeping its pacing as consistent as possible.

 

[madhair60]

This is straight up a great Sonic game. I’m knocked for six. I can even forgive the special stages because they’re ALWAYS shite.

The most staggering part is… the bosses are breezy fun. Every single fangame I’ve ever played has got the bosses completely wrong, but this one? Nails them. One of them is obnoxious-ish but so late in the game I can’t really be too bothered by it.

 

[muteKi]

In general I think this game does a very good job of taking ideas from the source material and expanding on them in ways that make sense in context with it, even given the every-third-act that feels more derived from Nobuya Nakazato games (ie Contra and Rocket Knight Adventures).

However, there is simply too much in the final main stage. It's already likely to take ~4 minutes to get through the first sections, and then they add on an autoscroller with a miniboss. It's too much in my opinion.

 

[madhair60]

It’s the final stage so it didn’t bother me. The elevator section is the closest the game comes to being unreasonable, but as there’s a checkpoint right before it I didn’t mind.

 

[muteKi]

Yeah, it's not the end of the world, but my general philosophy is that once I'm getting to the point where the background music starts to feel exhausting that the level is wearing out its welcome.

I have to say also that I'm quite impressed at the multiplayer mode as well. Sure, a lot of the ideas have their roots in the GBA and PSP games, but I think they're overall quite well done and wind up being a surprising amount of additional bonus content -- when your multiplayer mode has a single-player story mode too, you're doing a ridiculous amount of work for a free game.

 

[Patrick]

Very cool! I was a fan of Triple Trouble way back when. No idea if the original game would hold up, but I'm watching a playthrough of this and it looks neat.

 

[muteKi]

The source material is still pretty good, and makes for a fun way to spend a little over a half an hour if you're going for 100%. As I said before I do think this game does a good job of taking the ideas that already existed in that game and expanding them in ways that make sense. The main difference is that Atomic Destroyer in the original is a lot shorter and more focused around being a pipe maze -- not to everyone's tastes but certainly a staple of the handheld Sonic games designed by Aspect. Overall though if you liked this, you'll probably still enjoy the original, which is mainly different for being shorter and not doing the Sonic 3 different visual styles for each act kind of thing.