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Some time back, I attempted to stream Sonic Heroes with the intention of doing one playthrough mostly vanilla to show all the problems I had with the game before getting into the mods. I could not even finish that one playthrough.
But now, doing this on my own time on my Steam Deck, I finished Sonic Heroes and then moved on to some of the subsequent games! I guess this is now a big marathon I'm doing.
Sonic Heroes
For this game, I used quite a few mods but the big lifesavers were Sonic Heroes: Fixed Edition, Complete Physics Preset & Stage Fix Combo, and Independent Flying Characters. These improve the gameplay big time by making traversal feel nicer and removing some of the tedious bullshit. For the first time ever, I actually... enjoyed playing Sonic Heroes for the sake of it.
Example: in my Team Dark playthrough, I got stuck at this one part in Lost Jungle and I wanted to go compare it to the Team Sonic version. So I went back to that, got to the bit I needed, took my notes and... then just kept playing. Because it was fun. This was fucking crazy to me, because as a kid playing this game when it was brand new, I was immensely disappointed and frustrated with it. I hated the movement, there were constant glitches getting me killed, and there was tons of bullshit that seemed to be added just to justify the team stuff. But now, I enjoyed playing for the sake of it. Shit, I even enjoyed most of the Chaotix levels!
Now, it's not perfect. The homing attack is still kinda finicky, Knuckles and Omega still love sliding about when punching (and believe me, I tried fixing this with the physics editor), and that funny rail switching bug where you careen off into the abyss is still there--but the latter became less of an issue when I finally realized why it happens. In case you don't know: it's because you're doing the rail boost. If you switch while not doing that, it works perfectly every time. Also, the Egg Emperor is a stupid asshole fight
I've also always disliked the graphics. I have no idea why this game looks so much worse than SA2, though I suspect it's because of mishandling the multiplatform development. Some important mods for this: Definitive Character Visual Overhaul and the mods in its recommended section, Extended Draw Distance and this Reshade preset. That last one is a gamechanger IMO, because while the character overhaul is pretty cool, it overcompensates for the plastic look of the characters by completely removing the spheremaps, and this instead causes the characters to look really flat. The Reshade preset adds some much needed depth. I also ended up deleting the replacement texture for Rouge, because her outfit should be shiny and since her fur is white, the plasticness isn't too noticeable on her.
One very silly thing that frustrated me immensely: in the PC port, they "fixed" the thing where Big the Cat can get the Chaos Emeralds in like two seconds each. I ended up needing a different cheese strat for the last two emeralds where you just stay at the top of the halfpipe until the stage gives you some boost balls up there and then get a clean shot.
Shadow the Hedgehog
You only need one thing: Shadow the Hedgehog Reloaded.
This badass mod for the Gamecube version changes the physics in a wonderfully natural-feeling way, changes mission objectives to be less tedious, gives you quicker access to cool shit, lowers the required endings to unlock Last Story to only 3, and adds the unused vocal tracks just for good measure. I think it might also make you a sandwich and go down on you but I haven't figured out how to unlock it.
In all seriousness, ShTH is inherently kinda butt just because of its design, but this really takes out almost all of the frustrating bullshit. The homing attack is still kinda ass and the levels are annoyingly linear considering the mission-based structure of the game, but it feels so. much. better.
Sonic 06
Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, this still stinks. I know people love Project 06, but I wanted something that has the campaign so I went with the mod Legacy of Solaris. This kinda tries to do what Reloaded did for Shadow, and you definitely get a huge boost in performance and game feel, as well as generally making the game less blatantly unfinished, but it's kinda polishing a turd... even with vastly improved control, there's still way too much annoying bullshit in both levels and mandatory side missions. The broken collision detection and camera are what kill it. If those could be fixed, this might be worth it. It sucks, because I can see how close it is to being legitimately great in parts. Crisis City is like 95% really fun to play (the only missing thing being rail switching, so you're still stuck doing terrifying manual jumps over pits). Legacy of Solaris is also kind of obnoxious to set up, with counterintuitive instructions and a bunch of features that aren't enabled by default that you really want.
Ultimately, I was only able to stomach getting through Sonic's story, and I gave up pretty quickly into Shadow's, so... not much of an improvement for the patience I had playing the vanilla game back in the day. Project-06 is still the way to go, even if only having Trial Mode makes it a bit disjointed.
TO BE CONTINUED...
But now, doing this on my own time on my Steam Deck, I finished Sonic Heroes and then moved on to some of the subsequent games! I guess this is now a big marathon I'm doing.
Sonic Heroes
For this game, I used quite a few mods but the big lifesavers were Sonic Heroes: Fixed Edition, Complete Physics Preset & Stage Fix Combo, and Independent Flying Characters. These improve the gameplay big time by making traversal feel nicer and removing some of the tedious bullshit. For the first time ever, I actually... enjoyed playing Sonic Heroes for the sake of it.
Example: in my Team Dark playthrough, I got stuck at this one part in Lost Jungle and I wanted to go compare it to the Team Sonic version. So I went back to that, got to the bit I needed, took my notes and... then just kept playing. Because it was fun. This was fucking crazy to me, because as a kid playing this game when it was brand new, I was immensely disappointed and frustrated with it. I hated the movement, there were constant glitches getting me killed, and there was tons of bullshit that seemed to be added just to justify the team stuff. But now, I enjoyed playing for the sake of it. Shit, I even enjoyed most of the Chaotix levels!
Now, it's not perfect. The homing attack is still kinda finicky, Knuckles and Omega still love sliding about when punching (and believe me, I tried fixing this with the physics editor), and that funny rail switching bug where you careen off into the abyss is still there--but the latter became less of an issue when I finally realized why it happens. In case you don't know: it's because you're doing the rail boost. If you switch while not doing that, it works perfectly every time. Also, the Egg Emperor is a stupid asshole fight
I've also always disliked the graphics. I have no idea why this game looks so much worse than SA2, though I suspect it's because of mishandling the multiplatform development. Some important mods for this: Definitive Character Visual Overhaul and the mods in its recommended section, Extended Draw Distance and this Reshade preset. That last one is a gamechanger IMO, because while the character overhaul is pretty cool, it overcompensates for the plastic look of the characters by completely removing the spheremaps, and this instead causes the characters to look really flat. The Reshade preset adds some much needed depth. I also ended up deleting the replacement texture for Rouge, because her outfit should be shiny and since her fur is white, the plasticness isn't too noticeable on her.
One very silly thing that frustrated me immensely: in the PC port, they "fixed" the thing where Big the Cat can get the Chaos Emeralds in like two seconds each. I ended up needing a different cheese strat for the last two emeralds where you just stay at the top of the halfpipe until the stage gives you some boost balls up there and then get a clean shot.
Shadow the Hedgehog
You only need one thing: Shadow the Hedgehog Reloaded.
This badass mod for the Gamecube version changes the physics in a wonderfully natural-feeling way, changes mission objectives to be less tedious, gives you quicker access to cool shit, lowers the required endings to unlock Last Story to only 3, and adds the unused vocal tracks just for good measure. I think it might also make you a sandwich and go down on you but I haven't figured out how to unlock it.
In all seriousness, ShTH is inherently kinda butt just because of its design, but this really takes out almost all of the frustrating bullshit. The homing attack is still kinda ass and the levels are annoyingly linear considering the mission-based structure of the game, but it feels so. much. better.
Sonic 06
Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, this still stinks. I know people love Project 06, but I wanted something that has the campaign so I went with the mod Legacy of Solaris. This kinda tries to do what Reloaded did for Shadow, and you definitely get a huge boost in performance and game feel, as well as generally making the game less blatantly unfinished, but it's kinda polishing a turd... even with vastly improved control, there's still way too much annoying bullshit in both levels and mandatory side missions. The broken collision detection and camera are what kill it. If those could be fixed, this might be worth it. It sucks, because I can see how close it is to being legitimately great in parts. Crisis City is like 95% really fun to play (the only missing thing being rail switching, so you're still stuck doing terrifying manual jumps over pits). Legacy of Solaris is also kind of obnoxious to set up, with counterintuitive instructions and a bunch of features that aren't enabled by default that you really want.
Ultimately, I was only able to stomach getting through Sonic's story, and I gave up pretty quickly into Shadow's, so... not much of an improvement for the patience I had playing the vanilla game back in the day. Project-06 is still the way to go, even if only having Trial Mode makes it a bit disjointed.
TO BE CONTINUED...