You may remember some months ago I highlighted the release of The Unleashed Project. If you've forgotten, The Unleashed Project is a mod that ports all of Sonic Unleashed's daytime levels (aka: part of the game that's worth playing) to the PC version of Sonic Generations. If you don't already have it, you can get it from here.

There was one glaring problem with the mod, though: as somebody who put hours and hours and hours in to Sonic Unleashed, it was extremely difficult to get good scores in the Sonic Generations port. The developers of the mod had seemingly skewed the difficulty in favor of expert-level speed runners.

When I brought it up with them, I was basically told to shut up. So I took matters in to my own hands and modded their mod, creating S-Ranks Unleashed. The mod tries to re-balance the scoring system back to something similar to the original Sonic Unleashed.

I figured that if it was too difficult for me, somebody who played a metric boatload of Sonic Unleashed, it would probably be basically impossible for anyone just coming to this game for the first time. More information about the mod, including installation information and download links, can be found at its Moddb page.

I make it no secret that I love Sonic Unleashed. I didn't think I would, but something about it's insane high speed antics really captivated the closet adrenaline junkie inside of me, and neither Sonic Colors nor Sonic Generations ever really managed to recapture the thrill of these levels. I think it's something Patrick Klepek mentioned once or twice (in relation to Mirror's Edge), about the good feeling you get for overcoming something that seems to be heavily based on practicing memorization and timing (another good example I like to point out is this guy relating getting S-Ranks in Sonic Unleashed to getting 5 stars in Rock Band).

I was hoping that The Unleashed Project would've been a way for me to show the rest of the world why I loved Sonic Unleashed without anyone having to slog through the boring parts, but the S-Rank stuff was bad enough that I never felt comfortable recommending it to anyone.

Hence, why I decided to fix it for myself. Because of the differences in scoring systems, there's no direct way to port ranks from one game to another, but I did my best to feel out what the correct level of difficulty is. Just keep in mind: You still have to try. S-Ranks are not supposed to be easy, they're just easier now than they used to be.

If you need a reminder as to why I think Sonic Unleashed is so cool, allow me to provide these two examples:

And if you want something newer, here's a video I recorded of The Unleashed Project before I developed my mod (so I get an A-Rank instead of an S):

Play this game, you guys. It's one of the reasons people are starting to say Sonic might be cool again.

The increased difficulty of the S-ranks in Unleashed Project did keep me from bothering to S-rank them; but I did like that it was harder, since Generations had it way too easy.