It's become something of a tradition in the Sonic community for industrious fans to pull apart Sega's games and make all sorts of little changes to improve the experience of playing them. Project 06 might as well be the poster child for this, but even games like Sonic Superstars are benefitting from alternate soundtrack mods that attempt to wash away the stain left by Jun Senoue's bootleg Genesis snare drums. While a lot of these efforts are driven by the passion of fans and amateur modders, Sonic 3D Blast: Director's Cut is a unique case where the game's original designer, Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales, has gone back to retool their work. Unfortunately, it's still Sonic 3D Blast. fart_noise.flacc

I was actually pretty excited to try this out, even grabbed a reproduction cart of it in lieu of a legitimate copy of Sonic 3D Blast (you can toggle the mods off and play the game like normal, which for me makes this the ideal copy to have), but all the quality-of-life improvements in the world can't cleanse this game of its stink. Director's Cut makes improvements to movement speed and momentum, tweaks how Flickies function so that they're easier to find and don't all drop at once, and even adds Super Sonic, but the core design of 3D Blast is still the same. Jump on enemies, collect bird, hop into ring. I don't find this loop to be very compelling and would prefer something closer to a traditional Sonic, but the isometric perspective really hinders navigation and stage readability even in the time trial levels, which do ditch Flicky collecting for something more straight-forward.

For every improvement Director's Cut makes, which there are many, it just highlights the parts of the game that don't work for me, and those parts are so fundamental that you'd enter Hedgehog of Theseus territory if you started to uproot and replace them. Jon Burton, to his credit, changed about as much as he could, and the Director's Cut is the most approachable version of 3D Blast for his efforts. Changes to hit detection and the way damage operates does smooth over some the base game's key problems even if I may still be hung up on the more immutable aspects. It is unreasonable to expect Burton to alter level layouts to be more conducive to traditional Sonic gameplay, but changing how far the camera pans when running does help me avoid jumping directly into pits of lava in Volcano Valley, so I guess this is my preferred way to play.

In true Traveller's Tales fashion, I'm left weighing how impressive the game is on a technical level against how much fun I actually had playing it, and while I do think Jon Burton smoothing over nearly 30-year-old rough edges if worthy of some praise, I still find Sonic 3D Blast a struggle to get into. Very excited to pull this off the shelf in another five or eight years and walk away with the exact same opinion, because unlike 3D Blast, I never change.