Reimagining the Worst Iteration of City Escape

Surprise! Here’s a final 2024 stocking-stuffer! On my weird Sonic development post here, I offered an oral history of the fangame Sonic World, as well as my own personal experience with it. The game is more or less a case of quantity over quality, but given the Sonic I grew up on, being up to today’s graphical standards isn’t too much of a concern for me so long as it has a distinct charm and atmosphere. With the right mods—namely characters, voices, stages, and menu themes—it’s nice to be able to create my own little Sonic experience while homing in on the exciting rewrite that is Shadow the Hedgehog: The Recollected Cut. It sort of gives this fallen property some new life by blending modern gameplay with the Adventure formula.

Granted, there are many cases where the age and bugs of Blitz3D, the game’s engine, start to cause serious problems, given there’s no story mode to prop it up (although marathon mode does allow you to play all the stages continuously in a random order). I’ve come to live with those dreaded “memory access violation” errors because they’re pretty much unavoidable, even in Sonic World DX, but some of the stages will leave you shocked to know they’d been barely touched all through Release 10. Most of the more stand-out bugs surround lighting and textures, like the mismatched floor and wall textures in Crazy Gadget and the Mission Street boss stage having daytime lighting when the background and original stage are at nighttime. Then, others are so bland, ancient, and lifeless that you simply cannot play them without feeling empty inside.

Enter City Escape. Just how and why does this stage get so much love, anyway? Probably because the theme’s a motivational earworm, and the setting uses real-life San Francisco as a strong foundation that even compliments the gameplay with its downwards-sloping streets. Nostalgic reverence aside, it’s a very creative stage that won’t leave your mind anytime soon, thanks in part to the bonkers G.U.N. truck chase at the end. For the most part, I appreciate the reimagining of this stage from Sonic Generations despite the fact that I no longer play the game, given its bright colors, fresh layout, and theme cover by the two guys responsible for the original. Granted, while some extra details like the ability to grind along the telephone wires are just some nice added touches, it falls into the same trap as Shadow Generations, which is having to amp up the ridiculousness of the action eighty-fold. Case and point, instead of just barreling through both lanes, the truck has to attack Sonic with buzzsaws and flamethrowers. That doesn’t make the stage feel more modern. Just more annoying.

While default and modded stages for Sonic World are all over the map in terms of quality, ranging from popping with life and creativity to having been put together in a couple hours with random shapes, you’d expect plenty of time to be taken with one of the most beloved stages from this franchise. Then again, it is a fairly old stage, and while the latest compatible updates for modeling and animating tools like FragMOTION can work wonders nowadays, I have to assume this game’s sole rendition of City Escape came at a time back when faithful stage imports were either a far more painstaking process or just flat-out impossible. As a result, and even though a page from the official site here points out that the stage is expected to be redone, this has still yet to be followed through on, and all that we’re left with is a hollow shell of generic gray buildings and minimal décor. The roads are narrow and lack any cars, signs, posters, billboards, or lamp posts whatsoever, and instead of roads or water underneath, the floor of the level is just this endless pane of gray stone. Hardly any trees exist, and mere polygons like rooftops have random floor and roof textures applied to them. There’s not even a sun to cast light rays should you have the setting enabled! Even worse, searching “sonic world city escape” keeps leading me to Sonic Speed Simulator, an official Sonic tie-in for Roblox that, despite taking place in… you know… Roblox, has a beautiful take on City Escape teeming with life, color, and decorations.

Two can play at that game.

For the past three or four days, I’ve been overhauling the textures, objects, geometry, lighting, sound, and other properties to make Sonic World‘s version closer to the Generations and Speed Simulator iterations. This includes sprucing up (no pun intended) the vegetation; lining the roads with trees (fortunately, an update for DX happened to add cars, which has allowed me to simply migrate them to R9 Plus); adding more colorful textures from Generations, some of which I took the time to modify; giving the buildings more vibrant textures by updating the original stage’s; reapplying mismatched materials like roof textures; stamping the walls with billboards from Generations, others advertising newer official media, and more edited by yours truly from my Modern SA2B: Simple Edition mod; importing the park benches and recycle bins from the original Sonic Adventure 2 stage with updated textures; adding a mild blue tinge to the lighting, an ocean over the bottom of the stage, and a ray-projecting sun in the sky that makes certain camera angles really pop; finalizing two respective daytime and sunset versions to line up with the continuity of the original game; replacing certain flying enemies with festive balloons; and ultimately dropping in the cover theme from Generations that, until now, I never realized featured part of the tune to “It Doesn’t Matter” in the instrumental break!

We’ll see if I can get a download page for this, seeing as you can’t edit and share official stages without the team’s permission, but the many other people who take issue with the original stage could really use something like this. Of course, I will admit that this whole update is pretty much just an excuse to shill the work-in-progress projects tab on this blog. I haven’t done much to elaborate on that or the database tab, so to clarify, the former will be used to showcase non-professional digital art projects like mods, screenshots, and video clips while the latter’s a redo of my old Google Sites “wiki” called Cohepedia, in reference to my middle name Cohen. Much like that site, this will be devoted to comedic “wiki” articles for my interests, inside jokes, and personal life, with articles to become accessible through the main page sometime soon. My version of Sonic World—with custom and modified menu themes, character bios, and mods for both stages and characters, as well as only the higher-quality stages with my own personal touches and improvements—will be showcased in the projects tab, but only when I get the time. I’m really busy with stuff nowadays. Regardless, do expect to see a video comparison between default City Escape and my remaster among the first entries!