Homebrew Review! "Sonic CD" for Nintendo 3DS (Retro Engine v3)

I've written on Sonic CD before, I love this game. I consider it the best of the Genesis Sonic titles. So imagine my surprise when I discover that in relation to the full decompilation of all three iterations of the Retro Engine, there exists a port of Christian Whitehead's Sonic CD to the 3DS! It's available on Universal Updater, though keep in mind that you'll have to access the SD card to manually set up the RSDK or data folders in order to run the game. They're required as an anti-piracy measure to ensure that the decompilers are not at fault for distributing an archive of every Retro Engine Sonic release. The source can be found here for more detailed setup instructions.

Note that while the port officially supports 3DS as well as N3DS, my review is based on my experience playing on a N3DS, and your experience may vary.

Right off the bat after installing, the app has a really nice menu banner made by adding transparency around a bit of Sonic CD official art! It looks really nice, and is actually newer of an add; when I first downloaded and playing this port, it used a simple square PNG banner like a lot of homebrew apps do. Nothing wrong with that of course, I just appreciate the dev going the extra mile to spruce up its menu appearance!

Loading up the game, and yep, that sure is Sonic CD! There's not a whole lot to note about this other than "It's the Christian Whitehead Sonic CD port", because it is. It's incredibly impressive for a decomp project like this, and I never would have expected to see a downloadable game I remember from the PS3 appear on my 3DS like this! The game as a whole functions just like any other port, though one unfortunately lacking feature as of writing this, is that the Achievements button on the main menu doesn't do anything. Presumably this is because on mobile (the RSDK this port is based on) it would just pull up the Game Center interface or whatever it used, but I know that the later PC release of this same Retro Engine v3 port featured an in-game Achievements screen. It would be really cool to see that appear on the 3DS and be fully functional, though I'm obviously not the dev and I have no idea how big of an ask that is.

Other than that, the only real shortcoming of this port is the Special Stages. This is a fact that is consistent with the 3DS Sonic Mania port, but the 3D Special Stages run at an incredibly slow speed. It's obviously not required to do them at all, and you can even use this slowdown to your advantage, essentially viewing the world in slowmotion to nab the Time Stones! Though it can't be denied, this is a shortcoming all the same, however admittedly small it may be.

Overall, this project is very cool! It's very fun to get to play Sonic CD in full on a handheld like this, and it runs and looks incredible. I highly recommend taking a look at this project if you get the chance!

~ Alex Amelia Pine

This post is a part of the series Game Reviews
Also check out "Sonic Mania" for New Nintendo 3DS!