Proto:Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)/Xbox Live Arcade Demo

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The Xbox Live Arcade demo of Sonic '06 was built on September 16, 2006, a little under a month before the final and just under two months before the game's release, and released on the Xbox Marketplace a little over a week later on September 27. It was available for download until 2010, when Sega delisted Sonic '06 alongside other Sonic games that received average or below-average Metacritic scores.

The demo is a shortened version of the Tokyo Toy Show 2006 demo, featuring the first section of Sonic's Kingdom Valley. Upon completion of the level, a trailer for the game, which features various stages and shows off all three hedgehogs, plays. The demo doesn't feature very many visible differences from the final and most of the files that it doesn't need have been removed, but the code needed for the rest of the game's content is still present.

While some of what's normally playable is a bit more polished than the final, what's not gives a damning look into the game's heavily unfinished state.

Stage Differences

The enemy placement is different, and is generally easier than the placement in the final.

Unused 1-UP Placement (Kingdom Valley)

Demo	Final

There is a 1-UP item box hidden in this bush. This is replaced with a Silver Medal in the final game. When Sonic obtains the item, he exclaims "Yes! I knew it."

Gameplay Differences

Rotation interpolation is fully functional here, and characters will smoothly rotate in situations when needed instead of instantly snapping (such as on slopes). This only works for a few states for common characters in the final game (e.g. Grinding, Light Dashing, and Idle on Ropes), while Snowboard Sonic's posture control uses this rotation for every situation.
The collision detection is weaker than the final game, making it easier to clip through most walls.
Rings explode from the player because they collide with each other from the player's absolute centre point. Depending on the number, some Rings spawn closer to the player.
Menu options are extremely sensitive to analog stick inputs.

Sonic

Sonic's jump dash respects gravity, like the E3 demo. The final game just ignores it, even though it still accelerates during the move.
Sonic's Action Gauge starts off empty in this demo. In the final game, it starts off full.
Although they can't be selected, the Gem abilities are already functional and it's possible to use the abilities of all but the Red, Purple and Yellow gems by swapping Sonic's states in the executable.
- The Homing Smash and Super Transformation already behave identically to the final game.
- The Green Gem is missing its particles, though the attack itself works.
- The Blue Gem gives Sonic significantly more speed than it does in the final game. So much speed, in fact, that it makes Sonic nearly impossible to control and allows him to pass through most walls.
You can use the Light Dash on every trail of Rings in the stage. In the final game, you can only do this for Rings that can't be picked up with the Yellow Gem. This is due to the path container missing these splines in the final game.

Although not accessible by default, Mach Speed Sonic is also present.

If Sonic fails to perform a chain jump in time, he will still be able to move (if the analog stick is held in any position). In the final game, he'll simply drop down without any speed.
Sonic's speed when landing from a chain jump is slow, like E3 (if the analog stick is held down).
Sonic's speed when landing from a jump panel decelerates (if the analog stick isn't held down).

Likewise, Snowboard Sonic is in the demo, but can only be accessed via hacking.

When colliding with a wall, Sonic will lose Rings just as he would when taking damage. Thankfully, you can't die this way.

Unused Characters

Only Sonic is playable by default, but Shadow, Silver, Tails, and Knuckles are present within the demo's code and contain various differences compared to the final game.

Shadow

Shadow is able to charge Chaos Smash, though attempting to fully charge it will just make him fall to the ground, leaving the standard Homing Attack as his only option. On top of this, his ability to charge is limited; when recoiling from another Homing Attack or Chaos Spear, he'll skip the charge and Homing Attack directly.
Shadow's Homing Attack respects c_homing_dir in this build. If the Y value is set to -0.5, he will use the same downward angle that he uses in the Tokyo Game Show 2006 demo.
Shadow can start charging his Homing Attack after a Jump Dash, allowing the player to infinitely chain the latter.
Shadow's Homing Attack recovery is more akin to Sonic's. While his movement is still unlocked like the final game, there's no pause beforehand to let the player use Chaos Attacks, as they function differently in this build.
- To start a Chaos Attack combo, the player has to press the A button just as they make contact with an enemy. This is unnecessary if Shadow's performing a Chaos Snap since he'll automatically perform a Chaos Attack.
Shadow's state after using the Chaos Spear acts identically to the one he uses for Homing Attacks, despite both already being separate. As a result, he jumps upwards, allowing players to abuse the Chaos Spear as an infinite jump. In the final build, he can no longer gain any upwards momentum this way.
Shadow always jumps before starting the Chaos Boost.

Silver

Silver is able to pick up any object and it doesn't effect the gauge.
Silver's can't kill enemies after releasing them - this leads to broken results, as the enemies can stand in mid-air if released over a bottomless pit.

Boss Silver

Instead of grabbing nearby objects when near Sonic, Silver's boss fight uses a ground-based variant of the Psycho Shock, a move which goes unused in the final game.
When near objects, Silver will jump and hover to the closest object, then repeatedly use his Psychokinesis to move the object up in the air. He'll repeat this until he's attacked or the object is destroyed.
Silver can occasionally get stuck hovering in the air.
All of Silver's other unused abilities as well as his final 'Grab All' attack are already implemented.

Tails

Tails instantly drops without any warning when he tires out mid-flight.
Sound effects are missing for dummy ring bombs, running, flying, and walking.

Knuckles

Knuckles doesn't play any animations when charging up the screwdriver punch. He'll keep playing the last animation that played until the X button is released.
Knuckles is unable to climb walls unless he's gliding. In the final game, he's able grab walls by just jumping into them. While this change sounds convenient, it introduced a nasty bug which gave Knuckles a tendency to immediately latch back onto walls he jumped off of.
Knuckles is also able to climb every surface. Yes, every surface. Even floors.
Climbing seems a bit buggier than in the final game. For example, Knuckles can climb off a wall onto a floor without his angle changing at all.
Gliding lacks a cool down timer, allowing Knuckles to spam his glide move. As cancelling the glide resets Knuckles' momentum, this allows the player to travel much further than normal.

Character Switching

When switching characters, the camera stays toward the characters' front side rather than repositioning itself to the back.
The game handles character switching as a checkpoint, when you die you get sent back to when you switched characters.

Changed Graphics

The HUD is slightly different than the final.
- The positioning of certain HUD elements is closer to the edge of the screen. This was changed in the final version, likely to compensate for overscan on some TVs.
- The Action Gauge will always have part of the main gauge and maturity meter filled, even when the former is empty and despite the fact that the latter can't be filled at all.
- The first bar on the Level Indicator will always display as full, even when the level is set to 0 (as it normally is with Sonic).
- When switching characters, the HUD doesn't change character icons.

Unused Menus

Main Menu

The main menu is fully functional, but is extremely unfinished. It can be accessed via hacking and adding the assets from the final game to the XBLA demo archives.

Single Player

Episode Select
- The text placement is slightly different, which causes it to be misaligned with the icons.
- The location where you were last is labelled as 'RESTARTPOINT' and always amusingly uses "Tropical Jaungle[sic]" as the placeholder — there's no label in the final game.
- There's a section for 'TOTAL PLAY TIME' which is absent in the final game.
- 'Last Save Time' is labelled as simply 'SAVE TIME'.
- The date and time format for the last save time is YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss — it's YYYY/M/DD h:mm in the final game.
- The Last Episode uses Tails' life icon.

ACT Trial
- The character text displays their full names, rather than just a single word.
- The descriptions for each episode uses placeholder text.
  - The stage order for each episode is in chronological order with the story, rather than the extras and bosses being last.
  - The bosses use placeholder text and are capitalised correctly, rather than being all uppercase like the rest of the menu.

Town Trial
- Same weirdness as ACT Trial.
  - Each mission uses the mission ID, instead of an increasing number.
  - Backing out of the menu is unresponsive and takes awhile to return to the Town Trial menu.

Gold Medal Results
- The stage order for each episode is in chronological order with the story again, just like ACT Trial.
- The Gold Medal count is 160 instead of 180 like Retail.
- There's untranslated Japanese text at the bottom of each episode, despite the system using English.

Multiplayer

Tag
- Tag Story - opens character select for Tag.
  - After going through the menu, the game will load the unused test_tag area.

Tag Trial - opens an extra menu which has all of the main stages including End of The World and each stage has up to five missions.
- Two of the stage names are different; Tropical Jungle and Aquatic Base are called "Tropical Savanna" and "Aqutic Base[sic]" respectively.
- When selecting an option, the game takes you to the same place as Tag Story.

Battle - opens a large character select similar to Sonic Adventure 2: Battle that displays all of the game's characters.
- Selecting a character brings up battleruleselect.xncp, which goes unused in the final game and is missing textures.
- When selecting an option, the game mode is similar to Tag Story and Tag Trial, but instead loads into the test_battle area.

Xbox Live

This menu isn't drawn correctly, so it inherits the drawing method from the last opened menu instead.
- Due to mainmenu.xncp being back-ported to the demo from the retail files, it no longer contains the data for the Xbox Live menu.

Retail
Restoration

Rankings - crashes the game because it expects ranking.xncp, which no longer exists.
- If a custom ranking.xncp is provided (see Mockup), the text renderer will take over drawing, rather than the UI system.
- There are some functional menus remaining, such as a character select and a mission select.

Retail
Restoration
Mockup

Download - does nothing.

Retail
Restoration

Extras

Audio Room
- A lot of the entries are missing and most of them are missing text.
- There is an extra entry for Crisis City, most likely for the cut "D" section of the stage.
- The entries that are here do play the correct music track.
- Placeholder entries are labelled as 'NO Title'.

Theater Room
- The game will crash because it can't load the text needed for the menu, if you force the game to skip loading the text then the menu will load but looks unfinished.
- The only asset that loads in is a single arrow.

Options

Audio settings
- BGM is labelled as 'dummy06 BGM'.
- SE is labelled as 'dummy07 SE'.

Subtitle settings - identical to the final game.
Vibration settings - both the final game and the XBLA demo don't have rumble, so this menu doesn't function and isn't present in the final game.

(Source: Original TCRF research)

Status

An unknown menu that would've been accessed via the pause menu - not much appears to be implemented and the current way of loading this menu creates a new instance of StatusTask. It just displays the text 'Status' and can only be closed using A, X or Start. Sonic Unleashed ended up having a menu of the same name, but displayed statistics, despite being called 'Status'.

(Source: Original TCRF research)

Unused Graphics

Aside from a few repeats from the final game, the demo contains a few unused graphics of its own.

mission_bg_parts.dds

This was used in the E3 build for the loading screen, which is quite different from the one seen in the final game.

stagetitle1.dds
stagetitle2.dds

Each of the stage titles rendered in the same style as the E3 build, albeit in a different font. Here is the Unused Load Templates merged together.

Sonic06 stage title.png

stage_title.xncp

A variation of the loading screen seen in E3 is hidden inside the demo's loading screen - as displayed via an unofficial XNCP modification tool. The gradient background has been replaced with the controller texture and its fade sequences have been removed, but the rest of the elements can be reenabled with a hex editor.

Oddly, the mission goal text (hardcoded to "HEAD FOR GOAL RING") is misaligned, the word "MISSION" is oversized and the stage title briefly changes to White Acropolis as it slides back offscreen.

Audio Differences

The title screen plays a loop of the E3 trailer music.
The sound effect on the title screen when pressing the Start button has a slightly higher pitch in the demo compared to final - neither of these pitches match the way the sound is internally stored.

Original	Xbox Live Arcade Demo	Final

Some voice clips are played during the stage which are not heard in the final, but used in different segments.
The result screen is missing many sounds, most notably the voice clip that plays upon receiving an end-of-level rank.

Unused Music

Out of the five tracks present in the demo, only two of them are actually used (besides the title screen theme, which is embedded into the WMV used for the background loop), these being Kingdom Valley's music and the Round Clear theme. Thus, more than half are actually unused!

Xbox Live Arcade Demo	Final
main_theme.xma	theme_sonic.xma

A demo version of "His World", Sonic's theme for this game. It's in the key of E minor (similar to what's heard at E3 2006) instead of E-flat minor (as it is in the final), and it has a clap track, probably to guide Ali in singing it. This was eventually used as the backing track for Crush 40's cover of the song.

speed_up.xma

Xbox Live Arcade Demo	Final

An early version of the invincibility music, which curiously still uses the key of E minor and this filename in the final game.

result.xma

Xbox Live Arcade Demo	Final

A loop of one of the instruments in the beginning portion of His World. Similar to the main theme above, the key is in E minor. Even though you can reach the (much sooner) end of the level in this demo and thus see the results screen, this music doesn't play after the Round Clear track, leaving it in silence.

Unused Sounds

Many of the final game's sound effects are also present in this demo, but they are unused simply because their objects aren't placed in the area of Kingdom Valley that's present here. Sonic's grunts are also present, but they're unassigned.

Trailer

The subtitles that appear from the trailer use a different font (Chiaro), which the version shown at E3 2006 used for many display elements rather than the final game's use of New Rodin.
Near the end of the trailer, there's a completely different pre-rendered cutscene featuring Silver (and briefly, Sonic)...
- Silver is standing on a ledge overlooking the ruins of Soleanna in the future, declaring that he's found the Iblis Trigger. In the final game, Silver delivers the line while in present-day Soleanna.
- Silver clenches his left hand into a fist; in the final game, he does this with his right hand.
- The Iblis Trigger is referred to as "it"; in the final game, the Iblis Trigger is referred to as "him".

(Source: Sonic Retro)

Oddities

Unused Multiplayer Renderer

In the archive kdv_a4.arc, there is a folder containing the render scripts, similar to that of cache.arc in the final game. In render_main.lub (the file that stores most if not all parameters for the game's renderer), there is a function called RenderMainForMulti, the same function used in the final game which uses different parameters to optimize performance for the game's multiplayer modes.

Save Data

If you bruteforce writing save data, it will produce a file that is exactly 1024KB in size, containing only null data. The save data in the final game is a measly 172KB in comparison.