Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

Some years ago, [ColinC10] released a wonderful hack called [Sonic 2 - Battle Race] and while me and Natsumi were playing it, we couldn't help notice the series of bugs and problems with the hack. Now, this is by no means an indictment on Colin, as programmers ourselves we understood that the hack was not built to be flawless and if anything was merely a proof of concept, and probably made for just a bit of fun. We are sure that if he had continued it, he would most definitely have made it flawless.

Regardless, we wanted a version of the hack that was fixed, with improved routing and winning direction detection, and perhaps some minor things added here or there, so one day Natsumi said:

...and so it began.

We carefully plotted out how we would handle such a thing, looked at the good things and bad, and Colin's hack supplied us the perfect insight and lessons learned to clean it up. We came up with a box system, and it seems to work pretty well, not perfectly, but pretty well. Of course, there were a heap of bugs to fix with the original Sonic 3 title, these took quite a lot of time to hunt down and fix, and because of the time it took, we ended up adding more to this hack than we had originally planned and even now we still have more we want to add. Likewise, bugs will no doubt still be present, though, compared to the bugs that were in place originally which Natsumi has spent countless hours hunting and fixing, it's not too shabby if you ask me.

We did have plans for some extra game modes, gimmicks, options/museum, and a brand new level, and a slew of other things, but these will have to wait until the next release which we hope will be sometime early next year. We are actually getting a little fed-up of working on the project as it is taking up time we really don't have, so I doubt a few months will turn into a year (even though I have been wrong before).

Anyway, if you are not familiar with ColinC10's Sonic 2 - Battle Race, then we suggest you head over to SonicRetro's [wiki page], download it, and give it a play yourself first, don't worry, our version can wait, we simply cannot thank Colin enough as our hack would simply not exist if his didn't.

For a download link, credits and more info, please see Natsumi's post below mine: