Sonic Adventure DX Preview: Director's eXtras

We were kinda hoping that nothing big would go down while TSS was under, but a whole heap of new screens have been revealed over the past months, a release date has been set, and several new features have been added to what was Sonic's biggest and best groundbreaking 3D game ever!

The newest shots come straight from E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, held every year at Los Angeles. Older (and several more) shots can be found at the screenshots section of this game. Sonic Team have since revealed a release date for Europe - June 2003! Which means that us Europeans best get saving now if you want to play Sonic's first adventure all over again. This date will most likely mean that Sonic Team are planning an earlier date for US and Japan, or a worldwide release in June to coincide with Sonic's 12th Birthday (2 years since the 10th Anniversary already!?).

Better yet, new features have been added to make the game a little more playable over the DC version. The graphics have had a huge overhaul, and while earlier shots did not show this, these later ones show classic scenes (like Sonic getting chased by 'that' whale) with a completely new sexy body for the blue blur. And Sonic Team have taken away the "Mr Sheen" shiny-ness that plagued the early models, which is decent of them.

The Chao Gardens will be renovated to harness the same sort of raising models and techniques as can be found in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle - consequently, SADX will link up with either Sonic Advance 1, Sonic Advance 2 or Sonic Pinball Party on the GameCube to take Chao Raising on the move.

Best of all, there are more Emblem missions to master, meaning that each stage now has the standard 5 missions instead of the original 3 in Sonic Adventure. And, upon collection of a number of emblems, you can earn bonuses, including 'exclusive items', of which everyone probably knows about now is the addition of all the Sonic Game Gear games being able to be played on your GameCube, Sonic Mega Collection-style.

SADX sounds like a worthy addition to what could be another great port to the Nintendo GameCube. Our review will be here in the coming months.