After 17 years, Sonic Unleashed finally has a native PC port, and it's been developed with a tool that could potentially help give the same treatment to any Xbox 360 game. With that, the door to one of the most exciting avenues of game preservation we've seen in ages might have been kicked open in a major way.
There's a lot of "potentially" and "might" here because this new tool, called XenonRecomp, simply gives fan developers a path to creating PC versions of Xbox 360 games. As the GitHub page explains, it "converts Xbox 360 executables into C++ code, which can then be recompiled for any platform." It's not magic - you can't simply drag a 360 .iso file in and get a perfectly functional PC port - but it could make things much easier for fan developers to create their own ports.
XenonRecomp was heavily inspired by N64: Recompiled, which effectively does the same thing for Nintendo 64 games. The asterisk here is that N64: Recompiled has been out for nearly a full year and there are so far only a small handful of N64-to-PC ports that have happened as a result, and we might be in for a similarly long wait for Xbox 360 ports to take off depending on the interests of hobbyist developers.
For now, at least, there's Unleashed Recompiled, a PC port of Sonic Unleashed made using XenonComp. It has all the features you could hope for from a proper PC release, including much higher native resolutions, ultrawide support, and the ability to unlock your frame rate. Unleashed has always been among the more divisive 3D Sonic games, but if you're looking to play it in 2025 this seems to be the definitive way to do so.
Emulation tends to be the most far-reaching way of making old games playable on modern devices, but Xbox 360 emulation has never quite reached an ideal state. Unofficial 360 emulator Xenia only plays a fraction of the console's library, and even Microsoft's official emulator on modern Xbox consoles, while broadly excellent, has a relatively small whitelist of compatible games.
Many Xbox 360 games either received their own official PC ports back in the day or came to PS3, which has a far more robust fanmade emulation option in RPCS3, so very few of these games are genuinely lost to modern hardware. But the possibilities of new native PC ports are nonetheless exciting, as they can offer more robust performance improvements and gameplay tweaks than emulation.
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