Sega has announced a sequel to Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing which will launch on multiple platforms later in the year. Named Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, the great thing about this game is that it will include a whole level based around the Panzer Dragoon series.
Going by the video preview, it appears to a canyon level, loosely based on the intro of the original game. Throughout the level we can see Shelcoof hovering overhead (00:52), a number of definitive ruins of the Ancients (00:59), and the Blue Dragon flapping his wings on the side (02:26). We also see the building featured near the end of Panzer Dragoon episode 1 (02:50).
In the preview, Gareth Wilson, Design Director said:
It’s important to us that we keep the classic music that was with the original game but we’ve remixed it this time with Richard Jacques.
Listen closely and you can hear the Panzer Dragoon episode 1 music in the background. He also added:
For each of the tracks in the game we try to make it so it’s as you remember the game as opposed to actually how it is. So what we have to do is take the essence of, say, Panzer Dragoon, so we reimagine what the Blue Dragon would be like if Panzer Dragoon came out today. So we take a very basic, low poly model and then we work very closely with the people who originally worked on Panzer Dragoon all those years ago and we rebuild all the assets from scratch so that it looks like a triple-A racing game.
Shelcoof and the Blue Dragon certainly look how I’d imagine them to if the Panzer Dragoon games had been released on the current generation of consoles.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is expected to be released on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and PC Digital Download late in 2012. More info is available on the Sega blog.