INSANE MASHUPS! Every Hero Is in the WRONG Game Now!

Okay. Watch the blue blur. That's Sonic, in Los Santos. Not a GTA guy in a Sonic costume: the real Sonic from Sonic Adventure, rolling down the boulevard like a pinball. Across the beach. And then... across the ocean. Sonic still can't swim. Turns out he doesn't need to.

He's not the only hero who wandered into the wrong game. I'm Nora, welcome to the Mashup Arcade. Last time, every game went inside every other game. This time: heroes switching games, old games with new tricks, and single-player games getting a player two. Seven mashups. Three levels. Insert coin.

TOKEN: “Credits: seven.”

Level one: Character Select. Our first pick is that Sonic mod, by Bennett Waisbren. His caption: "I put Sonic Adventure into GTAV and I literally can't stop playing it." Tails flies over downtown, and the mod page promises: "He never tires." Knuckles drops off a skyscraper. Then Amy joined, and her hammer sends cars flying. Finally, a fix for Los Santos traffic.

TOKEN: “Player three has joined. Player four has joined. Player five has...”

This week: a robot. E-102 Gamma, from Sonic Adventure, firing lasers across Los Santos. Bennett's caption: "I did not hold back on his homing attack." He did not. The gang has also moved into Red Dead Redemption 2: "Sonic Adventure 3 takes place in the Wild West." Tails, down the railroad. Fastest train robbery in the West.

Player two: Leon Kennedy, from the original Resident Evil 4, in Elden Ring. The banner says: by SupMyNinja07. The viral post, from a different account, says: "Leon in Elden ring. Mods going crazy." That's RE4's own life gauge and ammo counter, and that's the Tree Sentinel. The boss swings, and a DODGE prompt flashes, like an RE4 quick-time event.

The mod page says Leon starts with both guns loaded and one green herb. One herb. Against the Tree Sentinel. Bold. And then: Enemy felled. The same account's follow-up adds: "Btw it's real mod."

Player three: Sora, from Kingdom Hearts, in Borderlands. tvllerr posted: "Updated the kingdom hearts 1 x borderlands 1 pass-through mod a bit." A bit! Sora has the Kingdom Hearts command menu, Donald and Goofy, and Firaga, Blizzaga and Thundaga for the bandits. It's a passthrough mod: Kingdom Hearts runs in the background and does the fighting, and Borderlands draws it.

Which is how Sora ends up seeing this: Fight for your life. Welcome to Borderlands, kid.

Level two: New Game Plus. Same game, a feature it never had. Like Melee, in 3D. walz's caption: "Check the disc... Super Smash Bros. Melee is now an arena fighter!" Pokémon Stadium, now walkable. Attacks go forward, and you hold R, the Throttle, to aim up and down. My favorite tutorial card: "Every edge is a ledge." For Melee players, that's not a tip. That's a threat.

It patches your own copy of Melee, and walz says it's Slippi Direct compatible.

Next, Starfield: landing on a planet without a loading screen. Frederik Wessberg's mod flies you from orbit to the ground in one go. People asked if the clouds were hiding a loading screen, so he landed on an airless moon. No clouds to hide behind. Watch the speed drop... touchdown.

Then he does it again on autopilot, gets up, and walks around the cabin while the ship lands itself. In his words: "an autopiloted one where the I leave the cockpit seat and walk around continuously." He says the game still loads, in the background while you play, and swaps at the very end. So there is loading. You just never stop to watch it.

TOKEN: “Can we get that mod?”

Don't look at me. It's still a work in progress.

Level three: Multiplayer. BioShock was built for one. Now there's BioShock Together, by Nyko of Void Crown Studios, and its page opens with: "Would you kindly bring a friend?" Here's the dev log: host screen, client screen, two players in Rapture. The page says you share enemies and Big Daddies, and your partner shows up as a Splicer. In Rapture, that's camouflage.

Little Sisters stay personal: you each rescue or harvest your own, and "Your ending remains your own." Nyko says the whole campaign has been played in co-op. Except the final boss, which you each fight alone. It's an alpha, and the page's best advice is: "Seriously. Save your game."

Finally, a crossover that needs a crowd. The Battlefront Pack is Star Wars inside Halo: speeder bikes, blasters, clones and droids, on maps like Hoth and the Death Star. It's by abyssquick, stevierothy and team, and it's been around since 2022. What's new is Project Reclaimer, a free fan-made launcher that takes Halo 3 from sixteen players to a hundred and twenty-eight.

The team's caption: "The Battlefront Pack with 100 players is INSANE." We didn't count them. A Halo fan who shared the same clip wrote: "Star wars and Halo merged together is quite literally one the the best things I've ever seen." One the the best. Agreed.

Okay, the catch. Every one of these needs your own copy of the game, and for crossovers, both games. Some makers say they had help: Bennett's mod page credits Claude as programming assistant, and tvllerr's readme says Claude wrote the code while tvllerr directed and playtested. The Battlefront Pack team has posted that theirs uses no generative AI at all.

And the big one: a mod runs with full access to your PC. Leon's page lives on Melty, and a community note on Melty's launch post says it doesn't make the mashups it lists, or scan them for malware. So get mods from the maker's own page.

So, which hero moves into which game next? Put it in the comments, because at this rate, somebody will have built it by Friday. Oh, and TOKEN just informed me:

TOKEN: “I put the entire of game Nora into Elden Ring as mod.”

TOKEN: “Btw it's real mod.”

That's what I'm afraid of.