Sonic Free Riders was absolute agony to play. Despite being perhaps the best-looking game in the series at the time, its unresponsive controls made this Kinect game a chore to get through. The positions it asked you to get in were far too uncomfortable for a full race, and the voice commands straight up didn't work. There might have been a good game in there, but launching on the Kinect meant it was dead on arrival. Yet that doesn't mean fans have forgotten about it.
13 years later, fans have got together to free Sonic Free Riders, ridding it of its dependency on the Kinect. The Sonic Free Riders No Kinect patch is live now, letting you play through the game as you would any other Sonic Riders title. Everything from story mode to simple menu navigation finally works without having to stand awkwardly in front of your telly and flap your arms around, with every character now playable with a controller.
The mod is free to download, although it may require you to get the files from the base game on your computer. There is an option to actually play it on a console, however, you'll just need to have your Kinect plugged in, otherwise it won't let you play the game even with the mod.
The good news is that after that faff, the results look pretty damn great. The graphics hold up surprisingly well for a Sonic game that was hit with bad reviews at launch, so freeing it from the Kinect should make it play just like a new Sonic Riders game.
There's still work to be done on the mod, such as getting three and four-player modes working, and making it able to boot up without having a Kinect plugged in at all, but this is already an incredibly impressive project from the community. Sega has long abandoned the Sonic Riders series in favour of its big crossover racing games with its other properties, so the chances of the original Sonic Free Riders being saved from the Kinect were slim to none.
Kudos to Game Banana users Rei-SanTH, SmileyWorld, MagicShad, and Dunker961 for getting this up and working. There's a full list of controls on the mod page if you ever get lost, so you shouldn't need a ton of experience with Sonic Riders to get it working.