Essential Sonic The Hedgehog Games
Sonic Pocket Adventure
While this game wasn’t the blue hedgehog’s first appearance on a non-Sega console – the atrocious TigerGame.com version of Sonic Jam takes that title, unfortunately – Sonic Pocket Adventure is an excellent greatest hits remix of the Mega Drive games, incorporating brand-new level layouts with the visual style of Sonic 2 and the musical compositions of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. The game includes hidden puzzle pieces in every stage, encouraging exploration and repeat play, as well as a race mode for link cable owners.
Sonic Adventure
Originally planned as a Saturn game, Sonic Adventure’s development switched to the Dreamcast as the fading fortunes of Sega’s black box became apparent. Sonic’s first 3D platform game is the first to prominently feature his friends – all six characters have different play styles ranging from item-hunting to fishing, and their stories must be played to reach the game’s true ending, meaning it offers plenty of replay value. The game also added the popular Chao-raising minigame, in which players could raise a virtual pet on the Dreamcast and via the system’s Visual Memory handheld console/memory card hybrid. While Sonic Adventure was well received at the time, selling over a million copies and later earning a GameCube port, playing it today reveals a wayward camera and some rather linear stage designs. Despite these issues, it still manages to deliver plenty of thrilling moments and managed to keep and build on the early mechanics that the series was known for.
Sonic R
Traveller’s Tales returned for the Saturn’s only exclusive Sonic game, an on-foot racing spin-off. The game’s five tracks each have a large number of shortcuts and alternative routes off the main track, and you will need to explore them all in order to find the hidden items that allow you to unlock additional characters. Sonic R doesn’t last long but it is a technical showcase for the Saturn, displaying graphical tricks like transparency that had been thought impossible on the hardware, and the soundtrack is utterly unforgettable.
Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island
Sonic’s Mega Drive swansong was an isometric platformer developed by Traveller’s Tales that employed pre-rendered CHI sprites – a style that had been popularised by Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country a couple of years prior. Sonic was tasked with rescuing Flickies and leading them to various exits, a gameplay mechanic borrowed from Sega’s 1984 arcade release Flicky. The Saturn release was a late replacement for the cancelled Sonic X-Treme and sports improved visuals as well as a brand new polygonal special stage designed by Sonic Team.
Sonic Championship
Sega’s legendary AM2 team took the help for this arcade release, which along with Virtua Fighter Kids represented a drive to make fighting games more appealing to young players. Based on the Fighting Vipers engine, it is a fun and frantic if slightly shallow fighter. New characters include Bark, a polar bear and Bean, a bomb-throwing duck whose design harks back to Sega’s cutesy beat-‘em-up Dynamite Dux. A Sonic-style version of Fighting Vipers’ Honey was also designed but dropped, finally appearing in the game’s PSN/XBLA release.
Sonic Blast
Sonic’s farewell to the world of 8-bit gaming was a surprisingly ambitious one, with Aspect choosing to employ pre-rendered sprites to represent Sonic and Knuckles. Unfortunately, to make that choice worthwhile, those sprites have to be quite large, and you don’t get to see much of the stage at a time. This makes it tough to avoid obstacles, which may be why hits cost you just ten rings rather than all of them as is traditional. The Brazil-only Master System version is now a real rarity.
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Keywords: Sonic, Sonic the Hedgehog, Retro Gaming, Videogames, Nintendo.
