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AlexArtsHere

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About AlexArtsHere

  • Birthday 10/09/1998

Retained

  • Member Title
    Can bench press at least two Sonic the Hedgehogs

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  • Pronouns
    He/Him
  • Interests
    Art, analysis, perpetually moving mammals
  • Location
    Britain

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  • Favorite Fire Emblem Game
    Fates: Conquest

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    Nohr

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  1. You know the balancing issues are completely circumvented if you upgrade Steal to Insider Trading? Idiot. Joking aside, there’s certainly a bitterness to watching the scope of missable content creep ever wider in each of these write ups. Maybe it’s my perfectionism speaking but, given that nobody’s just going to know this stuff, it seems like a mechanism to pad playtime at best and a scheme to hawk guides at worst. While your tonguebathing of FF5 piqued my interest in that game, I think my enthusiasm towards the prospect of playing The Good Final Fantasy has been a little dampened. Anyway, I can’t wait until FF9 (presumably, given that’s meant to be the inevitable early-mid-00s “return to the roots” game) when ATB gets shot and left in a ditch.
  2. I can’t say I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Mega Man stan, but I was rather hoping you’d like this one, so I’m glad to see such a glowing review on it. I think the gear system is a pretty terrific way to leave difficulty up to the player in a way that is both dynamic and organic, with the timer-based recharge preventing the ability from becoming abusable without screwing over bad players like me who rely on it a lot by making it possible to run out of uses for a stage. That said, I only ever did the one run of Mega Man 11 (on normal difficulty, I believe) and don’t even remember all that much of it in hindsight, so the rest of the suite of difficulty options seems really interesting. Will need to replay at some point.
  3. But it is all Rose Boys! Or is that one of the other games? Everything I know about Final Fantasy can be traced back to PCP University's 4.5 hour video on the series delivered by BestGuyEver. Anyway, your notes on FFV's job system give me vibes of one of the best parts of Granblue Fantasy, that being the high tier classes which, as opposed to having three innate skills like the lower tiered classes, get one innate skill off the bat, equip any two learned skills from other classes and get to choose one more skill from a pool of three unique to the equipped class upon mastering it. This is all to say that, after reading your post, my strength of my desire to play FFV has gone from "interest" to "appeal".
  4. I don't think it's so much that as it is that Aspect is trying to iterate on their previous work with 8-bit Sonic 2 to try and bring their releases closer to the console versions, despite the Master System and Game Gear not being able to achieve that. That might seem like splitting hairs a bit, but I think it's very different in character compared to attempts to reinvent the wheel in games like Heroes, Unleashed, Lost World and Frontiers.
  5. Previous instalment: Sonic CD (SEGA Mega CD, 1993) Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: In November 1993, a new Sonic game hit store shelves – one that represented something of a departure from the previous two entries, but would go on to be largely overlooked in the eyes of wider audiences compared to its earlier and later brethren. No, this isn’t a repeat of the Sonic CD writeup – this time, we’re looking at Sonic Chaos. When Sonic CD first released on 23 November 1993 (at least in North America – and coincidentally the 30th anniversary of my other hyperfixation, Doctor Who), it didn’t do so alone. It, along with Sonic Chaos and the next, as yet undisclosed, game in this series dropped simultaneously to form a marketing push that was branded “Sonic Mania Day” (which is giving me the oddest sense of premonition…), clearly an attempt to strike once more with the lightning that was Sonic 2sday the previous year. Sonic was now a proven cash cow in the west, so it’s unsurprising that serialisation quickly turned to franchise expansion, with several titles releasing per year from 1993 onwards (with a couple of exceptions here and there). Such a trend isn’t slowing down anytime soon, and could be argued to have caused ripples that are still felt in Sonic games today, but that’s getting way ahead of things. Developed by Aspect, the studio behind 8-bit Sonic 2, Sonic Chaos (released as Sonic & Tails in Japan) is our third Sonic title for the SEGA Master System and Game Gear. Beyond that, I find it difficult to really ascribe an identity to the game. Within the Sonic community, 8-bit Sonic 1 is viewed as the companion piece with a handful of alternate level settings, 8-bit Sonic 2 is pretty much universally known as “the really difficult one” and the fourth 8-bit Sonic platformer seems to have garnered the reputation of being where these games came into their own (an assessment that I’ll put under the microscope in due time), as well as debuting its own cult classic character to the franchise. So where does that leave Sonic Chaos? During my research on the game’s development via the Sonic Retro wiki, I saw the game referred to as being the 8-bit games’ answer to Sonic 2, given that the actual 8-bit Sonic 2, certainly in aesthetics and mechanics, continued very much in the vein of its predecessor. I think such a statement on Sonic Chaos is somewhat valid – not only is this the first 8-bit game to feature Sonic’s now-iconic spindash (as well as a version of his peelout from Sonic CD with startup invincibility, here named as the Strike Dash, a move so devoid of use case within the game that I had completely forgotten it exists until the realisation that led to this post-publishing edit), it has the understated distinction of being the first game ever to feature Tails’ ability to fly in a playable form, where the Mega Drive version of Sonic 2 had only deigned to use it as a means to contextualise Tails respawning after getting lost offscreen or taking too many hits. Otherwise, I can’t really credit Sonic Chaos with anything near as weighty as 16-bit Sonic 2’s revolutionary legacy. To start with, the gameplay. Where 16-bit Sonic 2 honed in on the strengths of the series’ venerable first entry, emphasising and expanding upon them to create an altogether sleeker and more refined package that I credit with cementing a platonic ideal for Sonic games, Sonic Chaos, in spite of its headline additions, largely feels like more of the same to me as far as the 8-bit games go. Game feel is still considerably clunky, with the same rudimentary facsimile of physics that pales in comparison to the Mega Drive hits. Levels, designed by the enigmatic M. Shimamura, pseudonymous Ray and Tadashi Ihoroi (originally credited as 500ZO), are still broadly flat and mostly empty affairs, albeit with a commendable effort made to incorporate a wider variety of level gimmicks, such as speed boosters and springy shoes that allow Sonic to scale heights that would be insurmountable with his basic jump. Further, these levels make a notably more concerted effort to emulate the level design of Sonic 2’s multiple tiers of branching pathways, with Turquoise Hill Act 1 in particular doing its best impression of a Happy Meal version of Emerald Hill Act 1. Even so, they’re mostly over in a minute or less, with little threat from the game’s decidedly passive cast of enemies. Or at least they are if you aren’t hoping to visit the game’s special stages. That’s right, the Sonic series’ variety act is back once again. Unlike the previous two 8-bit games, where the Chaos Emeralds were located in the regular levels and only needed to be found in order to be acquired (a task often easier said than done, admittedly), Sonic Chaos opts to follow suit of its console big brothers and place the gemstones in another dimension, kept out of Sonic’s reach until he’s able to overcome the challenges he encounters there. Well, five of them are, anyway. Doctor Eggman is keeping a hold of the sixth emerald, serving as the impetus for the game’s gratuitous backstory, and the dev team evidently weren’t informed that we now live in a post-Sonic 2 world, with a whole seven emeralds and a super form to go with the complete set. This time, accessing a special stage requires that 100 rings be collected within any level, turning the game’s pacing into a decidedly Sonic CD-like affair, with the gameplay loop now focusing on the exploration of the levels in order accumulate the necessary rings, extending playtime by about 60 – 90 seconds a piece. Upon collection of the 100th ring, that level ends and Sonic is warped to the special stage, regardless of progress within the level. There’s little to complain about here – rings are pretty plentiful in most levels and the docility of the game’s enemies means that there’s little danger of losing them to a stray potshot. Ending the level to enter the special stage is an unconventional choice in theory, but ends up having little real impact outside of being the slightest of conveniences, given that levels are neither interesting enough for me to protest at being whisked away prematurely (as I would if this were 16-bit Sonic 2), nor brutal enough for skipping whatever’s left to feel like any kind of reprieve or reward (as I would if this were 8-bit Sonic 2). The stages themselves are less of a format change compared to the Mega Drive games, instead taking a form best described as bonus levels, five obstacle courses to be completed within a time limit, each having a specific theme. The first one focuses on the free-flying rocket boots powerup, which effectively amounts to staying in the middle of the screen and holding right until you come into contact with the emerald (rings can be grabbed along the way, with 50 granting a continue, but this is entirely optional and offers no progress towards the emerald itself); the second one requires Sonic use the spring shoes to climb a series of floating platforms; the third one is a series of tubes that just requires you hold right until the gotcha moment where you have to instead hold up, all while you’re inexplicably being peppered with invincibility monitors; the fourth one is most like a standard level, with the “difficulty” coming from navigating a stairwell of springs aiming to send you careening back the way you came at around the three-quarter mark of the level; and the fifth one is another series of tubes, this one more labyrinthine in nature. These stages are entirely unremarkable. They’re barely interesting and don’t even begin to explore their mechanics to the fullest degree, even within the limited depth of an 8-bit Sonic game. If not for their grab bag nature, the only memorable thing about them would be their difficulty curve. The first three stages put up all the fight of a sedate kitten with next to no requirement for engagement on the player’s part, but the fourth stage represents a sharp spike in difficulty due to the precision and speed with which it must be navigated (with the aforementioned spring stairway being a particular hassle), and the fifth stage pretty much can’t be beaten without some combination of several attempts, a guide and a copious amount of luck. Even if you manage to correctly navigate the tubes, you’d better be ready to jump as soon as you enter the room containing the Chaos Emerald, lest you hit the cruelly placed spring that would you bounce back into that tube, forcing you back to the start of the level with a 20-second penalty, all but killing that attempt at the emerald. And it’s in this we find the throughline of Sonic Chaos, ugly as it may be. As with the special stages, the game’s standard levels start out laughably easy before a jarring difficulty spike kicks in. The first three levels provide next to no challenge whatsoever, before the fourth zone starts peppering in bottomless pits and slanted walkways above those pits that’ll send you careening downwards if you lose too much speed on them, while the sixth zone features invincible enemies rooted into the ground along Song’s path, just waiting to be run into (which happens frustratingly often, given the Game Gear’s screen crunch – frankly, I couldn’t imagine trying to play this on real hardware with the screen ghosting that entails). It’s still no 8-bit Sonic 2 in this regard, especially with the Chaos Emeralds moved to special stages rather than being left in difficult to reach spots within the levels themselves, but at least Sonic 2 was enough of a pain in the neck to be memorable for it. This approach to difficulty permeates the bosses also. The first boss doesn’t even directly attack Sonic, instead just trundling back and forth ineffectually, the only way to lose a life being to run into the poor thing without curling into a ball first. However, the third boss begins to up the ante with a downward arc of fire that makes rebounding off of it after a hit a potentially lethal proposition, while the fifth boss even gets a second phase involving a barrage of tough to dodge missiles. Even the addition of rings to boss stages (though only on one path, making it entirely feasible to end up fighting the boss without them – I don’t even know how to reach the rings in the fifth zone’s boss act without using Tails) only takes the edge off somewhat, but I find it hard to muster any real ire for this. By the time the bosses start presenting a challenge, they can all be cheesed by jumping in such a way that Sonic lands directly on top of them and can continue to score hits with consecutive bounces until the boss folds. The developers must have known about this, as the fifth boss leaves from the top of the screen once its second phase begins, but even this can be abused, as the boss will carry a bouncing Sonic with it, making its normally difficult missile attack a complete non-issue. Even the final boss, a laser-firing bipedal mech piloted by Eggman, is cursed with the inability to turn around. To the doctor’s credit, he does fire a fast-moving energy shot that covers the area above and behind him by careening off the screen’s boundaries, making the usual cheese strat infeasible, but this too is barely an inconvenience, simply requiring players to retreat to the corner of the screen behind Robotnik to wait out the attack before continuing to scramble the Eggman. If you think that sounds disappointing, then wait until you hear about Tails. Up until now, I’ve been framing gameplay pretty much exclusively as a Sonic affair, and that’s not by accident. Upon starting Sonic Chaos, you’re presented with the option to play the game as Sonic or Tails, with no chance to switch once the journey has begun. Given that he’s the template from which all other playstyles stem in the 2D space, I of course picked Sonic for my first playthrough. I subsequently got the bad ending due to figuring out how to access special stages only halfway through the game. “No biggie,” I thought “this seems like the perfect reason to go back through the game and play as Tails, using his flight to make accessing special stages much quicker and easier”. My first experience with Tails was that I couldn’t even figure out how to make him fly, to the point that I thought I’d tricked myself into believing that this was the debut of his ability to fly. In more or less every other 2D appearance, Tails’ flight is activated by additional, consistent presses of the jump button after an initial jump, evoking the same tactile game feel as revving up Sonic’s spindash. In Sonic Chaos, Tails’ flight is activated by pressing up and jump simultaneously, but only when on the ground and standing still. It feels a little unfair to hold it against the devs of this game for not hitting up on the now-accepted solution for Tails’ flight before the mechanic became mainstream, but the whole affair is just weird and clunky, given that intuition dictates that you’d want as much height as possible before beginning to fly to extend your air time, making the choice to only have it be activated while grounded and motionless a little jarring and rather a pace-killer. Even once he’s in the air, Tails’ control is unimpressive, being unable to move with anywhere near the grace and fluidity of his console self, his rigidity instead evoking something you’d expect to see on the Atari of the early 80s rather than a full colour display a decade later. All of this, however, is secondary to Tails’ biggest shortcoming in Sonic Chaos, that of being entirely unable to enter the special stages and collect the Chaos Emeralds. This, in some part, makes sense, given that two of the special stages feature the Sonic-exclusive rocket boots power-up (almost certainly conceived as a way to allow the blue blur to match his fennec friend by taking to air himself for a limited time), but concessions could certainly have been made to rectify this issue, especially given that the stage which outright requires the use of the power-up is the least interesting in a set of terribly boring special stages. Granted, perhaps I’m overstating things, as the inability to collect emeralds has absolutely no bearing on gameplay, with their collection simply changing the game’s ending (in the bad ending, Sonic stacks it and face plants in his attempt to chase down Eggman for the sixth, red emerald, the idiot), but it’s just not a good look to have a co-titling character be unable to participate in the game’s full breadth of content, however banal that content may be. In point of fact, the only screenshot of Tails I bothered taking was the one above, before promptly resetting the game at the realisation that there was no worth in this playthrough – the game is easy enough already, and the areas of difficulty that do exist wouldn’t be alleviated by the ability to fly anyway. At least the presentation values are good, right? Well, they’re fine, I guess. Indeed, perhaps the most memorable aspect of Sonic Chaos is its introduction of a new art style. Gone are 8-bit Sonic 1 and 2’s flat-coloured sprites and uniform outlines in favour of something a little more evocative of the Mega Drive stylings, with an emphasis on detail and shading, courtesy of Hisato Fukumoto, Gen Adachi, Nobuhiko Honda and Shinichi Higashi. Credit where it’s due, the game does project an appearance of something technically superior to the previous Master System/Game Gear outings, and character sprites in particular, heroes and villains alike, all benefit from a sense of depth and volume that was lacking in those games but, on balance, I’m still inclined to say it’s a downgrade. In the 8-bit Sonic 1 review, I was really rather impressed with the strength of the art style, highlighting the clever use of system colour limitations to sell the illusion of deep and intricate backgrounds that really help level aesthetics pop. In Sonic Chaos, colour and detail is frontloaded into the elements within the playable area, reducing backgrounds to being single-colour fills with sparse tiling of mostly indistinct decorations of little permutation, failing to really suggest a wider locale in the distance and leaving stages looking as though they exist in barren voids, with the level aesthetics themselves failing to evoke anything so fanciful as their names would suggest (someone please tell me what the hell Sleeping Egg Zone is meant to be). I think things do look a little better on the Master System, given its more pastel palette compared to the Game Gear’s darker hues, but choice of system is no factor in the content of Sonic Chaos’ art style. In the console wars arms race of the 90s, it would seem that SEGA and Aspect allowed ambition to get the better of them on 8-bit systems and traded in the strengths of a simpler art style for a façade of technical superiority over the NES and Game Boy. “But what of the music?” I hear you cry. “This is a Sonic game! For the love of chilli dogs and all that is fast, surely we’ve been treated to a round of 8-bit bangers as only this series can give them!” Sorry to say, its’s another miss here. Scored seemingly entirely by series newcomer Kojiro Mikusa (I say “seemingly” as Masayuki Nagao, also credited for the game’s sound, looks to be more involved with sound effect production, judging by their body of work listed on Moby Games), Sonic Chaos gives us, by some margin, the single most forgettable soundtrack yet heard in this series. It’s not particularly bad, mind, but doesn’t aspire to be anything greater than wholly standard video game fare, which is a bit of a damning statement within the context of the Sonic series, so revered for its tunes as it is. While I’m usually in the habit of queuing up each game’s soundtrack in order to evoke mood and memories of my time with it as I write these posts, this time I took one or two listens as a formality before switching over to other Sonic soundtracks. About the only track I’m left with any affection for is the Game Gear rendition of Aqua Planet Zone, though even this isn’t something I’d be able to listen to on loop the same way I can 8-bit Sonic 1’s tunes. All in all, I think it’s pretty evident why Sonic Chaos doesn’t have much renown or identity, even within the deepest depths of the Sonic fan community. It’s a wholly uninspired experience that seems to be going through the motions, neither good enough to be fun nor bad enough to be memorable. Even its jerky difficulty curve seems to be more of an accident of sloppy design rather than some planned sucker punch to wall out inexperienced players and light the fire of spite to goad them into seeing the thing through for their own satisfaction. Truth be told, the most profound thing that Sonic Chaos does is lend further validation to something I’ve been feeling since reviewing 8-bit Sonic 1: Sonic games just don’t work on 8-bit systems that aren’t computationally powerful to simulate the physics that made the series fun in the first place. Already I find myself forgetting much of my time with a game I beat within just a couple of hours three days ago. Go, girl, give us nothing!
  6. Yeah, that pretty much hits the nail on the head for me as far as why I don't like ATB. Even if it's the illusion of pressure, the pressure is still felt and I don't want that kind of pressure in an RPG, it stresses me out. I don't even mind RPG fights being slow and perhaps unflashy, because I think the itch it scratches for me is something approximating resource management. I'd much rather have a slower experience that lets me get stuck into the weeds of planning than something with the facade of speed, but no depth as a result.
  7. Actually I'm powered by the small animals trapped inside my metal shell against their will.
  8. The speedrun from “it’s cool and I really like it” to “please just stop” happened a lot sooner than I expected.
  9. Previous instalment: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (SEGA Master System, 1992) Divergent evolution is a funny old thing. It’s not unsurprising that it happens as far as design is concerned, but it’s interesting to see what exists in the space between an idea being birthed and the definitive iteration of that idea seeing mass adoption, superseding the original and becoming the new default. Two parties can work independently to improve the same base, only for the results to be altogether distinct from each other. Such was the case with Sonic the Hedgehog during its primordial phase in the early 90s. As I touched on in my writeup of the first game, while a lot of the fundamentals of classic Sonic gameplay didn’t change much from the inception of the franchise in 1991 through to Sonic 3 & Knuckles in 1994, things didn’t come out fully formed the first time, and those two years in between can be looked back upon as a time when the cement hadn’t quite finished drying and the ideas of the series were a little more malleable. I’ve already written about Yuji Naka and co.’s accomplished sequel that really solidified the template of what Sonic was to be, and still is for many, all these years later. This time, I’m writing about a very different sequel that resulted from the vision of the other essential figure in the Sonic creation myth, Naoto Ohshima. Released in Autumn 1993, Sonic CD was positioned as the killer app for the SEGA Mega Drive’s Mega CD add-on. While Naka et al upped sticks to California to work on Sonic 2 at the behest of Mark Cerny and SEGA of America, Ohshima remained in Japan and formed his own team to bring about his own Sonic sequel that would take advantage of the Mega CD’s unique features in an attempt to make the peripheral a success, per the direction of SEGA. Ohshima is generally deflective towards the idea of Sonic CD being a true sequel to the original (even suggesting that his team had more fun working without the pressure that the American team was under to deliver the sequel to one of the early 90s’ seminal hits), and I’m inclined to agree with him, but the parallels between these two games really can’t be overstated. Where Sonic 2 zigs, Sonic CD zags - this is by design, as Ohshima deliberately maintained communication with Naka as the two worked on their respective projects so the former could ensure that CD would stand independently of 2, rather than just being an enhanced version of it. While Sonic 2 delivered one of the most iconic sidekicks in all of media with Miles “Tails” Prower, Sonic CD instead chose to give Sonic a(n unrequited) love interest in the form of Amy Rose Hedgehog and his first true rival in Metal Sonic, a robotic dark mirror of our hero that himself contrasts the bulky and industrial design of Sonic 2’s Mecha Sonic Mk. I with a much sleeker, cobalt blue frame that more accurately mimicks the real Sonic. As Sonic 2 introduced the spindash, providing speed and protection through a revving action, Sonic CD instead breaks this concept down into two moves, the Super Peelout and its own version of the spindash – both of these performed by continuously holding either up or down respectively and the jump button, with the former providing a huge burst of speed while the latter offered a slightly slower but safer manoeuvre (though the Sonic 2 styled spindash would be officially introduced to Sonic CD with the game’s 2011 remake by Christian “Taxman” Whitehead and has since supplanted the CD-original version as the default option in subsequent rereleases of said remake). The most fundamental of these contrasts, however, is time travel. As I briefly outlined in the addendum of Sonic 2’s writeup, that game was at one point going to feature time travel as a major point of focus. As best as can be gleaned from the publicly available concept art, I believe this would’ve mostly been a presentational element rather than a fully-fledged game mechanic, with Sonic and Tails chasing Eggman on a journey through time in a set, linear order. Meanwhile, not only did Sonic CD’s take on time travel make it into the final game, I personally think it was executed in a much more interesting way than what seems to have been proposed by the Sonic 2 team. The mechanics of time travel in Sonic CD are as follows: by making contact with time warp plates placed throughout each level before reaching and maintaining a certain speed for a few seconds (approximately five in the 2011 remake, a little shorter in the 1993 original), Sonic will then warp to the past, present or future, depending on what time period he’s in when initiating the warp. But what’s the point to all this? Well, if you only ever stayed in the present and blasted through this game as though it were any other Sonic title, Sonic CD would end up a brief experience, and ultimately no progress would truly be made in stopping Doctor Eggman, who has abused/is abusing/will abuse the mercurial space-time laws of Little Planet, the game’s setting, to transform it into a synthetic wonderland in his own image. While Sonic may be able to travel between past, present and future, that future is not set in stone and can be good or bad depending on actions taken over the course of each level and the game as a whole. As such, the true goal of Sonic CD’s gameplay loop is to save the planet and conquer time by shutting down Eggman’s robot generators in the past or grabbing the seven Time Stones (Ersatz Chaos Emeralds, honestly) to keep them out of the bad doctor’s clutches. In effect, this allows for Sonic CD to played in two ways (assuming you want to save Little Planet and see the game’s good ending). The first of these (and the approach I would hazard is Ohshima’s preferred way for us to play the game) is to focus on the generators in the past, while the second is to play with a mindset of getting to the goal, taking time travel as it comes rather than seeking it out and trying to harness it. To best understand how these two gameplay experiences differ, we first need to discuss the level design of the game. Frankly, it’s rather messy. Off the bat, the basic geometry of the level design is generally pretty blocky and places a big emphasis on verticality, which makes it more difficult to maintain speed in the same way as when playing Sonic 1 or 2. Those games focused on organic slopes for the level designs of its natural locales, allowing players to reach new paths with the use of Sonic’s speed rather than asking them to sacrifice it. Meanwhile, level design in Sonic CD frequently forces Sonic to stop or severely slow down to maintain forward progress, making it unnecessarily difficult and tedious to maintain the speed needed to time travel. This kind of design is at its worst in the fifth zone, Wacky Workbench, which has an intermittently bouncy floor on its bottommost layer and a lot of walls in the upper areas, making the viable real estate for time travel practically nil. On the other side of the coin, Sonic CD absolutely loves to just throw Sonic onto all sorts of wild rides with springs and bumpers. This is bad enough in a vacuum in that it stalls forward progress in a different way, but becomes even worse with time travel thrown into the mix, as these segments of level design can provide the speed needed for time travel but in a way that isn’t practically reliable to use as a strategy for time travel and can often be unwanted. This kind of design isn’t particularly frequent but is no less egregious than the first flaw. In practical terms, this makes going for the good ending via destroying all generators pretty awkward. First of all, there’s one in every first and second act of each zone, and missing even a single one means you can no longer get the good ending that way, already setting an exacting standard for success. Unfortunately, it only gets worse when you bring the flaws of the game’s level design into the mix. Since travelling into the past ends up being rather a task a lot of the time, particularly in the game’s later levels, it’s not great that you have to do it in two thirds of the game’s levels and then scour those levels on top of that to find the generators. Unintentional time travel is so much more frustrating here, though. Given that all your objectives are in the past, travelling to the future becomes nothing but detrimental in a generators-focused run of the game, yet that’s how most unintentional time travel happens, since future time warp plates are considerably more common than those leading to the past. This ended up happening to me a considerable amount in one of my playthroughs and the consequence of this happening is having to then find two more past warp plates to get back to the present and then go to the past to actually start looking for the generator. The saving grace of this is that you can find the (now defunct) generators in the present of each level, so you don’t necessarily need to get to the past as soon as possible just to find the generator, but this doesn’t do much to reduce the tedium of the whole thing. On the other hand, going for the Time Stones is a much less aggravating experience. As in Sonic 1, special stages are accessed by collecting 50 rings jumping into the large warp ring that appears at the end of the level. This generally isn’t as much of a hassle as in that game, since the biggest challenge of Sonic CD being navigation of the environment itself means that there’s not actually a whole lot that’s going to take away your rings (which themselves are plentiful). But the real improvement here is in the special stages themselves - once again, it’s all change. This time, Sonic is dropped into a Mode-7 styled racetrack-like area and is tasked with destroying all of the UFOs flying around the area before time runs out. Most of these UFOs give rings, but some give Sonic a temporary speed boost that can be used to navigate the map more quickly. Making contact with the water around the stage costs ten seconds each time it happens, but a special UFO spawns every time the clock drops below 20 seconds, with its destruction granting an additional 20 seconds to work with. This may be my favourite special stage format in the classic quadrilogy, honestly. The UFOs can seem fairly erratic, but they follow set patterns every time you play, and clearing each one of these on the first attempt is entirely feasible, unlike the special stages of Sonic 2. You can’t halt Sonic’s movement once the stage starts, so you always need to have your next manoeuvre in mind, but Sonic can be slowed down as long as you’re holding backwards on the d-pad. The freedom of control for Sonic, combined with non-linear nature of these stages, results in obstacle courses that don’t require internalised knowledge of their cycles, but do become massively rewarding with this as you begin to be able to route your runs on repeat playthroughs to clear them in very little time and look cool while doing it. There’s a nice flow state that can be achieved here and it makes a huge difference that these stages can be hastened with experience and good performance, unlike the auto-scrollers of Sonic 2 and…whatever the hell Sonic 1’s special stages are. They’re not without flaw, however. The letdown here is in the low graphical fidelity of the stages, which can make it difficult to tell where smaller bodies of water lie and generally screws over depth perception, which can become frustrating in the later special stages as you miss hits on the more slippery UFOs that by all accounts should have landed. Even so, I far prefer these special stages to the two attempts prior. In terms of actually playing the game this way, however…it’s a bit boring. By ditching the impetus to explore and instead making things more or less a straight shot to the goal, Sonic CD’s levels become fairly bland in their construction and very short, and there isn’t a lot of engagement to be had, not helped by the fact that there’s no real reason to time travel other than for sightseeing. To be utilitarian about it, the point of going to the past is to destroy generators. The point of going to the good future accessible upon destroying the generators or collecting all the Time Stones is for an easier ride, since there are no enemies there (though this game is already so easy that this isn’t a particularly compelling sell – if you’re going to struggle, it won’t be due to the enemies). The bad futures, which you’ll be seeing until Quartz Quadrant Act 2 at the very earliest if you’re only going for Time Stones, have the same level design as the good futures, but with enemies added into the mix, simply offering a different flavour from the present and having no utility of their own. The layouts themselves are just about different enough between eras to give consequence to time travel, but don’t do much to invoke the desire to time travel. This becomes even more baffling in the 2011 remake, which adds Metal Sonic holograms in every first and second act that can be destroyed for an achievement…in the past…where the generators already provide an incentive for exploration. All of this is to say that going for the Time Stones instead of the generators, while a less tedious and frustrating experience, is still one that leads to you ignoring the crux of what the game’s about. In keeping with the theme of tedium is Sonic CD’s boss fights, which have a deliberated pace compared to Sonic 1 and 2 – unfortunately, that’s not a compliment. In theory, most of Sonic CD’s bosses operate in the same way as the prior two games, being vulnerable at all times, but requiring you to reach them to land hits. The trouble is, the game very much dictates when you’re allowed to reach the bosses, which are otherwise protected from damage. Dishonourable mentions here include the final boss in Metallic Madness, which is protected by its spinning blades and is very stingy with its vulnerability windows, and Quartz Quadrant’s, which is functionally invincible and must be ground into submission by running on a conveyor belt in the boss arena while avoiding attacks, effectively turning the boss into an autoscroller. The worst offender, however, has to be the second boss, found in Collision Chaos. This is even less of a boss fight than Quartz Quadrant’s, instead taking the form of a pinball table that Sonic must reached the top of in order to smash Eggman, who all the while is firing small explosives downwards towards Sonic, pushing him backwards on contact but only being able to hurt him by forcing him into spike traps, which rarely happens. It’s a truly miserable experience and succeeding is largely down to luck of being able to avoid the explosives while bouncing from flipper to flipper. In short, pretty much all of CD’s bosses can be boiled down to gameplay experiences that aren’t difficult, but simply monotonous. In my opinion, even the fan favourite Metal Sonic race that serves as Stardust Speedway’s boss doesn’t escape this curse, though it does have the saving grace of being cleared more quickly with skilful play. This pretty much just plays out as a third stage for the zone, with the gimmick being that you have to beat Metal Sonic to the end of the level while Eggman chases you with a laser that kills instantly on contact. Metal Sonic himself has two attacks that occur entirely based on his position to you when triggered. If he’s lagging behind, he’ll burst forward in an energised tackle, the V. Maximum Overdrive Attack. When leading, he’ll slow right down while electrifying his entire body in the hopes that Sonic’ll just run into him. You never directly engage with Metal Sonic and, once again, your main obstacle is the environment itself, being littered with spike traps and constructed in such a way that can kill momentum if you don’t react and jump in time to avoid the numerous quarter pipes on your path. Overall, Metal Sonic’s debut face-off is about as rote as the rest of the game’s bosses. Instead, it’s memorable for being a change in format to every other boss in the series up to this point and on the strength of Metal’s character design and presence itself, which is just as well, given this is the second of his paltry two appearances within gameplay, the first being to show up and kidnap Amy Rose at the start of Collision Chaos (you get to free her after besting Metal Sonic) – a bit baffling, given how he’s front and centre in all of the game’s promotional materials and on its box art. It's in Metal Sonic’s race, however, that we find the explanation for why Sonic CD has gone on to become rather a cult classic within the Sonic zeitgeist, which reminds us of why Naoto Ohshima is so important within the creation of Sonic in the first place. In the conception of Sonic, Yuji Naka was the engineer who coded and calculated the physics of momentum and acceleration that made Sonic the Hedgehog, the game, a landmark title in the gameplay department. Meanwhile, I believe the credit that belongs entirely to Ohshima is that of creating Sonic the Hedgehog, the hedgehog, and this really bears out in the presentation of Sonic CD. When starting a new playthrough, Sonic CD swings for the fences pretty much immediately in terms of making an impression, with a series first for Sonic: a 90-second-long animated intro, courtesy of Studio Junio (subcontracted by Toei Animation, credited as the animation’s producer) and spearheaded by chief animator Hisashi Eguchi, who has also worked on the likes of Lupin III, Evangelion Neon Genesis and Naruto. You can read more about the history behind the intro and Eguchi’s work here, because a lot of it is way outside of the scope of what I’m writing about in this post, but what’s important for our purposes is that this intro’s really just rather fantastic. Showing Sonic’s journey to Never Lake (above which Eggman has chained Little Planet to a mountain bearing his own image, Rushmore style), the whole piece just oozes style, effortlessly demonstrating Sonic’s cool personality in both design and movement in a manner that’s codified how Sonic should be portrayed more than anything that has come before. All of this is happening while elevated by a vocal arrangement of 8-bit Sonic 2’s Green Hills Zone music titled “Sonic – You Can Do Anything”, produced by Masafumi Ogata, Casey Rankin and Keiko Utoku. “Nothing can survive the will to stay alive” is one of the hardest lyrics of all time and it comes from a goddamn Sonic game. And this energy keeps up all the way through the game. Where Sonic 2’s zig was to refine the art style of Sonic 1 into something softer and slightly more grounded, Sonic CD’s zag instead sprints headlong in the other direction to embrace those 90s eccentricities that would later go on to influence vapourwave aesthetics. Each and every environment to be found on Little Planet is bursting with eclectic style, from Palmtree Panic’s polygonal palm leaves and terrain patterns to the upside-down rivers and canopies found in Collision Chaos and yet beyond to the titanic and incomprehensible machinery that looms large in the distance of Metallic Madness. But Sonic CD’s environmental design (brought to vibrant life by Hiroyuki Kawaguchi, Takumi Miyake, Masahiro Sanpei, Masato Nishimura and Hideaki Kurata) runs far deeper than the surface level in its brilliance – it takes the game’s time travel aspect and uses it as a stage upon which it blows up Sonic 1’s fairly subtle environmentalist themes to epic proportions. In that first game, an understated narrative played out as Sonic’s adventure took him from the serene Green Hill Zone, untouched by human hands, to the corrosive and smothering Scrap Brain Zone, a dystopic industrial complex belching fiery smog into the skies above, passing through increasingly urbanised locales on the way. Granted, the theming was slightly compromised by the mid-development decision to change Labyrinth Zone from the second level of the game to its fourth (a decision that was absolutely a no-brainer from a difficulty design perspective), but it’s undeniably there. Sonic CD doesn’t just continue this theming, but elevates it by intertwining it with the game’s mechanics to brilliant effect in the art design of each stage’s past, present and future variants. The present can be considered to be the default and, for the most part, riffs on the stage tropes seen in Sonic 1 – lakesides, cities, water-logged ruins, etc. Meanwhile, travelling to the past will show these stages in a less developed light – Palmtree Panic and Collision Chaos take on a somewhat pre-historic aesthetic, while Stardust Speedway’s bustling city reverts to a deep green waterfront that’s a little more Greco-Roman in its aesthetic, and industrialised stages such as Wacky Workbench can be seen still under construction. The two futures, however, are where things are at their most interesting with relation to the nature vs technology theming. In the bad futures, Eggman’s corrosive influence has twisted the landscape into something almost unrecognisable – natural areas are inhospitable, with dead plant life and waters that run a sickly purple with oil and waste. Even Eggman’s own constructions aren’t spared ruination, as the likes of the Quartz Quadrant mining facility have fallen to rust and disrepair. On the other side of the coin, the good futures present something far closer to a utopia in which nature and technology don’t just coexist, but harmonise and excel in symbiosis. Where Tidal Tempest transitioned from a Labyrinth Zone-esque temple in the present to what appears to be a long-abandoned sewage treatment plant in the bad future, the good future’s transformation is far more benign and arguably more radical, completely overhauling the area into some kind of futuristic aquarium crossed with botanical gardens. The water is the clearest out of any of the time zones, and plants are preserved in pristine condition within glass tubes throughout the background. Even Eggman’s final base of operations, Metallic Madness, has changed for the better, with sky visible once again over a fantastical city in the background, while birds and butterflies soar freely in the playable area, itself lush with potted plants. To me, the strength of this theming lies in its nuance. Lesser interpretations of such a narrative, even those within other areas of the Sonic franchise, such as the 1993 SatAM cartoon series, certainly present the adverse effects of unchecked industrialisation upon nature, but the machines themselves are always presented as sterile, cold and unaffected. Meanwhile, even current depictions of eco-modernism aesthetics focus squarely on the natural side of things, showing apartment blocks and highways covered in vegetation in a manner not too dissimilar to apocalyptic settings like The Last of Us or otherwise post-population settings such as Kirby and the Forgotten Land, where humanity has either been forced to cede its structures back to nature, or has simply abandoned them for new pastures. Either way, there’s little conception of the role technology plays in such hypotheticals. By contrast, Sonic CD’s answers that technology can be as ruinous to itself as to everything else, but that it can also be used to cultivate and enhance nature in ways that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, feel to me to be genuinely more-considered, profound and ahead of the game’s time. It almost feels a little silly to get so philosophical concerning a 1993 platformer about a fast hedgehog, but it’s this kind of vision that allows Sonic CD to stand tall as one of the best games in the Sonic pantheon as far as visual design goes. As far as the more technical elements go, the game remains strong here too. Things largely follow the foundation laid by Sonic 1 (with Sonic even using a sprite set very similar to the one in that game), bolstered by the Mega CD’s colour capabilities facilitating softer shading and more diverse palettes. Kazuyuki Hoshino and Takumi Miyake bring us an even more animal-centric cast of badniks to bash than the previous two games, largely made up of insectoid and crustacean-inspired enemies. Even Yasushi Yamaguchi, last seen in the 16-bit Sonic 2 as the central graphical designer and creator of Tails, finds time to pitch in with the design of the special stages. Compared to Sonic 1 and 2, characters are a fair bit cutesier here, with a bigger emphasis on rounded shapes, but that absolutely fits the whimsical and trippy world that Sonic CD presents. I’m pleased to confirm that Sonic CD’s immaculate sense of style also extends to its phenomenal soundtrack, brought to us courtesy of Naofumi Hataya and the previously-mentioned Masafumi Ogata, both returning from 8-bit Sonic 2. There’s an oft-cited adage within the Sonic community that, regardless of gameplay quality, you can always expect to find a good soundtrack in a Sonic game, and I think that CD is perhaps the first title to be truly emblematic of that. Not that the prior soundtracks, particularly those by Masato Nakamura for the first two Mega Drive games, were lacking, but Sonic CD represents a huge leap forward for the series in terms of its music. While the technology of the Mega CD may have only provided modest graphical gains, the uplift in audio was revolutionary, allowing for the use of studio quality recordings rather than synthesised tracks transcribed from demo tapes, as was the process for Sonic 1 and 2 (and would continue to be so for the remaining games on the Mega Drive). Frankly, the results are phenomenal. In terms of application, the soundtrack nails theming just as well as the graphics do, though the focus in this area of presentation is more on the time travel aspect than environmentalist subtext. Present is once again the default here - most similar to the music of the New Jack Swing genre, these tracks feature a lot of bombastic brass, classy piano and persistent synth percussion, as well as fantastic use of sampling (a series-first for Sonic), and generally sit in the 120-140bpm range, with a couple of outliers on either side of that. In the bad future mixes, the tempo raises a little and the sampling and percussion develop a greater presence as techno and electronic elements are added into the mix, all in service of a more frantic and strained vibe. By contrast, the good future mixes generally dial the tempo back a bit and favour the keyboard (now emulating chimes and xylophones rather than strictly keeping to the piano) and brass elements of the original tracks, supplementing them with moderate amounts of saxophone to create an optimistic and serene atmosphere). Finally, the past mixes are all rendered at the system level in PCM (pulse-code modulation) format, a la the Mega Drive games. The instrumentation in these tracks is generally ambiguous, but a throughline of wind instruments and somewhat more archaic drumbeats (with frequent tom drum usage) is definitely present. Whether the decision was made on artistic merit or out of pragmatism regarding system memory is a debate that I don’t think has definitively been settled, but the past tracks have a brilliant identity all their own as a result. Frankly, the greater fidelity in sound quality and even more avant-garde style than the previous games make it hard for me to really critique Sonic CD’s soundtrack in a technical sense, since I lack the musical knowledge and vocabulary to articulate my enjoyment in any meaningful way, but I can say with confidence that it’s up there as one of the series’ very best. Picking a favourite from each era, my highlights this time around are Collision Chaos Past, for its catchy pan flutes and orchestra hits, Quartz Quadrant Present, for its multiple tempo changes and sonorous piano medley, Stardust Speedway Bad Future, for its near constant but ever-changing samples and intermittent police sirens, and Metallic Madness Good Future, for so brilliantly reinterpreting the originally menacing composition into something that’d normally be entirely unexpected for a final level theme. Outside of those, the final boss theme is appropriately dramatic and, while I’ve already shouted out the game’s opening theme, its credits theme, Cosmic Eternity ~ Believe in Yourself, is absolutely worthy of praise also. Honestly, I’d say this is one of those soundtracks where you can pick pretty much any track and be met with a pleasant listening experience. But that’s not all, as Sonic CD is the gift that keeps on giving. During the localisation process, some moron at SEGA of America decided that the original soundtrack was too much like club music and wouldn’t be entertaining enough for American audiences. Whoever had that take was dumb and wrong, but I will forgive them because it resulted in a whole other soundtrack for the American release of the game (PAL regions kept the original Japanese soundtrack). Composed by in-house SEGA musicians Spencer Nilsen and David Young, with performances by Brad Kaiser, Erik Frykman, Bobby Vega, Armando Peraza and jazz trio -Pastiche- (Sandy Cressman, Jenny Meltzer and Becky West), I think the American soundtrack might best be described as more atmospheric than its Japanese counterpart. The mission here seems to have been to produce something more reflective of the imagery seen within the game’s locales rather than exploring the themes of time travel. For example, the green shores of Palmtree Panic are accompanied by a bright sax lead and lots of tom drums, while the industrial locale of Quartz Quadrant places heavy emphasis on its electric guitar shreds. That’s not to say that the individual mixes don’t match the mood of each time period, simply that the differences are perhaps more subtle, with instrumentation generally being consistent between each time zone. That, and I find that the melodies themselves are better in the moment than after the fact, as most of them don’t quite worm into the ears the same way that the Japanese tracks do, in part due to how the tracks are structured to build in progressive sections of instruments layering on top of one another, rather than there being a clear melody anchoring each song. This is all great if that’s your bag, I just happen to derive the more enjoyment from the original music. With that said, there are some tunes that I do prefer to hear the US versions of, such as Tidal Tempest and Wacky Workbench, while others, like Stardust Speedway and Metallic Madness, are more of a toss-up with each as good as the other in my mind. Unfortunately, this soundtrack is stuck with the now-incongruent past themes from the Japanese version of the soundtrack, given that replacing these PCM compositions would be more taxing than simply swapping out the CD audio files, so the US version loses points on the cohesion front. Also worth noting is that, rather than having separate intro and ending themes, the US soundtrack opts to give us two different versions of its vocal theme, Sonic Boom. The intro version is pretty well-loved and was probably my first exposure to Sonic CD as a whole, but I’m partial to the ending version myself, given its lower tempo and guitar strumming towards the end. So, while the US soundtrack by and large isn’t my thing, it’s absolutely worth listening to, and modern rereleases graciously cater to both audiences with an option to choose your preferred soundtrack. And that’s Sonic CD, one of the sequels of all time. A quirky, oftentimes scattered and frustrating game, albeit one wrapped in the best presentations values this series had yet seen at the time of its release. It’s a game that very much needs to be met on its own terms – you can’t play it the way you would play Sonic 1 or 2 and expect to have a good time. Heck, you can’t guarantee enjoyment even by playing it the way it expects you to, but it’s nonetheless an interesting look at the direction Sonic could’ve gone in, not to mention the game where it all began for Amy Rose and Metal Sonic, two future mainstays of the series. The game’s saving grace is most certainly that it’s an unfiltered blast of Naoto Ohshima’s conception of the Sonic world directly onto your eyeballs, backed by tunes that are as timeless and unmistakable now as I’m sure they must’ve been back in the day. It’s a bit of a shame that Ohshima didn’t take another shot at directing after Sonic CD, honestly. His role in Sonic reverted back to being a designer in future titles and, after a couple of non-Sonic director credits with NiGHTS Into Dreams and Burning Rangers (both Sonic Team-developed titles for the SEGA Saturn), he’d left SEGA completely by the turn of the millennium. Surely if he were to take another crack at a Sonic game in, oh, let’s say 2023, he’d be able to refine the weaknesses of this one and give us a truly good Sonic game without caveats. Ah well, we can but dream… Addendum: Miracle on 93rd Street Next instalment: Sonic Chaos (SEGA Master System and Game Gear, 1993)
  10. Previous instalment: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (SEGA Mega Drive, 1992) Last time, I gave Sonic the Hedgehog 2 a pretty glowing writeup, and I think I made it pretty apparent that it stands head and shoulders above the previous titles as the best game I’ve played so far for this thread, which doesn’t sound as impressive when considering that it’s only the third game I’ve reviewed so far, but I digress. This time, I’m here to tell you about why Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the worst game I’ve played so far for this thread. That’s right, folks, it’s 8-bit Sonic 2. Releasing day and date with Mega Drive Sonic 2 in Japan and a few days before in the US and Europe, 8-bit Sonic 2 for the Master System and Game Gear strives to be more than just a cut down version of the home console original as 8-bit Sonic 1 was. Instead, it stands as an entirely unique Sonic outing with its own story (Eggman has kidnapped Sonic’s new buddy Tails – go save him!), levels, enemies, music, the works. Information on the development of 8-bit Sonic 2 is scarce, so it’s difficult to tell why this came about in the way it did as opposed to a version more faithful to its 16-bit counterpart, but I do think the added originality is at least a point in the favour of this game. Contrary to appearances, what with it using a lot of assets from 8-bit Sonic 1, 8-bit Sonic 2 was actually developed by an entirely different team than the first game, with this game being given to Aspect as opposed to Ancient (the latter going on to become famed fighting game developer Arc System Works). This could be at least part of the reason for this game’s more unique identity and I wholeheartedly believe it’s why the game is so poor. To start with, I do want to talk about the gameplay positives. First, Sonic feels a lot better to control than he did in the first Master System/Game Gear entry. He’s still a far cry from his Mega Drive self, but he feels much less stiff, accelerates noticeably faster and even seems to carry momentum better than in 8-bit Sonic 1. Further to this, the aforementioned originality really does make this game a lot more memorable. I’ll cover the presentation-centric results of this later but, being its own adventure and a year removed from the series’ inception, I feel like Sonic 2 on the Master System is able to do a lot more Sonic-y stuff with its level concepts, compared to the fairly stock platformer set pieces of its predecessor. Whereas Sonic 1 on Master System focused a lot more on standard precision platforming, with momentum being relegated to segments of the level so devoid of real interaction that they may as well have been automated, this game bakes that momentum into its level gimmicks in a much more satisfying manner. Hang gliders in the second Zone ask players to manipulate their momentum in order to achieve effective use (though in reality these can be cheesed by just mashing the back button relative to the direction you’re facing to keep ascending with only a penalty of speed), while another level lets Sonic skim across the surface of bodies of water if he approaches them with enough speed, rewarding the player by skipping over difficult portions of level design. You’ll even see a few of the series-staple loops in this game, following their absence in 8-bit Sonic 1. To an extent, 8-bit Sonic 2 feels like it much better understands what Sonic as a vehicle of gameplay is than the first Master System game, but unfortunately this understanding doesn’t go very far. For those unacquainted, 8-bit Sonic 2 actually has a bit of a reputation within the community as “the difficult one”, a reputation which I think is entirely justified. First of all, bonus stages are gone, and continues with them…almost. You can score a continue if the end-of-level signpost flips to a portrait of Tails’ but this will only happen if you finish the level with precisely 77 rings, no more or less, as well as the same number of lives as when you first started the level. Needless to say, these requirements are so arbitrary and specific that getting a continue feels less like a reward for good performance and more like a roulette prize, and I didn’t get a single one through the entire game. In the same vein, checkpoints and shields are entirely absent, with the latter having the biggest impact. In the first game, the saving grace of the frustrating bosses was that you could take a shield into them from previous levels if you were careful, allowing a single mistake, which could often be necessary in learning how each boss worked. Not so in 8-bit Sonic 2. There are still no rings in the boss levels, so taking even a single hit means a restart here, an issue compounded by the platforming segment prior to each boss feeling considerably longer than last time. On top of all this, and like the worst parts of its Mega Drive big brother, this Sonic 2 is packed with trial-and-error gameplay, both in its levels and its bosses. Enemies are often placed such that Sonic will run into them without warning and respawn when defeated, which becomes particularly frustrating during a section of Aqua Lake Act 2 where Sonic must ascend a large shaft inside a fragile air bubble that renders him defenceless and pops on contact with just about anything, all while dodging enemies and arrows fire from the walls of the shaft. After exiting the bubble prematurely, I thought I’d at least be able to bop some badniks on my way back to the source of the bubbles so as to make my next trip up easier, but this proved not to be the case. Another pain point that deepens the frustrations which arise from trial-and-error gameplay is that what the game wants you to do isn’t very well communicated, even in failure. Again, this extends to both level and boss design. In Sky High Zone Act 2, the Chaos Emerald lies on the uppermost path (yes, you collect these things within the levels again, but they’re mercifully only ever in the second Act of each Zone and are even individually coloured now!). This requires Sonic to traverse some clouds that are solid until they’re not, with no visual indication telling you which areas are safe to land in and which areas of cloud will just send you plummeting down onto the lower path, locking you out of getting the Emerald unless you take a death and restart. The third boss doesn’t do a great job of communicating that it’s immune to direct attacks and you’re meant to burst the ball it uses to attack Sonic, but only while said ball is being inflated – contact with it at any point once it’s thrown kills him. The first Act of the fifth Zone places the end of the level directly below the starting point and after a corridor of spikes, meaning that you not only have to be moving to the left of screen to progress, an unintuitive action on its own, but also that you need to have invincibility active and hope you don’t get lost as you head to the end of the level, lest the invincibility expire and force you to take a death for another chance. All of this together adds up to a game that has very little respect for the player’s time. My ego isn’t too precious for me to admit that I played with save states and a guide for the Chaos Emerald locations (you can’t even access the final Zone this time without collecting all of them!), but, having had some prior experience with the first seven Actss of the game on its Wii Virtual Console release many years ago, I can say with confidence that the experience is not improved when playing by the game’s rules and torturing yourself with what’s effectively a grind to having perfect knowledge of the game. However, it’s not all bad news. 8-bit Sonic 2 at least continues the solid performance this series has had regarding presentation values up to now. Hisato Fukumoto (credited as Jly King), Nobuhiko Honda (Noburin) and the pseudonymous Tez and U.D.K. (8-bit Sonic 2’s credits are very vague on who precisely did what and, as said before, development information is scant) have crafted some pretty impressive visuals here. The Zone aesthetics are all appropriately Sonic-esque with interesting terrain and decorations (though I would argue the backgrounds are a step down from the previous entry) and some even switch up their visuals in between Acts, a first for the series that even Mega Drive Sonic 2 doesn’t offer. Although the designs of this game’s enemies are merely serviceable in my eyes, I do love 8-bit Sonic 2’s take on Mecha Sonic. He’s a cheeky little chappy and that’s all I’ll hear on the matter. As far as music goes, it’s a slight let-down here. Taking over from Yuzo Koshiro is Masafumi Ogata (Gatao), Naofumi Hataya (Nao Chan) and possibly Tomonori Sawasa (Dawasa), though the last one may have just handled sound effects. By and large, the sound track is pretty solid, with several tracks being appropriately catchy (the music for Underground, Sky High and Green Hills are all standouts), but I’d say the compositions don’t once reach the dizzying heights of Masato Nakamura’s work, nor do they consistently match Koshiro’s original contributions to 8-bit Sonic 1. At the end of the day, even at its worst, the music of 8-bit Sonic 2 makes for pleasant listening, even if it’s not a soundtrack I see myself queuing up at all often in the future when I want to listen to some Sonic tunes. And that’s about as much as I have to say about 8-bit Sonic 2. While a more original adventure than the previous Master System/Game Gear instalment, it’s not a particularly fun one, filled with padding and cheap design, seemingly out of a fear that players would otherwise blow through it in an hour, despite that sounding like a more amenable proposition, particularly with the Game Gear’s battery life. Speaking of, if you’re set on playing this, definitely do it via the Master System version. Best I can tell, the edits to the Game Gear version are minimal, and screen crunch is a big problem particularly with the game’s bosses. As with 8-bit Sonic 1, however, I’d again suggest that the most effective ratio of time invested to pleasure derived would be to just listen to the OST and be done with it, maybe watch a longplay if you don’t need your eyes for anything else. If nothing else, I’m sure it only gets better from here. … Right? Next instalment: Sonic CD (SEGA Mega CD, 1993)
  11. Honestly it’s a huge shame because the Mega Drive Classics kind of represented the best of SEGA back in the day. Not necessarily in all the games available for it, but it was a great and accessible way to experience so much gaming history, and the ability for fans and amateur devs to make money from their ROM hacks is something that no other major developer has done in such a capacity to my mind (I believe this is still going but I’ve not checked in with the scene in a while). Truly a shame how far SEGA have fallen with respect to the treatment of their classic library.
  12. Previous instalment: Sonic the Hedgehog (SEGA Master System and Game Gear, 1991) As I begin to write this, it’s been… *checks previous post* five hours since I published my writeup on Sonic 1 for the Master System. There, I spoke about how I’d spent almost an entire month putting that game off because its inability to replicate the Mega Drive original’s physics, dooming that game to inadequacy for the crime of being released on an older system. Since that post, I’ve marinaded on 8-bit Sonic 1 a little more, been to the gym (never skip leg day, kids!), had my dinner and played the first two Zones of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. First released on Tuesday 21st November 1992 in a for-the-time ambitious simultaneous global release branded as “Sonic 2sday”, just shy of 17 months after the initial release of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the product of a storied and fairly tumultuous development cycle, involving names such as Yuji Naka, Mark Cerny and Masato Nakamura, and is hailed by many as the best game in the Sonic franchise and one of the best video games ever created. Quite a weighty legacy, eh? To be frank, I’ve never had much reverence for the supposed great classics of the video game medium. That is to say, as I write out my thoughts on Sonic 2, I don’t owe this game anything and won’t say anything about it that I don’t mean. The first thing that hits you when you boot up Sonic 2 is the phenomenal level of polish. Despite its commendable presentation values, Sonic 1 still had elements of visual design that felt archaic even on a first playthrough and wasn’t quite in perfect harmony with what would become the aesthetic of the Sonic brand. In Sonic 2, the iconic SEGA splash screen is followed by pitch black, with text pronouncing “SONIC THE HEDGEHOG AND MILES “TAILS” PROWER IN” before a few disparate sparkles flash here and there, culminating in Sonic rising into the iconic title emblem, initially with his back to the viewer before he turns around and slides coolly into place, throwing a thumbs up over his shoulder. Barely a moment behind is newcomer Tails, earnestly squeezing into view in the space left by Sonic, all while the background flashes white to reveal a panoramic view of the game’s Westside Island setting as the series’ theme blasts out, capped off by a whimsical twinkle as a subtle shooting star falls from the top right to the bottom left of the screen in the background. As somebody who wouldn’t be born until six years after this game first released, only picking up my first Sonic game around eight years after that, it’s an intro that, while I’ve always appreciated its cool factor, I can only now see just what an emphatic sequence it is as I turn a critical eye to it, fresh off the heels of two Sonic 1s. And this sleekness permeates the rest of the game. The fairly dated font from the last game’s title cards, Century Expanded, is swapped out for the art-deco-esque, sans serif Gaslight, with the game’s HUD text having been slimmed down compared to its predecessor and italicised like even it is about to take off in a burst of speed. The Zones’ tri-colour, jagged-edged title cards are there just long enough to wow the player before individually sliding off-screen to reveal the gameplay hiding behind them. I realise I’m really front-loading this writeup with a laborious description of the tiniest fraction of the game’s visuals, but I think these opening moments are really emblematic of what Sonic 2 sets out to be. Not just “Sonic 1, but better”, nor settling to just be a dark horse hit like that game was, SEGA’s sequel is here to make Sonic into a true classic icon and a household name for gamers everywhere. But there’ll be time to talk about the graphics later. As with any good game, we’re tackling the gameplay first and worrying about the presentation after that. Technically speaking, Sonic 2 handles almost identically to Sonic 1. Save for increased speed caps, Sonic handles exactly the same, and the mechanics codified by the first game all return, save for the removal of a bug that caused Sonic to die instantly when landing on spikes after taking a hit, invincibility frames be damned. The most obvious additions to the engine in Sonic 2 are the spindash ability and Tails. While a solidly designed game, Sonic 1 can sometimes run into an issue when Sonic’s trying to ascend a steep slope, but just doesn’t have the momentum to make it, resulting in him stalling in place and perhaps backsliding after that. It’s a problem more commonly experienced by newbies who don’t yet have a familiar grasp on the game’s level design or physics, but is nevertheless one worthy of resolving and presents a wonderful opportunity for innovation, namely in how to best give the player access to on-demand speed to minimise dead air without this new tool becoming a crutch that less skilled players can use to blow through levels without having to truly understand them or Sonic. The answer is as follows: By coming to a complete stop and crouching in place, the player can then press the jump button to enter into the spindash state. Additional timely presses of the jump button “rev” the spindash, with Sonic shooting off upon release of the down button at a speed corresponding to the amount of revs the player had inputted while charging (up to a maximum of six). It’s a wonderfully tactile mechanic that doesn’t just solve a game design conundrum, but solves it in style and in a manner that synergises with the very character of Sonic, the act of charging a spindash effectively simulating the revving of an engine. Ironic, then, that this technique was canonically pioneered by Tails (or used to be, anyway – there’s been a lot of retcons in the 31 years since). Designed by Yasushi Yamaguchi (credited in the game under the pseudonym Judy Toyota), Miles “Tails” Prower was the winner of an internally held competition at SEGA to come up with a sidekick for Sonic, much like how Sonic himself won a competition to become SEGA’s mascot a couple of years earlier, and it’s not hard to see how. Much like Sonic himself, Tails’ design is a classic, contrasting Sonic’s balanced mix of cute and cool with a far more adorable appearance and personality, having an even squatter frame than the blue blur and much more rounded an innocent eyes, complimented by the curly tufts of fur on his head, muzzle and tails, the last of those being the kid’s namesake and defining feature. Although Tails wouldn’t properly fly during gameplay until the following year, in the original release of Sonic 2, this trait is exhibited as a way of contextualising Tails’ ability to respawn either upon taking a hit or falling behind as Sonic speeds through the levels. The lack of real functionality to those tails doesn’t make the kid useless, however. Of course, with a sidekick for Sonic comes the possibility for two-player co-op, allowing for a younger sibling or less experienced player to help you out on your journey without being able to hinder you in any meaningful way. Not only that, Tails pulls his weight in single player too as a CPU controlled companion, being able to land extra hits on bosses or on occasion save Sonic from the attacks of an otherwise unattended enemy. It’s nothing particularly earth-shattering, but it’s a fine addition to the sequel and, if nothing else, makes the adventure feel that bit less lonely (or perhaps more so, given you can’t take him with you into the endgame when playing as Sonic, given he goes down with Sonic’s plane, the Tornado, after tanking a laser from Wing Fortress, only returning at the end of the Zone to help him catch up to Eggman’s escape shuttle). The real meat of what’s new in Sonic 2 isn’t so readily marketable to 90s kids who only see cool fast hedgehog and not the mechanical underneath the surface, but is ultimately much more fundamental than the addition of a new move or character: the level design. In my Sonic 1 writeup, I had a bit to say about how Sonic Team’s level design philosophy hadn’t quite solidified, and that ultimately represented the biggest area for improvement in a game that nailed so much else on its first go. Clearly, level designer Hirokazu Yasuhara (alias Carol Yas) thought so too. It’s not as if every level in Sonic 2 is more like the accommodating slopes of Green Hill from the previous game, either. Sonic 2 trims a lot of the fat found in Sonic 1’s more vertically-oriented level design. Compare and contrast Green Hill Act 1 with Emerald Hill Act 1. Where Green Hill has just one path for the first third of the level before splitting off into ever higher fractals of terrain, Emerald Hill has far less altitude, maintaining clear paths from more or less the beginning of the level, with anything more simply being an option to save a few seconds or grab an item before returning to one of these paths. Where Green Hill’s terrain at times existed to be overcome, with inclines and blocky steps slowing Sonic’s forward movement, Emerald Hill’s slopes exist to carry Sonic forward and help build his speed, with steps only seen going down rather than up. Even in later Zones that ask the player to work harder to maintain their speed, slowing down is rarely jarring. When the game wants you to slow down, it doesn’t just put a wall in your way or, worse, let you crash into an obstacle – it’ll do things far more organically, often by placing a quarter pipe that not only resets the pace for any given part of a level, but rewards those who do approach with some speed by flinging them high into the air, often towards faster and easier paths or otherwise inaccessible item monitors. While Marble Zone asked the player to reattain all their speed when changing direction to follow the level design, Chemical Plant instead keeps things snappy by having springs accommodate this instead, meaning that there’s almost never a break in the gameplay due to this. That’s not to say the levels play themselves, however. That core philosophy of needing a quick finger and good awareness to stay on the fastest and most rewarding path is still here, it’s just executed much more elegantly. Unlike Sonic 1, where you often found yourself on a lower path by running into a pit, the level design just keeps going. It’s less failing to take the optimal path and more happening to take a different path. Even the explorative nature of Sonic 1 is still accounted for, with goodies stashed every which way you might think to poke around. Ring monitors, 1-Ups, shields and, most importantly, Star Posts. As well as fulfilling the checkpoint function of the previous game’s lamp posts, the Star Posts are this game’s gateway to the Special Zone, building on how this was handled in Sonic 1. What’s stayed the same is that you need to be in possession of 50 rings to get into a special stage. However, now it can be done at any checkpoint. When you first pass a Star Post with 50 rings, a ring of stars will erupt from the top of it. Jumping into this ring before it disappears will warp Sonic and Tails to the special stage. The pros of this approach are that it affords many more chances to nab the Chaos Emeralds, given that there are generally 3-5 checkpoints in any given level, compared to the all-or-nothing big ring at the end of Sonic 1’s levels. Further, it’s more in line with that core tenet of exploration, as several of these Star Posts are squirreled away in areas that truly test not only level knowledge, but mastery of Sonic’s skills, particularly the new spindash. Spindash jumping off slopes is basically a must to access some of the checkpoints, but the abundance of checkpoints throughout the game means not being able to pull this off doesn’t mean you won’t get the emeralds, just that they’ll come more slowly than they would otherwise. Heck, if you’re diligent enough in your exploration, you can get all seven before seeing the first boss (though this requires some game knowledge and forethought, as it’s possible to screw yourself out of a checkpoint and thus a special stage if you trigger them in the wrong order, due to a quirk in how the game registers checkpoints). The downside to this system is that it’s all too easy to blast past a checkpoint, with the special stage entrance being gone by the time you can get back there. This could happen with the special stage entrances in Sonic 1 too, but this was mitigated by them being right at the end of the level, so you knew they were coming given how the end of a level is generally telegraphed, and you don’t have the ability to overshoot quite as far as you can here. But on balance, I’d say this system’s an upgrade. But what about the special stages themselves? Well, and this’ll be a theme going forward, they’ve been completely switched up. Gone are the janky, disorienting mazes of the previous game and in its place is the tubular product of a radical new era – the pre-rendered half-pipe. Here’s the skinny: Instead of going directly after the Chaos Emeralds, this time you need to earn them by accumulating a prescribed number of rings as you travel through the half-pipe, all while avoiding spiked bombs. Conceptually (and in execution, for the most part), it’s far preferable to what Sonic 1 offered, but there’s a few snags. The first of these is that, with these pipes being composed of colour-limited, low fidelity sprites animating at a relatively low framerate, the depth perception in these stages is absolute piss. Even the 2013 TaxStealth remake, despite at least doubling the resolution of these stages, suffers from this issue, so God alone knows how I ever got through them in their original form. The second issue is Tails. When not under the control of a second player, Tails’ AI mimics everything Sonic does, just a split second later. It’s cute and can be a little helpful in the early going, since it allows Tails to collect some rings that Sonic might miss, but once hazards are introduced, it effectively makes the timing for avoiding them even tighter, giving you two characters to worry about. Thankfully Tails’ ring count is independent of Sonic’s in the special stages and, given that you should be collecting the bulk of rings yourself, he can only lose so many, but I’m sure many a Sonic fan knows the frustration of barely making it through a special stage, only for Tails to faceplant into a bomb at the end, costing you enough rings to take you below the quota and preventing you from getting the Chaos Emerald. This isn’t even the biggest problem with these stages, though. No, the biggest sin of Sonic 2’s special stages is that they will trial-and-error you hard, starting as early as the third stage. Even as a seasoned Sonic vet with a reasonable idea of what I was heading into, I got blindsided by several of these layouts, and I reckon it’d be almost impossible to succeed in most of these stages first time without any prior knowledge. Some freaks like that, but I honestly think it’s just pretty poor game design, taken as a whole. The good news is that this concept will be revisited a few times down the line and does get done much better later on, but we’ll get to that in due course. What makes it all worth it, however, is the reward for completing the special stages this time around. While Sonic 1 just gave you the best ending with some giant flowers and left it at that, Sonic 2 recognises your efforts with something far more tangible: The Legendary Super Sonic. Pure of heart and awakened by rage, or something like that, transforming into Super Sonic requires you collect 50 rings but, if you can do that, rewards you with invincibility and a speed boost that last as long as you have the rings to sustain the transformation. On paper, it’s not much, but Super Sonic just radiates coolness with his design and unique animations and saving up 50 rings to transform into the golden wonder absolutely provides some catharsis in the later, more difficult levels. I think there are arguments to be made that on-demand invincibility breaks the game in two and, yeah, there’s certainly a valid point there, but I’d say that casual players probably won’t be getting all seven Chaos Emeralds until the mid to late part of the game and anyone who’s invested enough time into this game to get them during the early innings probably doesn’t need Super Sonic as a crutch to begin with and I imagine is just as likely to forego collecting the emeralds to give themselves a challenge anyway. Furthermore, transforming isn’t a freebie. As already mentioned, it’s a 50-ring barrier to entry, which requires a lot of skill in not getting hit during the late game, but there’s also the caveat that you can’t tap out of the super form until the ring counter hits 0 again, which gives some risk to the act of transforming. If you’re not good about keeping up your reserve of rings, this can leave you very vulnerable in a particularly nasty part of a level, or even a boss. As such, if you’re not confident in your knowledge of the level and where to rack up rings, opting not to transform may be the smarter play…is what I would say, if the original Mega Drive release didn’t force Sonic to transform as soon as he jumps after collecting 50 rings, but this issue is rectified in almost every subsequent release and it’s ultimately a minor blemish on the debut of series staple powerup. Unfortunately, this is the part of the writeup where I start talking about the bad parts of Sonic 2, because trial-and-error isn’t just contained to the special stages. To its credit, Sonic 2 generally has a pretty organic difficulty curve, but things do get a bit jumpy towards the end of the game. The seventh Zone, Oil Ocean, is where I’d say the natural arc of the game’s difficulty curve ends. It’s generally a slower paced area than everything before it, with few slopes for gaining big speed and air and a lot of hazards around, with enemies in particular firing noticeably faster and more accurately than anything prior to this point, but it’s still plenty doable to get through this place without taking a single death, so long as you keep your wits about you and don’t try and rush through with reckless abandon. Zone number eight, Metropolis, is where things go off the rails. Scrap Brain from Sonic 1 was pretty rough, but I honestly think this is worse – at least in that game the top path remained pretty safe throughout so long as you could stay on it. Here, you’re in for a bad time no matter which way you go. Straight up, you can place this almost entirely on the enemy design and placement. Metropolis Zone features the three most deplorable reprobates we’ve yet seen in this series, now notorious within the Sonic community for how absolutely frickin’ cheap they are. First, we have Slicer. This pernicious preying mantis will launch his razor-sharp blades at you in a wide arc almost as soon as he comes into view. He gets me about as often as not, but the silver lining is that he’s a one hit wonder – nothing left once he fires off his first shot, much like Integrity. Easily taken out once you’re clear of his attack, unlike our next subject, Shellcracker. Remember Crabmeat from the first game, that goofy little fella found in Green Hill and Spring Yard who did a little dance from side to side before firing a feeble shot to each side that fell off the screen almost instantly? Well, this is that dude after hard time. I don’t know what he’s been doing with his right claw but…it’s a big, spikey son of a bitch that he’ll throw out as soon as he sees you, much like Slicer. Difference here is that it comes back fairly quickly, and gives Shellcracker a hurt box above his head, making the act of jumping on top of him a very risky proposition. Finally, I’ve said the most depraved badnik for last. Based on what I can only presume to be Yasuhara and co.’s most intense hatred for starfish, Asteron lurks on walls and actually has a longer response time than its compatriots’, but don’t let this fool you into thinking it’s anything but deadly. Once you pass by Asteron (and you will pass by Asteron), it springs to life and starts following you, self-destructing not longer after. But Asteron dies on its own terms, and those terms involve it launching its five spiked tips out away from it upon its death and, given that this badnik can’t be defeated normally or otherwise have its action prevented, you either have to hope Sonic can pass by these guys fast enough for them to be far away by the time they self-destruct, or else act fast and do a dance of deadly dodges so as not to get punctured. In a vacuum, these little shits are bad enough, but combined with their sadistic placements, getting through Metropolis Zone without taking a hit is a trial I’d only wish upon the most terrible of people. Slicers are often placed right in your path with no warning, or at the end of corridors where their blades can fly behind them and hit you even once you’re past them (there even seems to be a homing element to them); Shellcrackers await you at the top of shafts where you won’t see them until it’s too late, with the only counterplay being to just know the level (which is less helpful when they’re placed under walls to minimise their already specific area of vulnerability; and Asterons are probably going to hit you the most – these guys are everywhere, and their points fly off at awkward angles when they explode, with the upper two points on either side flying at an angle which causes them to get higher the further they fly, making it often difficult to discern whether it’s best to jump over or duck under them. This compounds with the projectiles being quite persistent, making it entirely possible to get hit by an Asteron several seconds after it’s exploded, usually knocking you off a platform to a lower route or into another hazard. And even once all this is out the way, the boss at the end of Metropolis is its own beast, with a requirement that you time your hits in a way that accounts for the faux-3D movement of its hit boxes…in a 2D sprite-based game. It can be fairly easily cheesed by hitting it from below with a quick tempo, but that just means the boss only gives you the options of fighting the frustration of jank hit boxes or not engaging with the design of the boss by playing lame in stead. In summary: BORN TO DIE, METROPOLIS IS A FUCK, KILL EM ALL 1992, I am trash hog, 410 757 864 350 dead Asterons. Metropolis is the absolute trough of Sonic 2’s quality at least, but the game’s peak already came and went by the time you’ve reached it, so what comes after isn’t exactly superb either. Sky Chase Zone features Sonic and Tails making their way towards Eggman’s flying fortress on Sonic’s plane, the tornado, with whoever you’re playing as standing on the plane’s wings to fight badniks while their buddy takes care of the flying. It’s a pretty easy-going level, which is absolutely appreciated following Metropolis, and its serene music does calm the nerves well enough, but the bite here is that it’s an auto-scroller, which I frankly think has no place in a Sonic game. It’s slow and boring, doesn’t really test the skills you’ve spent the rest of the game developing and can’t be sped up as your proficiency at executing it grows. Finally, after the overly long and linear Wing Fortress, another stage that doesn’t really provide much for experienced players to do, we reach the Death Egg – the mad doctor’s final line of defence and a lawsuit just waiting to happen. Rather than being a full Zone (as it once was during development), this single level hosts just two bosses – Mecha Sonic (Mk. I, formerly and still sometimes unofficially referred to as Silver Sonic) and the iconic Death Egg Robot. It’s…a little difficult for me to place my opinions on these two bosses, to be honest. Part of me wants to say they’re the best bosses in the game, but I also struggle to fully commit to that statement. The rub with both of these is that they’re actually pretty straightforward bosses, particularly the final one, who can actually be pretty easily manipulated. On the other hand, once you enter the Death Egg, you’re a one hit wonder. No rings, no margin for error, no cheesing the bosses by picking up the same ring every time you get hit. Mecha Sonic and the Death Egg Robot are going to severely trial-and-error first time players and, in the original release with no saves and limited lives and continues, have the capacity to kill entire runs. That’s not good game design in my eyes – it’s needlessly frustrating and the only way the player can meaningfully learn about how best to tackle these bosses is by dying to them and potentially having to restart from the beginning of the game as a result. At the same time, they’re technically always vulnerable, you just need to be precise in how you hit them. I can take down Mecha Sonic within just 12 seconds of starting the level, before he can even commit to his second attack, and I can almost two cycle the Death Egg Robot, a boss that can take less experienced players several minutes for just one successful attempt, let alone the strings of deaths and game overs needed to grind the experience to make that successful attempt happen. I can finish the entire final level in less than 90 seconds, and it feels like I’ve earned that completely, so I struggle to entirely reconcile my perception of this final level being bad within the scope of my philosophy on game design with the fact that these are kind of the platonic ideal of Sonic bosses, perfectly balanced in the fact that the window to damage them scales with the technical skill in a way that doesn’t allow them to be cheesed through sheer aggression, and all without relying on invincibility frames or filler animations that kill the pace. At any rate, I think a robot doppelganger of Sonic and the biggest boss yet seen in the series, made in the image of its main antagonist, is a fittingly climactic end to Sonic 2, even if that’s predicated on vibes more than anything else. Crivens, I thought this writeup would be shorter than Sonic 1’s, yet I’ve spent more words than that just talking about the gameplay. Let’s wrap up with the presentation. To start with, the art is gorgeous. I’ve already spoken about how polished aspects of it are, but Sonic 2 somehow improves so much on what was already an outstanding foundation in Sonic 1. Sonic 2 is actually the product of Sonic Team moving development to America in a move practically unheard of at that time and that arguably still doesn’t really happen today. While future Sony golden boy Mark Cerny assisted with the programming and production side of things, members of Sega of America’s newly-formed Sega Technical Institute (save your giggles), Craig Stitt, Tom Payne and Brenda Ross, assisted Yasushi Yamaguchi with the art. Honestly, it’s difficult for me to tell where the seams lie in light of this fact, at least as far as the final product goes, but that may be a result of Yamaguchi allegedly redrawing significant amounts of the assets due to his own dissatisfaction with them. In retrospect, this does add up when looking at assets for cut content such as levels and enemies, which are noticeably rough and at odds with aesthetic of the final game, but this could just as easily be chalked up to such assets being most certainly unfinished. Sonic 2 trades in some of the first game’s surrealist style for a slightly more grounded aesthetic, and I think it’s fair to argue something was lost in that transition but, on a technical level, the art of Sonic 2 is a remarkable upgrade to its predecessor in every way. Softer palettes and shading give objects noticeably more depth, and the environments look incredibly elaborate and lifelike for a Mega Drive game, compared to Sonic 1’s more cartoonish locales. Sonic himself has been tweaked to look less…pissed and the additional cartridge space has been put to great use, not just in providing more levels, but more animations through which Sonic and Tails can express their personalities, with Tails in particular having a fairly lengthy yet adorable idle animation of looking inquisitively at the player before letting out a yawn. That statement of intent made by the title screen at the very beginning of the game is sustained throughout Sonic 2’s visual presentation: bigger, bolder and brighter, capitalising on what the last game did so well and raising the bar even higher. And that goes double for the music. Unfortunately, Masato Nakamura’s second Sonic soundtrack is also his last, but my god does he ever give it his all. As with the visuals, the music of Sonic 2 is more elaborate in its melodic composition while also broadening the scope of instrumentation. Sonic 1’s music is probably best characterised by its strong and memorable slap bass and snare samples, but here Nakamura uses them to supplement convincing approximations of trumpets, flutes and electric guitars. My favourites from this soundtrack are Emerald Hill, Casino Night, Metropolis and the special stage theme, but there honestly isn’t a single track here I dislike or can’t whistle from memory. Truly, Nakamura’s deep and layered compositions and Masaru Sestumaru’s complete mastery of translating those compositions to the Mega Drive’s Yamaha YM2612 sound chip result in the soundtrack of Sonic 2 matching pound for pound every contemporary release not only on the Mega Drive, but also the technically superior SNES, and surpassing many of them to stand as one of the best soundtracks of not only its era, but in gaming history. And that’s Sonic 2, one of the greatest sequels of all time. Granted, it’s by no means a perfect game (nor has it ever been my favourite in the series), suffering from frustrating level design and enemy placement in its final stretch, along with other questionable decisions in other areas of the game, but it makes these missteps while massively improving on what was already a revolutionary first outing. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for SEGA Mega Drive isn’t just a sequel, it’s what proved the original wasn’t just a fluke and I think it’s fair to credit it with cementing Sonic the Hedgehog as a video game series that would last through the next 30+ years and beyond. In other words, this is the game to blame for the fact we’re still stuck with the blue rat to this day. See you next time, folks. Addendum: Absolute Territory Next instalment: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (SEGA Master System and Game Gear, 1992)
  13. Oh, I'm going to show you many strange and wonderful things you had no idea existed over the course of these writeups. At least some of them will involve Sonic.
  14. Previous instalment: Sonic the Hedgehog (SEGA Mega Drive, 1991) Kept you waiting, huh? Honestly, I could’ve had this game done and written up even faster than the previous one (especially since I’m playing the no-frills original release rather than a gussied-up version of a remake’s decompilation) but, cards on the table, I was putting this one off. Yes, only the second game in this journey and I’m already having second thoughts. Don’t get me wrong, this is far from the worst game in the pantheon of fast hedgehog sims – we’re going to go some dark places on this trip, but…well, it’d probably be better for me to introduce and explain today’s game first. This time, we’re looking at Sonic the Hedgehog. No, not the one I played last time. This is Sonic the Hedgehog on the SEGA Master System, colloquially known as 8-bit Sonic 1. For the uninitiated, the SEGA Master System is to SEGA what the NES is to Nintendo – an 8-bit home console that was home to its publisher’s library through the 80s into the early 90s. It’s a bit more complex than that, what with various models of “SG-x000” models being produced in Japan, each with their own idiosyncrasies, but that’s outside the scope of these write-ups (though if you are interested in learning more, I’d recommend Jeremy Parish’s SEGAiden series on YouTube). The pitch here is that this version of Sonic 1 was developed to bring SEGA’s killer new mascot to those who hadn’t yet jumped on the Mega Drive hype train. This version of the game hits a lot of the same beats as its 16-bit counterpart, but makes substitutions where needed and even brings its own flavour just for kicks. In effect, it’s Sonic 1 At Home. Regrettably, such a remark applies to 8-bit Sonic 1 much more deeply than at surface level. Concessions in graphics and sound are of course to be expected, but this game doesn’t feel like Sonic 1 on Mega Drive, either. This isn’t particularly surprising. Sonic was originally conceived as SEGA’s mascot to compete with Mario in a way that his predecessor Alex Kidd was never able to, and his debut game was not only a showcase of the Mega Drive’s capabilities (read: Blast Processing), but a statement of intent by SEGA to provide 90s gamers with the kind of experiences that weren’t possible with the competition. The Master System just isn’t up to this task, being unable to compute the complex physics that make 16-bit Sonic tick. Ultimately, this is why I was procrastinating on playing this one. Despite its best efforts, 8-bit Sonic 1 plays as a fairly pedestrian, albeit pokey, platformer. Sonic moves at a decent clip (unless you're in water, where he controls like lead molasses), but the ability to exploit nuances in terrain for the sake of building and maintaining speed is pretty much limited to pressing down on the d-pad to roll down gratuitously large slopes for big air, which is impressive for an 8-bit console when it happens, but offers little in the way of gameplay engagement. 8-bit Sonic 1 also feels very conventional in the broader sense of its level designs. Last time, I spoke about the inconsistency in 16-bit Sonic 1’s level design philosophy, with some zones making better use of Sonic’s speed and physics than others. On the Master System, those more speed-centric level designs are pretty much entirely eschewed in favour of, again, much more standard platformer fare, with emphasis placed on well-executed jumps across pits rather than for the sake of keeping Sonic moving. This version of Sonic 1 does at least encourage exploration in the form of the Chaos Emeralds. Rather than being in Special Stages, this time they’re placed throughout the levels, with one per Zone, just lying out in the open for the taking. The rub here is that you’ve no idea where they are until you come across them, both within levels and between them. They can be picked up in either Act 1 or Act 2 of a given Zone and are pretty inoffensive in the early game, simply requiring the player to explore each fork in the road, but later levels ask the player to make baffling leaps of faith down shafts in a game peppered with bottomless pits. That said, they’re only slightly more consequential than in the Mega Drive version, awarding 20 000 points each and removing the pollution from South Island during the game’s final score tally. I ended up grabbing only half of them, but I honestly see no reason to do a second playthrough just to rectify this. On leaps of faith, these are something that become more prevalent as the game progresses, with later levels requiring you make those leaps just to progress rather than for high-score MacGuffins. I don’t think it ever really gets endemic and, even as a first-time player, I was able to stockpile ten lives and four continues going into the boss of the third Zone, but it’s still not great game design. This harshness also seeps into the bosses, which are very easy to die in, at first from the lack of rings in the boss stages and later from the hostile level design, with Labyrinth’s boss being the point at which I began to get rather liberal with my use of savestates, having only used them as a traditional save in between Zones up to that point. Again, the game does try to mitigate this, providing a 1-Up monitor in every boss stage bar the last one and allowing you to carry shields between levels (something that I don’t think ever even became a feature in the mainline games), but it doesn’t make the bosses themselves any more fun to fight. One area that’s absolutely an improvement over the 16-bit game is the special stages. As mentioned, the Chaos Emeralds are now found in the levels themselves, so these stages instead allow to you rack up rings for extra lives, with each stage having a monitor granting a continue and later stages having 1-Up monitors too. Instead of queasy rotating mazes with morphing fish-birds, 8-bit Sonic 1 has something a bit more straightforward (quelle surprise!), but that better fits not only with the rest of this game, but with the philosophy of Sonic in general. Here, you have to navigate a corridor of springs and bumpers to get to the signpost at the end before time runs out. It can still get pretty hectic, with there being several different varieties of spring that catapult Sonic with varying amounts of force, but it’s a much better exploration of Sonic’s core movement than the 16-bit special stages and not nearly as frustrating, either. And that about sums up the gameplay. Perfectly serviceable, with a more consistent difficulty curve than its big brother that starts higher but ends lower than that game, but ultimately just can’t hold a candle to the real thing. What about the presentation values, though? Well, they’re pretty good, considering. I expect the aim here was to translate the Mega Drive graphics to 8-bit as faithfully as possible, and I’d say they more or less achieved that. All the characters look recognisable to their 16-bit sprites and, while environments are of course much simpler, with none of that lovely parallax scrolling that Mega Drive Sonic so deftly takes advantage of, the game is still absolutely a looker in its own right, with my only complaint being that the use of sprite flickering makes capturing screenshots a pain in the ass, though I appreciate that this was done in service of producing a game that looks better in motion. In particular, the Zones original to this game are very well realised. While Sonic 1 on the Master System retains half of the Mega Drive’s locales (Green Hill, Labyrinth and Scrap Brain), the other half are swapped out for Bridge Zone, Jungle Zone and Sky Base Zone (though unused music suggests that Marble Zone was at least considered for appearing in this version of the game). Being created specifically for the Master System, these levels are able to shine better than those using aesthetics taken from a version of the game that runs on a system able to create far more detailed images. Of these three, I think Jungle Zone comes off the best, with sprites being layered on top of a solid green backdrop to effectively sell the effect of a dense canopy of foliage, while freeing up space and colours for finer details in the foreground and near background. Overall, a truly impressive number of colours are on display in this area of the game and it quite frankly blows anything I’ve seen on NES out of the water. The game’s soundtrack is a similar success story. Several of Masato Nakamura’s compositions are lovingly adapted here, with new tracks handled by Yuzo Koshiro fitting seamlessly alongside them. Of course, Bridge, Jungle and Sky Base have their own bespoke themes, but Labyrinth and Scrap Brain have also been given new tracks to better fit the pace and aesthetics of their Master System depictions. Honestly, it’s difficult for me to choose favourites between the two options for each of these Zones – Koshiro’s compositions really do compete with the more elaborate tracks of the Mega Drive version. And that’s Sonic the Hedgehog for SEGA Master System! A quaint curiosity, albeit an evidently well-crafted one, I really can’t say you’re missing out on much by not playing this – listen to its soundtrack if you’re so inclined and you’ll basically have gotten the best this game can offer in far less time than if you were to actually sit down and play it. That said, it’s even shorter than the Mega Drive version and can probably be finished in 45 minutes or less at a casual pace, so it’s hard to lament the time I’ve lost to it. There is also a Game Gear version of this release, with graphics and level design adjusted to fit that system’s smaller screen but there’s nothing else to talk about with regards to that version, so yeah – it exists. This isn’t the last we’ll see of 8-bit Sonic, however. The little blue bastard actually enjoyed a relatively full career in this realm, despite being a mascot of the fourth generation of gaming. All that’s to come, though… See you next game! Next instalment: Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (SEGA Mega Drive, 1992)
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