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Tag: sonic the hedgehog

  • Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (Sega, 1992)

    Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (Sega, 1992)

    Developed/Published by: Sega Technical Institute / Sega
    Released: November 24th, 1992
    Completed: 26th January, 2014
    Completion: Completed once (on Xbox 360) and then I went back and finished it with all seven Chaos Emeralds on the copy that’s included on the Sega Mega Drive Collection for PSP. Yeah, really.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a (didn’t play it on my own Xbox 360.)

    Who would I be to critique Sonic The Hedgehog 2, eh? It’s a generally beloved entry in a franchise that’s, uh, generally beloved, as long as you’re only remembering the Mega Drive entries because you’ve been under a rock/have any sense. Well I’ll tell you who I am: ME.

    Let’s have a think about the Sonic games, being totally honest with ourselves. We’ve got a hedgehog guy (whose sprite I love perhaps irrationally; he just looks amazing) whose entire thing is “running fast.” In fact, if you’re not running fast, Sonic’s bagfuls of inertia mean that you’re slippy-sliding all over the place—or worse, desperately trying to get up enough speed to move a little bit, but not too far. And if you’ve found yourself stuck at the bottom of a ramp, be prepared to… be annoyed as you try to get him up it.

    Of course, you seasoned Sonic-a-manaics are like “but what about his spin dash, introduced in Sonic the Hedgehog 2… you twat?” to which I’ll say: it’s a hack. An inelegant hack to make up for the fact that the level design really doesn’t know what to do if you slow down at a point where it doesn’t want you to slow down.

    If you played through Sonic the Hedgehog (and I have, all the Chaos Emeralds and everything) you probably remember that after Green Hill Zone the development team seemed to have forgotten what they were trying to do with Sonic, with slow underwater zones, slow platforming levels with tiny platforms; basically they did everything they could to slow the game down. Thankfully Sonic The Hedgehog 2 isn’t quite as bad… except when it is. There are a lot more bits to run fast and free in, sure, as long as you’re willing to slam into an enemy you couldn’t see/fall into a bottomless pit/hit some spikes/whatever.

    Frankly, everything Sonic the Hedgehog 2 wants you to do is at cross purposes to that whole “Sonic go fast” core idea. You always want to collect 50 rings to get to the bonus stage, right? So what happens is that you creep through the level at a snail’s pace, collecting every ring you see, because if you run for even a second, you’ll probably hit something and lose them all. This wouldn’t be so bad if the bonus stages were something that you could wing it through, but no. I remember how the tunnels blew my mind when I was ten, but as an adult what I remember is how they are an exercise in memorisation (until, possibly, you blow up your mind.) Unlocking Super Sonic is so hard that I abused quick-saves to extremes just to do it, and it’s bloody unrewarding anyway—all you get for it is an invincible Sonic who has a suicidal level of inertia; in fact in several of the levels with difficult platforming I wanted to avoid rings!

    (And much like in Sonic the Hedgehog, collecting all the Emeralds merely gives you a very slightly different ending. Very, very, very… very slightly.)

    If you, as a kid (or whatever) managed to get Super Sonic on a Mega Drive, bloody hell, I salute you. Now get outside for some of that fresh air that your mum kept telling you to breathe across the months if not years it took.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ll go onto Sonic the Hedgehog 3 soon(ish.)

    Final Thought: You can, if you like, think I’ve gone at this whole Sonic the Hedgehog thing wrongly! The levels are large and have enough different routes that they welcome replay to an extreme degree, meaning that for a kid determined to get all the Chaos Emeralds, repeated play against the extreme difficulty is close to a Spelunky-like experience. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but for a while there’s always something new to see. Unfortunately that’s mere happenstance; the game rewards memorisation and dedication rather than skill. And if you want to complain that you could just play it without trying to 100% it—and yeah, the game is pretty fun, fiddly platforming/awkward level design aside, to play casually—they shouldn’t have put all that extra stuff in then if it makes it less fun, should they?

  • Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed (Sumo Digital, 2012)

    Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed (Sumo Digital, 2012)

    Developed/Published by: Sumo Digital / Sega
    Released: December 18th, 2012
    Completed: 4th January, 2014 (Completed every level of “World Tour” on at least Medium difficulty, completed Grand Prix as far as unlocking Mirror Grand Prix. Reached “S Class License.”)
    Trophies / Achievements: 42%

    This is probably a good way to start (what was at one point) a Tumblr called “every game I’ve finished” considering by all accounts I haven’t really finished it, unless you strictly count getting as far as seeing the credits as a completion (and that happens mid-way through the World Tour mode, anyway.) But the astonishingly clumsily named Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed is definitely one of those games that you eventually run out of steam on and just have to put away—especially because beating pretty much the entire game on Expert to unlock everything requires a level of dedication to a mascot racer that is beyond me.

    S&ASRT, as I’ll call it I guess, is something I’d heard praised, though in retrospect I can’t really tell why. Developed by Sumo Digital (who let’s not forget worked on the superb ports of Outrun 2) this is the kind of game that seems to exist as a very vague way to exploit Sega’s long list of brilliant IP without having to use any of it properly by, you know, making a new game in a series, because, well, it might fail. So better to slightly please people who want to see another Skies of Arcadia by including Vyse as a playable racer, but making sure Sonic, who must still be a big selling point to somebody (children? Do children even like Sonic now?) is front and center as much as possible. Boom, two demographics sorted: people who like Sonic, and people who will put up with Sonic so they can see some old Sega shit.

    This kind of thing can sort of work—Sega All Stars Tennis is actually a fairly decent way to whack on your nostalgia penis for a few hours, with, for example, the Space Harrier levels totally working—but the whole thing does, at best, leave you feeling a bit empty when compared to, you know, going back and actually playing Space Harrier. This is totally exacerbated by S&ASRT’s position as a mascot racer. You might think “oh cool! a Golden Axe level!” only to discover that you’re whipping around the course so fast that you barely pay attention to the decoration, and if you do, it’s not really super clear what about it makes it feel Golden Axey, or Shinobiey, or whateverey. The Shinobi one, for example, is just “generic Asian.” The only one that really works is the Nights level, which is impressively specific without actually being interesting.

    And the racing isn’t really all that either. I mean, obviously there’s the whole “you get to switch between a car and a boat and a plane!” thing but what this largely means is that you can’t easily remember the tracks (because across three laps they can change wildly, switching you between vehicle) and the tracks are too bloody long anyway. The boats are about as fun as the hovercrafts were in Diddy Kong Racing, which you might remember as having been fun, but I can confirm were about as thrilling as pushing a Subbuteo man across treacle. The planes are fine, apart from when you can’t tell where you’re supposed to be flying, which is “usually.”

    It’s obvious that the team at Sumo Digital has a lot of talent—the cars, at least, feel lovely—and that Sega is, more or less, forcing them to phone it in (It’s a bit glitchy, the difficultly level is way out of whack, and so on.) But most importantly, does anyone actually want something like this rather than, I don’t know, seeing any of the IP here given even this level of effort by Sumo Digital on a new game? Honestly, I’d be a bit harsher on Sega here for being so glib in their “no, we do like our old IP, see?” if they didn’t have M2 working their wizard magic on the 3DS Classics line, but taken in isolation S&ASRT is a waste of everyone’s time. The problem being, of course, is that because of the mild nostalgia layer you might not mind having your time wasted for a bit, and so they’re able to get away with it.

    Will I ever play it again? I didn’t totally finish it so if I manage to finish every other game I ever want to play I could conceivably go back to mop up as many stars as I could and finish Mirror Grand Prix. Not doing so would be better for my mental health though.

    Final Thought: They include a bunch of non-Sega racers too, stupidly. From Wreck-It Ralph they include… Wreck-It Ralph. Not Vanellope von Schweetz, who is a kart racer. For fuck’s sake.

    This essay is featured in Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24.