- A hedgehog who’s blue, with shoes, and runs. You know what we’re talking about.
It goes without saying, that if you’ve been playing video games since your childhood, you know who Sonic the Hedgehog is. Perhaps you can remember a time where SEGA desperately wanted to gain the lead with their new 16-bit video game system over a Nintendo’s stranglehold on the video game economy. In particular Super Mario was a first party franchise to be reckoned with – and although SEGA did have their own franchises to use on their new system, showing off revamped titles from their famous arcade machines, such as Golden Axe and Altered Beast – but what they didn’t have was a mascot powerful enough to keep in line with the moustached plumber from Brooklyn.
That was about to change. SEGA did have Alex Kidd as their mascot for a while, but since his popularity only really remained on the Master System – it was time for something new. With much planning and brainstorming; Sonic the Hedgehog was born, and really showed gamers the true power of SEGA’s Mega-Drive, or Genesis as it was called in the United States. It showed off the Genesis’ ‘blast processing’ abilities, being able to have great looking games that could also be really fast without slowing down. Something that the Nintendo Entertainment System would naturally have a problem with.
The game features you, a blue anthropomorphic hedgehog who seeks to defeat the evil Dr. Robotnik, and prevent him from turning all the animals into robots and to take over the world. Sounds simple right? Well fortunately it is. Good old classic side-scrolling action, but on crack. The game is known for having sections where you can quickly accelerate through, but the game features plenty of times where you’re going to need to slow down in order to use your brain cells, and figure out either where you need to go next, or how to get across a dangerous zone.
Along the way, when you collect 100 rings in a level, you have the opportunity to visit bonus stages. These bonus stages are somewhat tricky, but they give you the opportunity to collect not only bonus continues for when you lose all your lives, but also to collect a Chaos Emerald. You need to collect all 6 (which become 7 in the second game) of these emeralds in order to get the good ending to the game – failure to do so will leave you with an animation of Dr. Robotnik juggling the emeralds, as you failed to collect them along the way. Dr. Robotnik needs them to power his diabolical schemes, so it’s important that you do so.
This game has been re-released many times on newer platforms, such as on Xbox Live Arcade, on PC and on PlayStation 2. The game was also released in smaller, clearly inferior ports for the Mega-Drive’s predecessor, the Master System, and also for SEGA’s portable answer to the Game Boy at the time – the Game Gear. The only bad port of this game was on Game Boy Advance, and it suffered from glitches and frame rate issues. Everything a Sonic game should never suffer from.
This game is an absolute must-play. I doubt very much that you haven’t played it, but in the rare event that you’ve lived under a rock or are an alien visitor from another planet. Please go check it out.
