Sega celebrates two decades of Sonic the Hedgehog Sonic the Hedgehog is twenty years old today, raise your glasses and salute. Sega introduced Sonic in the early nineties to rival Nintendo's cash-cow Mario and improve sales of the company's waning console, the Mega Drive. Sonic the Hedgehog Until Sonic hit the scene, Alex Kidd was top bill at Sega and let's face it, …
I did have the original Sonic on the Master System too... and Sonic Chaos, later on. Didn't realise the level select worked for that too... would have saved a good few hours replaying the game to get back to where I was after the parental units turned it off on me!
Ahh, back when games were harsh, and they took months to complete, because there were no saves, and there was no nice easy continues... when you were dead, you were dead, and completing a game was a real achievement...
And if Sonic 3's annoyingly difficult level select was proving annoying, you could try this:
Start Sonic 2 up.
Enable level select + whatever else.
Rip the cart out.
Insert Sonic 3.
Press reset.
Tada, Sonic 3 with cheats enabled. Well, presuming you didn't blow the Megadrive up, though I never did manage to break anything by ripping a cart out. I discovered this way before the official cheat was discovered, and most miffed that magazines wouldn't print it. Tsh, liability issues. Wimps!
I believe the Sonic 2 level select cheat was 19, 65, 09, 09 and 17. Correct mr if I'm wrong. The Sonic 1 level select was up, down, left, right, ABC+Start. Unless you wanted to access debug mode, then it was up, C, down, C, left, C, right, C, A+Start. That also unlocked the ability to perform a soft reset by pausing and pressing A. Good times!
Happy Birthday Sonic!
That makes two of us mate!
As it happens I ordered a gamepad from eBuyer this morning for running emulators and the odd platformer.
I might as well hit the booze again, at 28 it's not like I have to worry about long term consequences. The consultant said my liver had about 2 years left in it.
Sonic was an entirely closed system. The parts that gave the opinion of most speed often reduced the players control to the occasional button jab.
Compare this to the open platform game that was mario. You could literally climb out of the playing area.
Sonic was a prime example of shiny good looks. Trainers, spiky hair, ' tude over sturdy functional dungarees and hard work.
Mario was an engineer. Sonic worked in marketing.
While I don't entirely agree - part of the rush of Sonic was the sheer speed and testing your reactions - I did feel sorry for the artists working on Sonic Adventure 1. All that effort put into making their 3D levels pretty to look at, all that detail, and you scream past it at 300mph.
Two different games really. Mario was a traditional platformer, with puzzle and exploration elements.
Sonic on the other hand, while it had exploration elements, was more of a racing game. Asides the collection of Chaos Emeralds, the whole point of Sonic was to see how fast you could do a level. If you were skilled at the game, it was entirely possible to complete some levels in mere seconds. However you had to know exactly when to jump, where to land for the next jump, how to land so you rolled perfectly down a slope or hit a spring in just the right place...
Yeah. Two different games. You might as well compare Zelda to Virtua Racing.
You were supposed to do it before the screen flashed white, as Sonic was barrelling toward the screen and busting the Sega logo all over the place. Still damned tricky though, hence my other post here on how to cheat at enabling the cheat!
Also Sonic & Knuckles + any random game = fun.
Range from good to terrible.
The old Mega Drive games were pretty good, but VERY difficult.
Dreamcast game was OK (Sonic Adventures)
Started the rot on the PS2 ones (Sonic Heroes is OK, there is another but can't remember what it was called)
There is a really naff PS3 game my boys like (Sonic Unleashed) and one part is press a button 100 times in something like 20 seconds.
... back when games were just about fun, rather than these super-immersive, high-definition, hundred-developer-team monstrosities that you have to give your undivided attention to for hours on end in order to even stand a chance of playing, let alone winning.
Sega have realised this - hence why Sonic 4 is a return to the roots of the game.
Long live the 2D action platformer!
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