When you think about it, the character of Sonic The Hedgehog has come a long way and endured many a fad in gaming, yet still, along with it’s greatest rival, Nintendo’s Mario, maintains it’s status as one of Gaming’s most recognisable and loved icons, with the original game recently being voted ‘The Best Game Ever’, which came as a shock to many, who expected a recent title such as
Grand Theft Auto 3 to waltz to a win. Recently, instead of giving their mascot, and the character who once spearheaded their dominance of the console market a new game, Sega decided to celebrate the history of Sonic with the
Sonic Mega Collection Plus for the
Xbox and
PS2, which was an expanded version of the compilation released for the
GameCube a year or so prior.
As I mentioned, the game isn’t an original title at all, and is a compilation of Sonic’s appearances on the
Sega Megadrive/
Genesis with some of his many
Game Gear adventures thrown in for good measure, as well as a few random Sega games for their 16-Bit console to unlock. While it does raise the point that Sega could easily have fit more games onto the DVD, something they cynically have done as a separate game, in the form of
Sonic Gems Collection, the prospect of 7 Sonic games for the console that may have been Sega’s finest hour, as well as a slew of rarely-seen handheld games for less than the price of 1 new
Xbox is a tasty one, at least for those of us who grew up in the 16-Bit era.
Now, before I begin, I’m sorry to say, but I won’t be looking at any of the games in as in-depth a fashion as I would if they were separate releases, as that would make the review longer and more rambling than any of you would ever want to read. Besides, I’ve actually already reviewed 4 of the games included in their original format, so if I may direct you to my reviews of:
Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega Genesis
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for Sega Genesis
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 for Sega Genesis
Sonic The Hedgehog for Game Gear
For more in-depth reading upon those titles. The fact is, most of the games on the collection follow roughly the same engine anyway, so explaining how one title works really explains how many of them will play.
While it’s hard to imagine a world where anyone hasn’t played a classic Sonic game, I guess there are some of you out there who may need the system defined, so here goes. You take control of Sonic, a blue hedgehog who has to run from the left-hand-side of the screen to the right, rolling into a ball to pick up speed, smashing various enemy robots and trying to collect rings(100 gives you an extra life, 50 access to the bonus stage, but more on that later), before taking on a boss every 3 levels or so.
Bonus Stages vary from game-to-game, but their purpose remains the same, to collect Chaos Emeralds. There are 7 of these, and you must try and collect them all to get the ‘Correct’ ending for the game. The bonus stages aren’t the only things that differ from game to game, with
Sonic 2,
Sonic 3 and
Sonic & Knuckles all add various things to the game, such as the ‘Spin Dash’, where Sonic charges up for a rolling attack, right up to a second playable character in the form of Knuckles the Echidna, who can glide through the air at the expense of a spin-dash. 3 of the
Game Gear titles also work on the classic Sonic premise, with the original
Game Gear title(reviewed above),
Sonic Chaos and
Sonic Blast all working on a variation of the classic engine.
All of these games are where gamers will likely spend the majority of their time, as it’s the classic Sonic titles that are the best. The games may not tax the brain, but therein actually lies some of their appeal, it’s fast, furious and ridiculously easy to get playing, and the only thing more ridiculous is how fun the games are. On paper, the Sonic games, as with their Mario counterparts, sound awfully dull, but in execution, that statement couldn’t be further from the truth, with each of the original-format Sonic titles being a simple-to-start, difficult to complete or put down carving of pure genius from Sega. Fantastic level and enemy design, responsive controls and speed so fast you expect a copper to give you a ticket are all in evidence in these games, and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Their transition to
Xbox via emulation is spot-on, with every pixel and sound effect perfectly recreated on Microsoft’s powerhouse, with these classic games not receiving any tampering at all, the games look, sound and play just as you remember them doing, which, in my eyes, is the purpose of such a compilation like this, especially when the games included are as good as the ones seen here. Obviously the
Game Gear titles, being designed for an 8-Bit hand-held, aren’t as good as the 16-Bit games, but they do still have their qualities, although most of the appeal will only resonate with Old-School gamers. Personally I think they are fun, if not on the same level as their full-scale counterparts.
Adding some spice to proceedings is
Sonic 3D: Flickies Island, a bizarre game which isn’t really in 3D, but 2D designed to look 3D. While this isn’t unplayable, and sticks, roughly to the basic principles of Sonic, controlling which direction he runs in on this bizarre game, with it’s slanted angle playing field makes it more of an oddity than a pleasure. I mean graphically it’s quite nice, but controlling it, as well as the game’s odd feature of getting birds to follow you to checkpoints, means this is really one for Sonic completists only, the same goes for it’s scaled-down
Game Gear equivalent
Sonic Labyrinth .
Deviating further from the established gameplay are
Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine,
Sonic Spinball and
Sonic Drift.
Mean Bean Machine, pointlessly represented by both it’s
Megadrive and
Game Gear incarnations, is akin to Nintendo’s
Dr. Mario, in that it takes the
Tetris format and alters it, so there are various ‘Mean Beans’ that you must eliminate by creating a row-of colour coded beans including it that numbers 4. While the game is a rather simple idea, it’s an addictive little puzzler, and a 2-player Versus mode is a fun addition as well.
Sonic Drift is a rip-off of Nintendo’s
Super Mario Kart, which sees the Sonic gang, rather pointlessly, taking to buggies for some racing. This was a
Game Gear title, and while it’s hardly
Project Gotham Racing, as an easy to pick up little racer, it has it’s charm. While there is no denying it does feel a bit odd playing what was designed to be a hand-held game on a large screen, I only played it to try it out and ended up playing for about an hour. Its fun, in a silly kind of way, and would have been awesome in it’s original context.
I don’t think any game in the series divides the fans as much as
Sonic Spinball, an odd pinball title where Sonic is the ball, and personally I think this is probably the best format to encounter the game. I would never have liked to buy it separately, because it simply isn’t good enough to justify handing over cash for, but when put, like this, on a disk with some great games, it becomes an amusing little diversion of sorts, used simply to waste time inbetween playing the ‘proper’ games..
In fact, apart from the pointless inclusion of the
Game Gear version of
Mean Bean Machine, I wouldn’t say any of the Sonic games are wasted space upon the DVD. Sure the
Game Gear games can’t match up to the
Megadrive titles, but for interest to fans, they are neat, and my only complaints with regards to the roster of games included is what
isn’t there. While it was neat of Sega to put in games like
Ristar,
Comix Zone and
The Ooze to unlock, wouldn’t we all rather have had the other
Game Gear titles,
Sonic CD or
Chaotix?
Trying to talk about the graphics of ‘the game’ would be folly, given that it’s actually over 20 games on 1 disk, but rest assured, I wouldn’t say any of the games are bad graphically. While the hardware limitations of the
Game Gear mean that the games ported from it naturally don’t look lifelike, for those of us who grew up with the games, and who the Collection is aimed at, you won’t have a problem playing any of the games, and the animation in some of the
Megadrive/
Genesis titles is fantastic.
The same goes for the sound. Sega always had a knack for writing awesome and catchy theme music for it’s Sonic games, and you certainly won’t have any complaints with the quality of music and effects or the quality of the sound, which is perfect. Naturally some games don’t have music as good as the core games in the series, but in general, the standard is good, and even if it wasn’t, that isn’t really the
Mega Collection‘s fault.
Once again, talking controls seems rather pointless, given that all the games have their nuances on the subject, although it is worth noting that in most games the main control is simply ‘Jump’, and pressing it in various situations, such as crouched, triggers other moves. Anyway, at no point in any of the games did I encounter any response issues, which is good because my
Game Gear‘s d-pad has taken quite a hammering over the years and isn’t as responsive as it once was.
As well as the games themselves, Sega have loaded the
Mega Collection with numerous fun extras, from the opening and ending to
Sonic CD, reproductions of the original instruction manuals, which you can zoom in and out of, comic covers, comics themselves, little movies…it’s a Sonic fan’s dream. Sadly though, the commercials included in the
Saturn‘s predecessor to this collection,
Sonic Jam, aren’t included, and nor is the fun 3D world for accessing the games that
Jam featured.
With all this said, the
Sonic Mega Collection Plus is still a must own for fans of Sega’s spiky mascot. It gathers a good number of his greatest hits in one place, and gives you some nice bonus materials to browse. It can also be picked up dirt cheap these days, and is a worthy addition to your collection, even if you own the core games, because the
Game Gear titles, which are fairly rare, are interesting to fans of the series, and some of the bonus stuff is really cool.
Sonic Reviews
Sonic The Hedgehog for Game Gear
Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega Genesis
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for Sega Genesis
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 for Sega Genesis
Sonic Adventure for Dreamcast
Sonic Heroes for Xbox
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