so much sonic!
I never owned a Genesis. I never owned any kind of Sega until I bought a Dreamcast, and I bought the Dreamcast after they’d stopped making Dreamcast stuff. All my memories of playing Sonic the Hedgehog are blurry and indistinct. I remember thinking it was really hard and really, really fast. I never really wanted a Sega, so I can only assume that while the speed impressed me, the game itself didn’t.
I rented Sonic Adventure 2: Battle for the GCN when it first came out, and I hated it. When I bought my Dreamcast, I picked up Sonic Adventure out of a sense of duty to Sega and Sonic Team. I liked it a lot more than Adventure 2 on the GCN, although it still had problems.
I’m not, then, why I felt so driven to pick up the Sonic Mega Collection. Probably it was largely because I like old school games. So many of the past masters are unappreciated by today’s audience because their graphics aren’t mind-blowing. Frankly, I think the graphics on Sonic the Hedgehog 1 are pretty damn good. The textures and resolution are mediocre, but the overall effect is great, and the impression of speed does get really convincing.
So far, I’m stuck on two points: I can’t save after arbitrary levels and I have no idea how long the games will be until I get to the end. It’s nice to have some kind of progress indicator and some method for walking away and picking up, later, where I stopped. It’s a limitation of the old systems, I guess, but it’s a real pain. Sonic is hard! I don’t want to start over from the beginning just because I want to go out for a sandwich. (I guess I could leave the Cube running, but… that’s not a real solution.)
The default games in the Mega Collection are Sonic 1-3, Sonic 3D, Sonic Spinball, and Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. I haven’t played the last two, as I largely focused on getting past the first few levels on the “real” Sonic games. There are about six unlockable games left, and GameFAQs seems to suggest that unlocking them is just a matter of playing a lot, so I’ll probably work on getting those out tonight. I’m a sucker for unlockables.