Perusing my little brothers game collection I ran across Sega’s SONIC MEGA COLLECTION for the GameCube and decided to get my old school game on and play one of the Sonic games I never got around to when I was younger. \u00a0I was a Sonic follower when I was little and I had a small collection of the games on the Genesis. \u00a0I’d never gotten a chance to play the fourth installment, though, so I was actually kind of excited to finally try out SONIC & KNUCKLES. \u00a0(The collection includes SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, its two sequals, SONIC & KNUCKLES, SONIC 3D BLAST, SONIC! SPINBALL, and DR. ROBOTNIK’S MEAN BEAN MACHINE.)<\/p>\n
The first SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, in case you haven’t played one of the original Sonic games before (I know, I’m getting old), was built for the SEGA Genesis and was a 2D platformer to compete with the Mario games from Nintendo. \u00a0The big sell-point was the amazing speed at which Sonic could traverse his tile-based levels and \u00a0the fun roller coaster design that resulted from all that speed. \u00a0SONIC & KNUCKLES was the fourth installment of the series and was the final 2D version. \u00a0The game plays exactly like its predecessors, though the designers added a couple new abilities for both Sonic, and his new rival, Knuckles. \u00a0These abilities allow the designers to create sections of a level that are character-specific, only Knuckles could reach some places with his smashing power. \u00a0Basic mechanics included moving and jumping (the basics of a platforming game precedented by SUPER MARIO BROS.) to progress from platform to platform, avoid dangers, and attack enemies. \u00a0The Sonic games also added the ability to roll into a spikey spinning ball in order to attack some enemies from the ground. \u00a0Springs and loop-de-loops are characteristic of most Sonic levels and spinning gold rings were the collection item of choice.<\/p>\n
It was interesting to go back to this game and see how strongly the arcade mentality influenced the design of the game. \u00a0The arcade industry was still fairly strong and console designers were constantly chasing arcade-quality. \u00a0Generally big successes were games that were big arcade hits and were then ported to the consoles, though with lower quality graphics due to the limitations of the console hardware. Despite (as far as I’m aware) never being an arcade title, SONIC & KNUCKLES still held on to a three lives, no continues philosophy, leading to a very challenging game. \u00a0The player has to earn new lives and learn the levels in order to progress to the later stages. \u00a0If he fails to get to the end before his life stock has run out, the game is simply over and the player must restart from the beginning. \u00a0Game design since has changed to favor helping a player play through and enjoy the game, with automatic saves, infinite “lives” (see my REPUBLIC HEROES post), and a focus on playing levels again after<\/em> completing them in order to find other bonuses or increase score. \u00a0This is in contrast to having to play a level over before<\/em> completing it due to failure to reach the end and having to learn how best to accomplish the task.<\/p>\n As a side note, I still find it amazing to play a Sonic game on a Nintendo platform.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Perusing my little brothers game collection I ran across Sega’s SONIC MEGA COLLECTION for the GameCube and decided to get my old school game on and play one of the Sonic games I never got around to when I was younger. \u00a0I was a Sonic follower when I was little and I had a small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[131,9],"tags":[161,42,99,181,52,160,149,159,162,118,158,157,69],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-initial-impressions","category-reviews","tag-arcade","tag-game-design","tag-gamecube","tag-initial-impressions","tag-my-little-brother","tag-nintendo","tag-platformer","tag-sega","tag-sega-genesis","tag-sonic-knuckles","tag-sonic-mega-collection","tag-sonic-the-hedgehog","tag-super-mario-bros"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/basketqase.com\/roblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}