Sonic Mega Collection

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic is back! Well, actually he hasn’t been away… not really. Like pearls on a string the Sonic-games have been with us since the early part of the nineties. And across a myriad of platforms, not just Sega’s own, he has been enforcing the colourful and speedy Sonic-happiness upon us.

Not all the Sonic-games have been perfect. But like with all big franchises you’ll find hits and duds. This Sonic Mega Collection clearly reflects that. Sega hasn’t just tried to throw us a “Greatest Hits”, but has instead served us a slice of video games history.

I want that... and that... and...

Sonic 2

The tiny GameCube disc is filled to the brink with stuff. Lets have a look at what you get:

The Games

This is of course the important part. If they don’t get us all worked up, the wrapping and the extras surely won’t do that either. Thankfully they do. Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles are solid Mega Drive/Genesis games and classical video game jewellery that Sega isn’t afraid to flaunt whenever a opportunity presents itself. I have been playing these games, on and off, for the last decade and to me, the speed and the graphics are still attractive and the games are still worth playing. They are not as deep and clever as the contemporary Mario-games. But they are really good for short bursts of play.

Sonic 3D is… well, kind of weird… It isn’t really 3D, but presents the player with an isometric view. This slows the game down and in my opinion it doesn’t qualify as a real Sonic-game.

Sonic Spinball is a strange hybrid between platform – and pinball-game. Being a pinball-fan I enjoyed the game back in 1994, but it hasn’t aged that well. I still had a lot of fun revisiting, but it certainly isn’t for everybody.

Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine is a puzzle-game. Even though it isn’t a straight Tetris-clone, it certainly belongs in the “fall and fit”-puzzle category. It hasn’t much to do with Sonic, but the graphics are easy on the eyes and the game-play is top-fun. It is one of my all-time favourite Sega-games and I’m pretty sure I would have paid the admission-fee just to play this one game.

The rest of the package

Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine

The bonus features contains more than hundred Sonic The Hedgehog Comic book covers, character-sketches, The History of Sonic-movie, intro from Sonic CD and other stuff like that, which is only real meaningful to hardcore fans. It isn’t bad, it is just not the great added value that the marketing-people wants you to believe. But it’s certainly another example that games are going “the movie-way”.

The Extra Games… spoilers…coming up…

Sonic Spinball

If you are one of those people who wants to discover everything yourself and wants to be genuinely surprised by the extra secret stuff you unlock, you probably wants to skip down to the review-conclusion and the data-box. Because in a second (depending on how fast you read) I going to name the extra games on this disc.

During the cause of play you will be able to unlock five extra Sonic-games. Before you get too excited, you might as well know that two of the unlockable games are Sonic & Knuckles 2 and Sonic & Knuckles 3, which is Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 playable with Knuckles instead of Sonic. A bit disappointing, but as the feature was made possible with the special “flip-lid” cartridge of the original Sonic & Knuckles, it would have been a disgrace for the historical completeness at least, if the feature had been omitted from this compilation. To tag it as two secret extra games is stretching it, though.

The other three secret games are rare Sega games indeed. Ristar, Flicky and Blue Sphere are not something you see every day. Ristar is the only one of them that you will be playing more than the first time. But that’s okay, because it is just a bonus.

Sonic will live on…

Sonic 3D

Even though Sega no longer has their own hardware-platform, there seems to be no end to the Sonic-games. And with Sonic CD missing from this compilation, Sega is speeding up for a “volume 2”. That’s okay with me. All the big game-companies should once in awhile dust off their old intellectual properties of yore. If they do it as elegantly as Sega has done here, we are sure to get an updated games-library which will appeal equally to people who were young(er) the first time around and to those who wasn’t even born back in “the old days”.

If you belong to the jaded group of techno-worshippers, who only connects to the newest games if they push the graphical boundaries beyond anything seen before, you should have been here 10 years ago; these games really pushed the envelope. Now there’s nothing here for you. Move on and let the rest of us enjoy a nice juicy slice of video game history.