Gotta Go Fast

So, it's 2024!! Huzzah! Time for me to choose yet another thing to obsess over and eventually fail to fully realize.

This time? Sonic the Hedgehog.

Currently I'm also playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure, Hello Kitty Happiness Parade, and Sea of Stars, albeit quite slowly on each.

But I recently finished Sonic Dream Team (which was pretty good btw, albeit pretty easy), and then a friend asked me which Sonic games she should pick up on the Steam sale. I recommended some and then she bought Frontiers on accident instead of Generations, which is fine because that's also a great game. So I decided to pull out my copy of Frontiers on the PS5 and play around with it.

And that led to me buying every Sonic game on Steam that I didn't already own (which wasn't that many) and then installing Sonic Origins on my laptop.

In short, I seem prepped for a deep dive into the Sonic universe.

So I did play a few minutes of Sonic the Hedgehog (1991), clearing Green Hill Zone. I have to say... classic sonic is NOT my jam. I don't dislike it but it doesn't do what I want it to do -- which is to have clearly visible patterns that you can react to like Super Mario and Mega Man, the 80s/90s platformers I grew up with the most.

Instead, you GO FAST. And Sonic stays in the CENTER of the screen, making half of the screen pretty much useless. And then things happen and you have no window of human reaction time to respond, meaning you basically just hold one direction until you run into something or fall. Then you start again and try to remember the exact spot you hit the thing and jump this time. That is the only action: jump. Even the original Super Mario Bros. had projectiles, and with all the platformers released in the 5 years between the two games, it's decidedly a feature of this game to have a simple one-button control scheme in which you have a single action (though you can roll into a ball by holding down + pressing the action button, so it's not as simple as you'd think!).

Anyway, my "problem" with this game isn't the simplicity, it's the lack of feeling of being in control. Everything just zips by you and you're more just watching the game until something stops you. If it's something that kills you, you start again and have to remember to press your one button at the right time. If it's not, you just press the one button to get over it. But it doesn't feel like I'm actually responding to anything.

But then I started to compare the process to learning a dance routine -- you can't possibly mimic a dance AT THE SAME TIME as watching it unless you've already seen it beforehand, and even better if you've practiced it a bit yourself. Then you watch and learn, and piece together the bits of learning until you eventually memorize the whole thing, then try to execute it as flawlessly as possible. It's not about reacting to what you see, but rather about learning something new and rehearsing it. If I can enjoy a game like UNiSON, I should be able to enjoy Sonic, right?

Even modern Sonic with the ability to react to what's on the screen is still a lot like this; you try to learn the "best" route through an act by running through the "crappy" way first and noticing things that go by you before you can fully react to them, then doing those things on subsequent plays. At least when you're going for S ranks and such. Basically classic sonic is a game where only S ranks are allowed and anything else is punished by having to redo or face frustration.

So I'm trying to go into it with that kind of mindset.

However, this makes me want to perfect every act instead of just clearing it, which starts to fall into speedrunning levels of dedication, which is NOT something I really want to be doing. After getting fairly proficient at Mega Man, Mega Man 2, Duke Nukem, and Mega Man X7, I don't think I ever want to speedrun again.

But maybe it's different -- I don't mind relearning and perfecting stages (?) to get the S rank in Frontiers. It doesn't feel the same at all. So maybe perfecting short 20-second classic Sonic acts will feel more just like that. Plus I'm not going to be stringing them all together to try to get some flawless end result that requires tons of grind to finally knock out. I'm just going to be doing them until I feel comfortable running through and can get the Chaos Emeralds.

Though my first goal will just be to clear the game... Then I'll want to go back and perfect it and get the good ending.

That's actually something interesting about classic Sonic -- clearing the game is actually a failure, in a way. If you don't 100% complete the game, it tells you to "try again." I think that's more evidence that the game is designed around a "learn and perform" structure rather than the twitch reaction structure of its predecessors in the genre.

This new outlook might help me enjoy classic Sonic more. I will admit I've never finished a classic (or any 2D) Sonic game -- I've only ever cleared newer 3D entries in the franchise. And even then, not THAT many of them. I've always been a fairly casual Sonic fan, and even then markedly a 3D fan. So this is new grounds to me for the most part. I didn't grow up with any Sega consoles (didn't get one until the Dreamcast, and then I didn't even own any Sonic games for it), and my first real dive into the franchise was with Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on the GameCube, which was college-era for me.

Anyway, we can't just simply play the games, we have to learn about them, too! And while I did a little reading on the history of the characters and franchise, what I mostly wanted to learn about is the story and lore. At least in later games, Sonic goes hard with the story and takes itself quite seriously. So I want to kind of puzzle out exactly how that story goes. I realize it's a lot of... just random stuff, with no overarching plot between games (at least that I know of), but I want to know more in-depth about the story and characters of each entry and get a general feel for the overall "lore" of the franchise.

Does this mean I'm also going to be jumping into the extended universe by means of cartoons, comics, and non-platformer games? Well... maybe. But we're going to just start with the platformers. I've read some of the Archie comics and enjoy them, plus they do cross over with my beloved Mega Man so it wouldn't be TERRIBLY surprising if I fell into that hole. But it also wouldn't be surprising at all if I play like 3 games and move on to something else entirely and put yet another deep dive on the backburner.

So yeah, STORY STORY STORY.

The main reason I wrote this entry was because I wanted to chronicle my journey through the Sonic series, commenting on both story and gameplay evolution as I go. I'm going to be doing things kind of weird because I finished up Dream Team first, and will be working on Frontiers slowly (most likely) as I go through the other games.

And so let's talk about Sonic the Hedgehog (1991).

Apparently this game isn't the actual start to the story -- Sonic and Eggman have been rivals for a while, and Sonic has been thwarting Eggman's plans to create his "Eggmanland" dystopia for a long time. It just so happens that this entry in the series is where the "real" story of the series begins -- when Eggman discovers the mysterious Chaos Emeralds on South Island.

The Chaos Emeralds hold immense power, enough to "bring energy to all living things" or something like that, whatever that means, or can also be used to support unparalleled technology and machinery -- and it is through this science that Eggman now plans to crush his nemesis Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, his goal is simply to crush Sonic -- world domination will come later.

Eggman creates the Scrap Brain fortress on South Island and uses it as a base to craft his plans to find the Emeralds at whatever cost. Sonic learns about this through rumors (lol) and heads to South Island to stop him.

Upon arrival, Sonic notices that "something is different" and shortly thereafter (maybe upon completion of Green Hill Zone?) learns from Eggman himself that the evil scientist is using animals to power his "Badnik" robot servants. Why? I don't know. He just... is. Because it's particularly evil. Maybe he found away to harness the life-force of animals as a very resourceful and powerful mechanism to back his robots and that's his best weapon at this point.

In addition to using the animals to power the robots, he's also capturing animals en-masse and has them cooped up in capsules. Upon clearing a Zone, Sonic finds these capsules and frees the animals within.

To be honest, for a video game from 1991, that's not a terrible backstory to give to a game. It's got a bit more depth than "bad guy capture girl" and actually feels pretty creative and clever.

So my goal as Sonic is to not only find and stop Eggman, but to rescue the animals he captured along the way, and POSSIBLY hunt for the Chaos Emeralds to stop them from falling into Eggman's hands. There are two endings to the game, one for Sonic finding all the Emeralds and saving the day, and another for letting at least one fall into the hands of Eggman. My first goal is just going to be to clear the game, then I'll work on "perfecting" it to get the "true" ending.

SO. Some things to note. Or rather one big thing to note. According to the story of this game, there are six Chaos Emeralds. Now, I know from player later games in the series that there are indeed seven of them. I don't know if this was simply retconned, or if there's a hidden one, or if some lore explanation crops up explaining how a new one is created or something... we don't know. I'll find out as I explore the series. For now I'm just going to take it one game at a time, and learn everything the way one would have playing the games as they released -- not knowing anything from the future. Well, kinda. Because I've already played games from the future. But for the sake of this series playthrough, I'm going to be analyzing everything as it comes and trying to "forget" future information.

Also, I just realized the Chaos Emeralds do not appear at all in Sonic Dream Team. The game takes place inside a dream world, where the Emeralds would not exist (or would already be in possession of Eggman, his Eggmanland empire already instated). But there's not even a mention of them that I can remember. I wonder what other games there are that don't include the Chaos Emeralds...? I was going to say that perhaps the overall story of the games may actually be the story of the Emeralds, and not so much the story of Sonic himself. But maybe that's not true after all.

Oh, also there is some arcade game called SegaSonic something that may or may not precede Sonic 91 in the story -- basically a story about Sonic and a couple pals being captured by Eggman and escaping from his perils. Not gonna be playing that, but it's an example of stories of Sonic vs Eggman that occur before the events of the first game, and of stories that happen before the Chaos Emeralds are discovered. Just wanted to mention.

But yeah. My next major goal is going to be just to clear Sonic 91 for the first time. I'm playing the "classic" port on Sonic Origins (not the remaster). It doesn't seem like it will be a terribly long process (it only took a matter of a few minutes to clear the first three Acts) unless the difficulty gets ridiculous as the game goes on.

Marble Zone

So, I started over my adventure. I decided to play on the iOS version and I learned a couple things about version differences:

1. The Spin Dash wasn't in the original Sonic 91. This was added to later versions.

2. Even the "classic" version on Origins has the spin dash and slightly redesigned levels, it's just cropped to 4:3 to "preserve the feeling" or something lmao.

3. The original version seems to have 3 lives and no continues. The Origins and iOS version support a 'save system' that allows for infinite continues.

So it sounds like unless I play on emulator, I'll be missing out on the original experience no matter what.

HOWEVER, I don't really mind these minor changes -- I might go back and try to clear the game with no continues in "no save mode" or on an emulator or something eventually, but I'm just wanting to see the game for now, not challenge myself to the fullest.

So, anyway, as for a little update, I cleared Green Hill Zone again, which was kinda underwhelming, but then moved on to Marble Zone. It actually had a lot of stop-and-go, wait-and-react gameplay that I was complaining was absent from classic Sonic lol.

But other than a couple sections, it just seemed to break the pacing...? The game was going so fast and now there's a lot of just... waiting for things to fall down or float around, without really much challenge to it.

People complained about the Werehog stages breaking the pacing in Unleashed, but I found them a welcome change of pace. They were actually fun and there was still a sense of urgency/hurry, just in a different way. But in 91 this is just... standing around and waiting for waiting's sake, it seems...?

The parts that were good were fun, though. I don't think I could get through this game on 3 lives very easily and it would be very frustrating to restart the ENTIRE THING every time I got a Game Over, and I probably would have dropped the game already if that was how I had to play, ahaha.

Now I'm on to Spring Yard Zone, which has the first appearance of Crabmeat, the only enemy that I actually know the name of.

Oh speaking of enemies, there is this purple caterpillar thing that is very annoying. It has spikes all over its body so you can only defeat it by hitting the head, which has an annoyingly small hitbox. This is made a little easier by the addition of the spin dash, as you can just spin dash into the front of it while it's facing you. But I don't know if this was one of the redesigns, but there was an area where it was in a narrow space and you couldn't jump... and it started out facing away from you, and you had to wait for it to SLOWLY crawl all the way to the wall and turn around, and then you could spin dash it -_- There was no other way to proceed as far as I could tell (other than just ram it and take the damage, which causes it to fall apart and go away).

So yeah. Taking a break to eat some Doritos, then probably going to go play some Sea of Stars, then maybe come back to Sonic. Or I might do more in Hello Kitty; I basically just logged in and got the five light bulbs for the event and logged out.