Summer of Sonic (1): Sonic the Hedgehog

I had been thinking about picking up Sonic: Lost World whenever I next saw it on sale when humble bundle dropped the Sonic 25th anniversary bundle. I was going to buy it, when I realized it had tiered keys, which I rather hate. Then the latest Steam sale began and... Ugh... So I just cashed the $10 tier.

This steam sale was terrible! None of my friends really bought much of anything. Oh, it was also the highest grossing steam sale. Hurray for average consumers! You've gone mainstream, Valve, extract money from da dopes. Whatever. I bought a bundle.

And then decided I should review a chunk of Sonic games, to go with said anniversary. I'm technically a Sega and Sonic kid; my parents bought me a revision 1 Genesis and it is probably the console I've played the most in my life. I'm not going to review every Sonic game (good lord) or even every Sonic game in the bundle, rather spend the next eight weeks going through a selection of them depending on how much I enjoy myself.

Sonic the Hedgehog, the first, has a copyright of 1991 on the title screen. I can actually remember getting this game as a rental even, right after it came out. I remember because I was so upset I couldn't get Sonic to move when I first tried to play it. Turns out the controller was half-plugged in and the d-pad wouldn't work. That moment always stood out to me as memorable, mostly because he would jump up and down but he could not go fast. Since I didn't own it, I never actually beat Sonic the first as a kid, doing it much later in maybe 2010 or so.

Screenshots display no HUD as the game is modded, as per the cool ass Steam workshop, to remove all HUD elements. I'll talk a little more about the steam workshop for the genesis/mega drive hub in a later review, as this is pretty minor. When you mod games you need to load the mod from the selector every time and... I'll get back to this.

Anyway, so Sonic the Hedgehog the first... I think this is actually the biggest selling title in the original sonic run, and might be the highest selling of all Sonic games. Of course, it was bundled with the Genesis for a while and I think those count toward the total. My genesis was bundled with Altered Beast, which just fyi is an IP I'm surprised no one has done anything good with. I owned Sonic 2 and Sonic&Knuckles as a kid. Weirdly enough, after beating Sonic 3&Knuckles (loaned from some kid I played Magic with, though I still have his copy - sorry Alex! Not that retro games were worth a thing back then) I never played another Sonic game for something like two decades.

The game is stone simple, and honestly feels a lot more like the original Super Mario than you'd think - you did need to use the run button in the later levels, so Mario did go fast - it just starts off feeling more about speed before calming down to become pretty normal as platformers go. The game honestly feels like any early prototype of what Sonic would later become, although it is interesting to see just how much of the game is honestly... Well... Replaying it just isn't all that fun in parts. The game isn't very fast, and a lot of the levels are just ugh. I really didn't enjoy replaying Spring Yard zone, and "the water level" Labyrinth zone is visually attractive but ultimately kinda dull, other than weird "gotcha!" death traps that one hit kill you. Water levels in Sonic were always kinda weird, since the whole air bubble thing - for those who have never played Sonic, there will be pockets of air that bubble up slowly to refill your unseen air meter - is just so counter-intuitive to the game. You'd think they'd have designed the underwater sections to go faster, using the tension of drowning, as opposed to actually making them go slower!

The visuals are... Unfinished. Some of the later concepts that dominate the visuals of the series, the smoothness and patterns, don't feel like they made it into all of the levels. I really like how the first two stages, and the eventual water level, look. But the "techno" looking levels don't have the same style later renditions end up with. Picking up Sonic 2 (before I finished this review, since Sonic1 is short) it really stands out just how inferior Starlight Zone is to Casino Night Zone, and Metropolis zone just nails the industrial grind of Robotnik's domains.There are some good and some bad tunes in Sonic1, but it's an early Genesis games (relatively speaking) and that makes a big different in the music quality.

We have to briefly talk about the special stages, because they're all different in the main genesis/cd era games and they all oddly have very different design philosophies behind both their construction and their nature. This is odd because almost everything in Sonic 1 through S&K (which is technically 5 releases) remains pretty similar. I mean sonic gains a move or two, but generally he runs and jumps in a nearly identical fashion and gets lives on the most part from rings you collect in the same way. The moveset, progress and reward structures remain most unchanged.

It isn't identical, no, but the special stages inversely are absolutely different. Sonic 1's stages do not look technically impressive in the modern day, but from what I've read they were considered nearly impossible to do and yet there they were? Who knows. Looks a great deal better than the eyesore that is Mode 7.  It's just simple smoothly rotating blocks that Sonic falls through, eventually reaching either a 'goal' (which is a forced exit, oddly enough, which isn't your goal) or breaking through to the emerald. I've never finished collecting the emeralds in Sonic1, the biggest thing being the number of chances is pretty limited. On my recent run through I managed to get 5, which I think is actually close.

The game in this case triggers the special stage after you finish a level with enough rings - I think 50, but don't quote me on that - which creates an interesting bit of tension they switch up in Sonic 2. They're always rewarding, which, interestingly enough is something they changed in Sonic 2...

More on that later.

I remember liking, but not loving, this game as a kid. It wasn't in my top 5 favorite games on the genesis, and it might not even be in the top 10. It's definitely top 20, I'll make a list after I'm done my pile of retro reviews, but there's a lot of genesis games. There's a surreal moment where you realize games do or don't age well, and while I don't think Sonic the Hedgehog blows my mind or stirs the nostalgia as others in the series do, it has inversely aged pretty well. After the last decade plus of gaming stepping further and further from "pick up and play" StH is charming for just... Go! No options, no menus, no discussion or cutscenes. Move like you mean it.