Video Game #5: Sonic the Hedgehog

If you read my earlier entry in this series about Pac-Man 2 you might have noticed where I said I'd never played Genesis before that day. You also might have gathered from that that I have never played Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega's most famous series. You gathered correctly. I grew up in a Nintendo household. We never had any hedgehogs in the house, only hairy pudgy Italian plumbers.

Here we goooooooooo!!!

This game was hard to screenshot. With a game that expects you to move around a lot it can be hard to let go of the controller and hit the screenshot keys (Shift and Backspace for this emulator. Convenient!) in time to catch any decent action.

When I started this thing I knew very little about the game. I knew there was a hedgehog named Sonic and he runs around really fast and picks up rings. That about covered it. And what more do you need to know, really?

As I played I noticed that if you kill an enemy it turns into a fluffy bunny or some other cute animal. From this my guess about the plot of this game is that Dr. Robotnick (I know there's a Dr. Robotnick) turned Sonic's fluffy animal friends into evil monsters and Sonic needs to pummel them back to the side of goodness. If this is the case, does that mean not beating up every monster I see makes me a bad person? Also, where was Sonic when Robotnick began his robot holocaust? How come he wasn't evilfied?


I liked the invincibility thing. It made Sonic able to stand on spikes. I didn't like the inconsistency of the game, though. Sometimes when I jumped on bad guys it killed them and sometimes it killed me. Same with hitting them from the side. And sometimes when I jumped on spikes while invincible I was fine, and sometimes I died. I don't get it.


I didn't like this part. It took me forever to get over this ledge.

And then I died. I was foolish enough to assume that just because I could stand on those other spikes while invincible that I could invincibly stand on these spikes as well. Still had 6 minutes on my timer, though, so I kept going.

The funnest part of the game, at least in these early levels, was undoubtedly when Sonic goes fast and rolls in a ball and spins around. That was the whole selling poin of the game back in the day, really. Considering how fun it is to zoom around the level really fast making wooshing noises* they should have made it easier to do that more often. There were only a couple of spots like that that I found.

*wooshing noises are not included in the game. You have to make them yourself.


At the end of Level 1-3 Dr. Robotnick shows up. Here he is pictured trying to kill me by swinging his massive balls at my face. He succeeded. I did not go back for more.