Screenshots from Video Game Museum

Year released: 1992 (Game Gear)

Number of Players: 1

Get the six Chaos Emeralds so that you can free Tails from Robotnik's evil clutches.

Graphics: Sonic's sprites look accurate when compared to drawn pictures of him. Enemies are weird robots, and environments rarely get to be eye candy, but they're realistic nevertheless.

Play control: "Left and right with control pad, button 1 or 2 to jump, press down as moving to go into a spin. When jumping or spinning, most enemies crumble before Sonic's sharp spines. It's a cinch!" -Taken from my review of Sonic 1 for Game Gear. And guess what--it also holds true for this game!!

Sound: While the instruments can get irritating, the composition itself is actually cool. If you saw Sonic jamming out to this music, you would want to be right there with him.

Challenge: Spikes. Sonic has to get over the spikes. Or a bottomless pit. That's the challenge in a nutshell. Oh, yeah, I'd mention how you only get one ring for bosses, but meh.

Gameplay: 2D platformer. "First of all, you collect rings. Once you get hit, you lose those rings. If you get hit with no rings, you die. If you lose your rings, the only way to get rings again is to find new ones." - Taken from my review of Sonic 1 for Game Gear again. Only thing different is the fact that you can get your rings back now. They bounce around and blink, just run around and collect them again.
Great realistic momentum engine (speeding up and slowing down), and it's used correctly this time. Even though there's a lack of enemies, the stage design carries you along for four straight levels. It gets hard until you figure out just how to do it--then, from there, it's easy to get past that point at any given time. However, after Green Hill Zone (level 4), the game loses all touch with reality and just slaps together stages. I don't know what happened, but they seem to lose their luster. Oh yeah, the emeralds are hidden within stages, not bonus stages.

Bottom line: Definetely would've been a great game if it didn't stop short of itself (you still have three levels to go after you beat Green Hill Zone). Some people say the challenge is too high, but "bah" to them.

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