Sonic Origins Review: Classic Game Collection Put Me in a Better Mood

Rather than targeting Earth, however, the bad doctor is conquering a colorful alien race known as Wisps. „Colors“ also introduces Cubot and Orbot; Eggman’s robot sidekicks who act as comic relief, and Yacker, a special White Wisp who asks Sonic and Tails to help free his people from Eggman. It is also worth noting that Sega released the „Sonic Advance“ handheld series during this same time period, which were 2D platformers that featured Sonic’s modernized look.

In 2019, Sega released a kart racing game, Team Sonic Racing , developed by Sumo Digital. In May 2021, Sega announced several Sonic projects for the series‘ 30th anniversary, including a remaster of Sonic Colors, the compilation Sonic Origins, and the 2022 game Sonic Frontiers. Frontiers was the first Sonic game to feature open-world design, and Iizuka expressed hope that it would inform future games in a similar way to Sonic Adventure.

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A lot was scrapped before the first game was released, but it’s fun to look back at what could have been. Launched amid a barrage of international hype, Sonic 2 would become a standard of Genesis players‘ collections as the pack-in game for the redesigned system. So fruitful was the title’s development that many of the more ambitious elements intended for Sonic 2 would end up forming the backbone of later entries in the series. Meanwhile the bits you did get – Tails, the Spin Dash, increasingly inventive uses of the Genesis hardware – are what made this one an easy choice to rank as the best Sonic game ever made.

Players will be able to customize various parts of their vehicle to advance their racing style. There are nine unique parts for every character (135 parts in total!). Race through the Sonic Universe with 21 total tracks across seven worlds.

  • SRB2 is closely inspired by the original Sonic games from the Sega Genesis, and attempts to recreate the design in 3D.
  • SegaSonic Frontiers is finally here and the blue hedgehog has ventured into full open world territory and the results are genuinely fantastic.
  • The Special Stages being one of them, and while they aren’t hard or demanding enough to be frustrating, it’s still glaringly obvious that their main purpose is as a technical piece, rather than tie together the game better in some way.
  • Penders remained the head writer for the following 150 issues and developed an elaborate lore unique to the series.

I was actually screaming at my TV in disbelief and glee when I realized what was happening. Generally, you want to stick to the higher routes to beat stages quickly, but a single mistake can send you plummeting to lower areas of the level. These branching paths make multiple playthroughs feel fresh, since you can still discover new areas of a stage even after beating it several times. Such is the case with „Shadow the Hedgehog,“ the darker spin-off game with multiple edgy endings — a few of sonic games online which include Shadow’s murder of the main franchise’s primary villain, Dr. Eggman. The game features „hero,“ „neutral,“ and „evil“ choices in every level, and depending on what combination of these you choose across the campaign, different finales will see Shadow the Hedgehog put the nail in Eggman’s coffin.

We also can’t forget how the game standardized video game release dates with its “Sonic 2sday” launch, which was a huge deal at the time. This one is arguably the best of the original Genesis titles. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 surpasses the original in almost every single aspect. It has sharper graphics, larger levels and more inventive boss battles.

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Animation, for instance, is dramatically better due to the capability of modern video game hardware. Even in Sonic Generations, were Sonic had a birthday in the game, Sonic is still 15. That means he went back in time to when he was 15 from when he was 15… weird. It also means that Sonic’s game series is canonically older than he is. If you want to make this even stranger, Sonic Jam and the original Sonic comic peg Sonic as 16 years old… which means Sonic has aged… backwards? Then again, his original incarnation listed him as 15 as well so, does he age in a sine curve?

Sonic the Hedgehog is still regularly ranked as one of the top gaming franchises of all-time, even with all of the 3D missteps. The Blue Blur and the rest of his friends also continue to be a commercial success for Sega outside of video games, with everything from plushies to cartoons to a long-running comic book series available for consumption. Throughout the early 90s Sonic The Hedgehog saw a ton of sequels, all of which introduced new faces to the series. This included Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Sonic CD, Sonic The Hedgehog 3, and Sonic and Knuckles.