sonic the hedgehog (sms) - 6/10
he's so wee! and flickering so horribly ow my eyes!
currently playing - nachoz - bridge zone (sonic the hedgehog sms - cover)
notice: i played this game using the Sonic 1 SMS Perfect System patch courtesy of Tracker_TD and ValleyBell through Genesis Plus GX. if you are to play the game yourself, i would highly recommend this rom itself! it sands a few edges off of the original without entirely changing it unlike the (still excellent!) fan sonic sms remake. these changes are most notable in the addition of an FM soundtrack - albeit one i had disabled, accidentally - , the dampening of the flashing lights in sky base, and thank the goddamned heavens the removal of the auto-scrolling in bridge zone act 2 and the kid icarus "go lower than the screen currently is and die" bullshit. please keep that in mind.
wow! uh, that was pretty alright, actually! its pretty decent for a majority of it, but god when bullshit rears its head, it rears hard. seriously, if you think that the mega drive version of labyrinth zone is the worst, you have not tried it in this game. mega drive labyrinth plays like you're living in fast forward in comparison to this slow-ass slog. that's my main complaint with a lot of the game here, really; the slowdown is just fucking abysmal. and its the worst too! its so so close to being so fun, arguably maintaining a better sense of speed in its intrinsic level design accessible without mastery more so than its 16-bit counterpart, but when you try to access the speed, well, it all goes out the fucking window. this game is severely bottlenecked by the constant slowdown that hounds it just when things are getting fun. it doesn't appear too harsh at first; green hill, as per mega drive sonic 1, is a light, fast romp that very much lets you tap into the breakneck pace a sonic game would evoke in your mind. however, much like a first-time playthrough of mega drive sonic 1, it'll not be too long before it comes crawling down. except, unlike in the case of the mega drive game, it's not mastery, level awareness or physics manipulation that are needed to further your ability to go fast, rather, it's the dire need of a higher goddamned sprite limit. seriously, if you try to go fast in some of the more complex stages, this motherfucker chugs asphalt milkshakes. it tears down what otherwise feels like some great stages to play!
i really love this game's exclusive zones - bridge and sky base. they're both neat little diversions from what was offered in the base game from marble and final zone respectively. where marble is a beginner's stumbling block, filled with slow blocks and lava flows that'll kill your pace if you don't know exactly what to do at all times, bridge conversely allows for a consistent speedy zippy nature (as much as the CPU allows, anyway) paired with an amazing song. i really wish that this came back in some capacity! curse you forever sega for not making the 3ds version of generations be a bunch of portable sonic stages!... even though this is the master system version and not the game gear version. eh, it doesn't have to make sense.
then with sky base, i really do like it a lot; what if the fakeout at the end of scrap brain wasn't just to set up another singular act that was a retread of a prior zone (seriously, if they pulled the labyrinth act 4 shit in this game it would be getting a star less), but instead it provided a whole new zone in of itself? yes, as opposed to the final zone just being... well, the finale, a singular act, no; it's a full three-act affair, set on the airship of a fleeing eggman. it kinda rocks! its really climactic, you're chasing through this airborne base, narrowly dodging thunderbolts just barely missing striking you down, eventually making your way inside and navigating a complex set of doors and teleporters. it's pretty fun to suss out, and that final boss was fun, if a little easy.
that's something, though. remember how i mentioned bullshit? yeah, the bosses in this game sort of made me want to pull teeth. the hitboxes are frequently fucked, and whilst the attack patterns are simple once you get down to brass tacks, it is incredibly punishing to attempt to learn them in the first instance, as sonic cannot recollect his rings in this game, and so boss fights are largely boiled down to you getting two attempts to get the download and not fuck up eight times in a row. some of them are fine, like the final boss, or the green hill boss, but then there's others like the jungle zone boss with those pissing balls that kept fucking me up with their odd momentum quirks, or god fucking forbid that damned labyrinth boss. underwater, homing projectiles, constantly spacing you like... well, actually, sort of similar to getting poor RNG in the final zone boss of sonic 1 mega drive, come to think of a comparison. they're decent enough once you get to know them but their hitboxes are quite frequently for shit, so they end up being, even once practiced, largely exercises in frustration.
i wish i had more positive to say about this game, really, i do, i love its heart, admire its uniqueness amidst the pack, and see it as a wonderful little footnote in the history of the franchise, but... that's all i can really claim it as. not a must-play, but a footnote. check it out if you're a massive sonic nut like i am but otherwise, yeah, you can give it a miss. resoundingly and unfortunately pretty middling package overall.
