sonic origins plus - 8/10
a perfectly cromulent collection
whilst there are inarguably still some flaws, such as the weirdly jittery menus, and the perhaps lacking museum - you know, odds are, if you're a sonic fan that you've likely seen every single one of these pieces of concept art and they're etched into your inner psyche, and the mislabelled songs'll do you a mischief - i cannot hold back here. this is far and away currently the best way to play these games if you use ultrafix and any other additional things you may want, such as soundtrack mods and all that sort of thing.
sonic 1 absolute is high quality don't get me wrong! but it changes and adds far too much for my tastes. same story with 2 forever. cd miracle edition fares a bit better, but its so very finnicky to set up from my experience. 3 air's modding community implodes every other month so its nigh-impossible to keep a solid and consistent good modlist to make it shine in the way it can.
with this game, though? built-in spindash, drop-dash, widescreen - bang. all you need, as far as i'm concerned.
additionally, the plus edition adds amy, with a unique moveset that's sort of like a halfway house situation between her own moves in sonic advance and a sort of weird sonic? its hard to explain, but shes super fun. girlboss is go!
i was genuinely surprised by how much i enjoyed the missions. as mentioned in my review of 3, i am an absolute sucker for nes remix, so having missions of that ilk placed in my sonic games was fuckin killer to me. little did i know that they'd actually be relatively competently biting in difficulty! i was stuck on a good few of these for a minute, although that may also be attributed to my stubborn refusal to get anything less than an S haha.
that said - did all the missions, completed all the games, unlocked everything in the museum, even did the little surprise picture thingy (which was really cute itself to have extra little objectives!) and did the lot. and, as previously stated, yeah, this is now the definitive way to play these games to me.
all im saying is that mario can release literally just an unaltered snes rom on a wii disc for $30 for his anniversary and nobody bats an eye. sonic releases 4 full-ass games with heapings of extra content and changes and everybody goes wild. yet another case of the sonic bias in action? more likely than you think.
happily played on linux, too! pc version is great outside of the aforementioned mild performance hiccups, hence the docked star. overall, though, fun awaits you no matter how you play this.
