![]() Does this make Sonic CD fundamentally joyless and inaccessible for the vast majority of players? Of course not! I know friends who are lifelong fans of this game and still regularly talk about how they don’t get it, while a cursory internet search brings up countless questions from players trying to make sense of it all. ![]() Yet for many Sonic CD players, the time travel mechanics remain an obscure and mystifying addition. Securing a good future across the whole game requires deliberate, methodical play and hours of practice that ensures you can come back years later with a clear reason to keep playing. You have to respect how replayable this design choice makes Sonic CD. Do this across all seven levels and the game’s true, good ending will be unlocked. Where previous Sonic games largely required you (chaos emeralds aside) to run from left to right, beat a few boss battles and get to the end of the game, Sonic CD has an additional overarching objective to “make a good future.” If the player travels into the past of each zone then finds and destroys a robot transporter then the dark, dystopian future zones will become much happier looking stages. Now this is where a So nic CD superfan might tell you that there’s an ideal path through the game, and they’d technically be correct. Instead, Sonic CD presents a tantalizing potential for the first time in the series… Variety! It’s conceivably possible that you could play through this game several times and take an entirely different route through it on each occasion. Yes, Sega could have used the extra CD space to simply triple the usual number of levels and create one epic Sonic game, but that wouldn’t be particularly interesting or innovative and would arguably grow tiresome for players used to blasting through a platform game in a few hours. I’d love to see this particular bit improved in a remake to keep Sonic’s sense of momentum even when he passes into an entirely new time zone, but we can’t have everything now, can we?įrom a development perspective, the time travel gimmick is smart. That would have been really special, but I guess the slow loading times of the early CD format couldn’t quite handle that and you have to wait a few seconds while watching a little animation of Sonic flying through the timestream, without even a phonebox to protect him. ![]() I wish I could say it was an instant transition. Each stage has three versions, a past, present and future version that Sonic can access by passing appropriately labeled signposts and then running fast enough and long enough that he breaks through the time barrier to emerge in the alternative stage. While Sonic CD might feel like a backwards step from Sonic 2 in these respects, it feels like a giant loop forwards in others, most notably in its time travel theme. It’s almost as if the team in Japan heard about this new innovation their counterparts in the US were developing, but weren’t allowed to see it, so had to just guess how it would work. Nevertheless, this is a solo mission for Sonic, which makes the game feel distinctly closer in spirit to the original Sonic The Hedgehog than any of its sequels.įurthermore, there’s the spin dash, which is animated completely differently to the one in Sonic 2 and doesn’t feel quite as slick or responsive to use. In fact, there’s no attempt to give Sonic a partner character at all, although the cast is expanded with some neat in-level story scenes featuring new characters Amy Rose and Metal Sonic. Tails is nowhere to be seen, for example. ![]() This team not only took advantage of the CD medium to introduce new ideas, they also took the design and story in a different direction, branching off from the original game to make Sonic CD feel like an alternative sequel to the substantially more popular Sonic 2. While Yuji Naka worked on Sonic 2 over in the US with the Sega Technical Institute, an entirely separate team was back at HQ in Japan making a totally different Sonic game for Mega CD. Sonic CD seems to be made with a different philosophy, its designers taking the “CD” part of the title to heart and really taking inspiration from the new technology. I don’t think I even understood what an RPG was until Final Fantasy VII. I’d later learn that in the USA and Japan the Mega CD and PC Engine CD were graced with these huge RPGs with vast worlds and early examples of voice acting, but such luxuries rarely crossed our line of sight here in the UK. Maybe you’d get an enhanced soundtrack if you were really lucky, or grainy FMV games that were an acquired taste at best. The former was littered with ports of regular Amiga games that were rarely any different to the floppy disk versions, and Mega CD games tended to be similar variations on existing Mega Drive carts. The first CD console I owned was the Amiga CD32, while a mate had a Mega CD.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |