Review:
Sonic Classic Collection

For gamers of a certain age, there are some things that are simply iconic. The original loop-the-loop. The pseudo-3D half pipe run. Activating Super Sonic. The sound of the rings. Thankfully, Sega is on hand to provide all of these warm, lifelong memories in a tidy, coin-sized package, released just in time for the forthcoming Sonic 4.

Assembled together for the first time on a handheld are four of the best games of all time – Sonic 1, 2 ,3 and the expansion pack Sonic and Knuckles. Individually, the four games are utter classics. Combined, they form one of the greatest retro packages ever made.

The gameplay is almost charmingly simple by today’s standards. You control the titular blue hedgehog, running left to right as fast as possible, leaping over the various deadly traps, destroying enemy badniks, collecting chaos emeralds and battling the devious Doctor Robotnik. Along the way you’ll have to slow down to solve a few puzzles that block your route and attempt to seek out each game’s utterly enormous stash of secrets.

Of the four, the original Sonic the Hedgehog is probably the most difficult, demanding both superhuman reflexes and patience as you navigate the six treacherous zones. Accessing the chaos emeralds is equally difficult – you are required to complete a zone with a least fifty rings and then clear an impossibly fiddly and hallucinogenic maze. It’s gaming at its most intense, most rewarding and most genuinely pure.

Sonic 2 ups the ante, doubling the number of zones but decreasing the difficulty slightly. Chaos emeralds can now be collected by activating a checkpoint star post with fifty rings and beating the six increasingly hard half pipe runs. The number of coins in each zone increase as well as the extra lives and the difficulty curve ramps up quite gently, affording many new players the opportunity to see the brilliantly designed, wonderfully varied zones.