Sonic CD

"Is it the best Sonic game of all time? No. Is it worth getting? Eh...."

When it came out four or five years ago, Sonic CD was hailed as being the best Sonic game ever (it even won a Game Of The Year award or two). With the passage of time, however, the game's shortcomings become increasingly clear. Sonic CD is a Sonic game featuring colorful graphics, a pretty decent soundtrack, poorly designed levels, smooth control, and awful, grainy ultra-letterboxed Sega CD FMV.

Graphics: 7/10

It's obvious that this game wasn't designed by Sonic Team. So, who was it designed by? The names in the credits mean nothing to me.... Anyway, the graphics fit the Sonic standard, but not by much. Although the colors are better, in point of fact the game's parallax and overall texture design was far superior (and less clunky-looking) even in Sonic 1. On the other hand, Sonic CD is still far from being a bad-looking game; it just lacks a crucial something when compared to its 16-bit brethren.

Gameplay: 7/10

Control is fairly smooth, although Spin Dashing doesn't work all that well and it can be tricky to get Sonic to enter time warps whenever any kind of obstacle is nearby. Collision detection is okay.

Sound/Music: 7/10

The sound effects are good. On the other hand, while half of the tunes are just fine, some (like the music that plays whenever the dreaded Ivo Robotnik shows up) are annoying. I hate the theme song (a very '80s-style Pat Benatar "believe in yourself and wave your lighter to the hackneyed lyrics"-type song entitled "Sonic Boom"... hopefully Guile and Charlie/Nash from Street Fighter sued for royalties). Like any game equipped with QSound, you actually have to have a system capable of processing the sound to get the most out of it. Since QSound never really caught on that much, mostly people who own Aiwa stereos (many of which do seem to be compatible with QSound, whether it's stated or not) and some home theater owners will be the only ones who get anything out of it. For the rest of us, it isn't any better or worse than any other CD game's sound. So much for gimmickry.

Concept: 7/10

The entire time travel thing falls apart pretty quickly. In theory, you have about 48-51 stages to blitz through; divide that number in 3, and you'll quickly see just how many levels are *really* in the game. The past and future versions of the normal levels aren't really much more than palette swaps with some differing parallax. In addition, there's no real reason to play the "future" levels if you want to get a better ending; you have to prevent Dr. Robotnik from ruining the world, not punish him after the fact. So, basically your goal is to try to play in the "past" as much as possible.

The bonus stages are also terribly bad. They were designed to take advantage of the Sega CD's Mode 7-ish scaling and rotating capabilities; unfortunately, someone forgot to tell Sega that its version of Mode 7 wasn't as good. The graphics are grainy and ugly, the scaling is worse than in any SNES game using Mode 7, and they're almost impossible to beat because it's extremely difficult to judge your relation to the UFOs you have to jump at in order to earn Chaos Emeralds. Just like any other Sonic game, if you get all the Emeralds, you get to see the "best" ending. Needless to say, I've never, ever seen "the best ending" of Sonic CD. Someone out there must have done it, but I ran out of patience long before I finished the game.

On the positive side, Sonic CD allows you to save the game, either to the Sega CD's internal RAM or to the RAM backup cart. No more having to restart every so often! A boon to laziness! (I've gotten used to it, too... darn.)

As for extra modes, you can earn a weird "test" mode (DA Garden) and a time attack mode. No versus mode, no other playable characters. What a waste.

Overall: 7/10

This game just doesn't stand up that well on its own these days. There's nothing at all bad about it, it just isn't as great as so many people believed it was. It is better than Sonic 3D Blast and the first two Game Gear Sonics, but that's about it. I wouldn't buy a used Sega CD just for this. If you must have a Sega CD, scrounge up Lunar or Snatcher or Vay first, then go grab this; it still isn't too hard to find used, and a few stores may even still have new copies on clearance (one outlet mall music store near my city had about twenty-five copies, which they recieved in late '97-ish from Sega as remainders; most of them sat collecting dust for two years, until they finally trickled out a couple months ago). At any rate, it's a hell of a lot better than playing "Sewer Shock" or "Tomcat Alley" or "Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective" or (God save us) "Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch: Make Your Own Video."

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99