It is to this day my eldest daughter’s favourite video game of all time (in fairness, she hasn’t yet played Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, a visionary masterpiece that improves with every playthrough). It combined the modern gameplay of the previous year’s Sonic Colours, with the character and level design of those vaunted originals, and borrowed elements from almost every game in between to create the perfect ‘Greatest Hits’ package for lifelong fans. Similarly, Sonic Generations mixed old and new back in 2011 to great success. The much-acclaimed Sonic Mania was a great example of this: it was, on the surface, a direct continuation of the Mega Drive games – but in technical and design terms, it was so much more than that, pulling off many tricks that would have been simply impossible on that old hardware. But every now and then the franchise produces a new game that wildly bucks this trend of stagnant mediocrity: often by deftly evoking nostalgia, but remixing the best and most beloved elements of the old canon into something new and exciting. He prevails in spite of the games he stars in, not because of their quality, which is a notoriously mixed bag. Sonic has a knack for defying expectations. Who would have thought that it would be Sonic the Hedgehog – Sonic the bloody Hedgehog – that would finally break the curse of terrible video game movies? But, having said that, who else could it possibly have been? The Sonic movies are the best video game adaptations ever made. The media franchise and meme economy that emanates from him remains in rude health, having been the star of several hit cartoons and now two against-all-odds beloved film adaptations. My kids adore him, and couldn’t care less what a Mega Drive is or was (and nor should they). Sonic the Hedgehog isn’t just a SEGA mascot – he’s a totem for the boundless electricity of youth, and this is why he has endured much longer than the knee joints of those who were there to witness his birth. There will always be a place for Sonic in hearts of kids. We loved the fact that he solved a significant number of his problems by running really fast, which made him a superhero like The Flash, but sans the intrinsic naffness of a WWII “Buy War Bonds” poster that those old DC characters all had at the time (this was a decade when Aquaman’s biggest cultural cachet was as a punchline in a Chris Rock routine, long before he’d be played by the sexiest man on Earth). We’ve loved him since we were children, during what remains the most optimistic decade we’ve ever lived through: we loved his spiky 90s ‘tude, which made him a Dennis the Menace that actually belonged to us and wasn’t a cultural hand-me-down from Scottish pensioners. Because despite all the missteps, fumbles, and what looks like a dogged commitment to never quite hitting his mark, we love Sonic. Having survived all that, he shines brightly as ever. Against the insurmountable odds of multiple decades passing, the console arm of SEGA that he originated as a mascot of disappearing in a puff of bad management, and (perhaps most astoundingly) a general sense that the games have been a bit bobbins since, well, 1998 if you’re being charitable or 1994 if you aren’t. Is this what 31 years as a sexless mascot does to a mf? Frontiers can look shockingly bleak at times. #The bar in boundless game showing home colr codes how to#I’m in the midst of a noisy trade show, and the latest Sonic the Hedgehog game is telling me how to open a switch gate, in a tutorial level that looks worryingly like Death Stranding – a post-apocalyptic Kojima game about delivering Amazon packages to Geoff Keighley, or something. It’s 2022, an eye-watering 31 years since I first encountered the little blue bastard.
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