Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how’s it going this week? Are you well? Yeah, I am. Yeah, very well. I’m kind of a bit chirpy now that E3’s over, and I can just sort of, you know, chill and not have to spend every evening watching streams. Yep. I’m very, very happy for you and myself as well, after being submerged in game news for a week. So, we are joined by another special guest. So, Jay, would you like to introduce yourself? Hey, my name is Jay Baylis. I’m an independent game developer, and I’m one half of Byton Studio. Wow, we are not used to having people who make actual computer games on this podcast. That’s like- Yeah, shockingly new for us. So, yeah, Jay, tell us a bit about your background in games development. I kind of like grew up mostly on like Nintendo consoles. Growing up, I had a SNES and Mega Drive, kind of secondhand, and kind of grew up with those kind of pixel art games. I kind of like was a casual gamer. And then when I was maybe like 10 or 11, I started getting into, you know, games journalism, reading about games. My biggest doorway into the world of gaming as it was, was reading NOM or Nintendo Official Magazine, and it’s later rebranding O&M, which Matthew’s familiar with. All too familiar. Yeah, I was like big into that. So I had like, at a certain point, I think I had like a stack of every single issue published. I was like an issue one subscriber, yeah. I kind of got like super involved in like the kind of online side of things there. The O&M forum was interesting. It kind of ended up becoming in retrospect, this kind of pre-hub for a lot of people who ended up in the UK game scene, I found in retrospect. Oh really? Yeah, like I’ve talked to like a bunch of people and be like, hey, like, it was kind of this moment of recognition of like, we used to be on the same forum and we were like teenagers. There’s people who write about games, people I’ve worked with and then kind of met who are developers. So I’ve spent like a lot of time making my own little like fan games and stuff. People used to make like, use like sprite rips and things. So I got super into developing pixel art. Just as like a hobby, there was no sense of, you could make games as a career back when I was a teenager in like the mid 2000s. So I used to do like a lot of community projects and animations and stuff on there. I’m just kind of posting these again on like the Nintendo forums online. And it was never a sense that there was like a career behind it. But at a certain point in time, I remember Six Form, which for any US listeners, Six Form is kind of like, how would you describe it? Like latter- High school? Latter high school, yeah. That was kind of around the time when like suddenly Minecraft and Terraria hit in like kind of a one-two punch. And these are kind of like, oh, these are cool games. And then I would kind of like see them take off. I was always like told, like growing up, you know, like working games is terrible. And you’d read magazine interviews, it’s the one who worked on some game for a long time and it was horrible. And they made crates for three years and the game got canceled and they got paid pittance for it. So I always had this expectation that, you know, making games wasn’t a career, but then around the time I was kind of studying and I kind of like study animation, indie games became kind of like a viable career. So once I graduated, I kind of started working in games full time. I worked for a long time on a game called Starbound and then following that, a game called Wargroove, which was kind of a nice full circle of, you know, reading Nintendo magazines growing up and being really into the fan side of that and getting to publish something on Switch. What did you do on Wargroove? So I was quite a lot and predominantly an artist. So I did a lot of the pixel art, animation, character design and then like a bit of the kind of gameplay design and some of the extra writing stuff. Yes, that was a really cool project to be involved in. Did you do the dog? There’s a couple of dogs. I did one of the dog. I didn’t do the main dog, but I know the dog that you’re probably thinking of. The dogs were very popular. Yeah, so following that, my colleague and I went full time independent. We released a game in 2020 called Lenna’s Inception, which is kind of like a small scale, like a Zelda homage, kind of weird game. And since then we’ve been working on a game called Cassette Beasts, which is a monster collecting RPG, kind of open world. It’s kind of a throwback to DS era, kind of style visually. Okay. Kind of combining like low poly 3D and 2D sprites. And that’s what I’m doing now. And I’ve been locked inside for the last year, working on that. It looks really, really good. I mean, Cassette Beasts, kind of like what we’re sort of, we’ve talked about this a little bit, Jay. I hope you don’t mind talking about it publicly. But the idea that like Pokemon is probably the next kind of like Nintendo series to get that big wave of sort of indie takes. Oh, we’re already seeing the start of it. Like so the game Temtem released in the last couple of years. And that was basically like, what if we did Pokemon, but MMO and that’s kind of like, that’s done really well. And that’s on like every console now. Among the indie side, there is this boom of people taking on the role and kind of take on it. I guess with Cassette Beasts, we’re trying to be a little bit more distant. Obviously there’s this aspect of like collecting monsters. We’re not trying to compete with Pokemon in terms of like, Pokemon is like the ultimate like pet simulator, you know. It’s very much around this fantasy of like growing attached to this creature and it being really cool and you can pet it and you go on adventures together. Cassette Beasts is more about journeying with like your friends side of thing. So we’re kind of like leaning towards the kind of like the characterization and the writing aspect. Rather than catching monsters as like, I don’t know, like slaves, like sentient beings are slaves and then like fighting with them. It’s more about like kind of transforming into them, like weird power rangers, I guess. Oh, that’s cool. Interesting. I mean, you should see this DS aesthetic as well because that’s obviously quite close to my heart because it’s the period I was covering. The thing that’s popping into my head is like Spectrobes. It’s interesting. Yeah, I remember, I got Spectrobes when it came out. I was definitely like, I would grow up on anything that was like close to this genre I would like devour. Yeah, it’s interesting that like there’s been games like Spectrobes or like some of the Digimon games across the years that have kind of tried to tap into this scene. And I think now we’re seeing like more and more burgeoning interest in it, I think is fair to say. I think there’s now a point where everyone’s realized that Pokemon is gonna stay reliably Pokemon. It’s not gonna be more than it needs to be. And I think that’s completely fine. And I still love those games. But I think there’s like a kind of community of people who have grown up with them. And maybe you’re looking for more things. Let’s scratch a few of those itches. So that’s hopefully what we’ll aim to scratch. We’ll see. Yeah, so people can check out for that out on your Bitten Studios Twitter feed, right? Yeah, we’ll link that in the episode description. But you can check out what the game looks like. It looks really, really nice. And if you appreciate the art style of Wargroove, you can definitely see that same sort of DNA coming through. But yeah, the aesthetic, I immediately thought of sort of Pokemon Diamond when looking at it. So yeah, good stuff. So yeah, I mean, in terms of like how you sort of become sort of prominent in the industry, Jay, like what sort of game changer was Starbound? Because I felt like one of the first sort of major early access games that just like caught a wave and then just became enormous. Like what was that like for you kind of like as an up and coming artist? That was, yeah, that was pretty crazy. I think that was the point at which, you know, we’re seeing these big pixel art games coming out. And it was suddenly like, people were paying attention to the people making them in a way. I never had this feeling again, when we were talking, going back to reading O&M and magazines like that growing up. I never had this feeling of individual artists weren’t people, you’d have Miyamoto and the big creators. But then I think indie taking off, because you can create games with smaller teams and suddenly smaller creators have more value, I guess, is fair to say. And that’s kind of like an interesting change now. You can follow independent artists from project to project and kind of build this community of people who follow those individual artists. And also like, it’s easy to network, you know, if games are smaller, then people have more prominent roles on them. And therefore, you know, you can talk about those things easier. It’s very different to kind of the perception I had growing up of, you know, you work on a game, 200 people work on a game, you’re like a face in a crowd, essentially. That makes sense, yeah. So I think I first met you in, I think it was September 2017, when I came to Chucklefish to check out Wargroove. And so then we became buddies and I briefly lived in Brighton and was going through a kind of mild existential crisis. You were sort of my good coffee shop pal. So, yeah, now we play games together quite regularly. So I’ve dragged you onto this episode to talk about Sonic the Hedgehog, which is turning 30 around the time this episode release. I think a lot of people are aware of this anniversary because Sega just did a live stream where they talked about a bunch of future Sonic the Hedgehog rated stuff. So, I mean, you know, Jay, I’ll definitely have you on for more episodes down the line just so people don’t think I’ve tarnished you as like the Sonic guy. Because obviously I, you know, I want people to have your sort of like a full breadth of opinions on games because yeah, I think you’re a great thinker on games. But so I’ve brought you onto this one to talk about Sonic. What’s your sort of history with the series? So I’m kind of at that weird mid to late like millennial age where I grew up with old Sonic, like the classics, Mega Drive Sonic games and then immediately switched to the kind of like the 3D era. So I think a lot of people have, you know, in their like childhood memory, it’s very much one or the other. But I think I’m kind of at this weird tipping point where my friends and I kind of got into both halves of that very quickly. So like I got like a lot of the older consoles secondhand and growing up. So I grew up predominantly on the kind of 16 bit. And then I had like all the old Sonic games, like secondhand. I do miss the era of like being able to go into like a UK like video rental store and ask to see the box of cartridges. Do you remember that? And they’d pull out like a big plastic box from behind a like a drawer or something. And they’d just get to pick out like tattered copies of like Super Mario World or Star Fox or like Columns. That’s cool. No, I never had that experience. That’s like my memory of like getting games up to a certain point in time. So yeah, I loved the Mega Drive ones like a lot. And then Sonic was always like cooler than Mario. I think growing like looking back, like I was big into Nintendo as well. But then my memories of like, you know, like Sonic 1, Sonic 2 kind of burned brighter than like Super Mario World, which was kind of this like very hard, hard, weird little game. But then, you know, Sonic is cool. It’s designed in our lab to be extremely cool to seven-year-olds and that like worked with me. Also, they were very like great like sleepover with your mates games, you know, one of you could be Tails on the second controller. It was early like early local like co-op, which is really cool, I think. There’s a turning point where I got into the 3D games and then I had had kind of grown up reading that they were like, or up to a certain point, you’d read reviews of them and then they’d be like, oh, this is crap. So I would never like get into them. And I remember renting a particular game, I’ll go into this later. I won’t spoil my future revelations. There was a certain point where I realized, actually, hang on, I think these are great. And then I would basically buy every 3D Sonic game up to a point where I got too old and realized they actually started declining after a certain point and maybe weren’t ever that good. But yeah, so Sonic is something that I’ve definitely been very big into for a majority of my life. We’ve kind of seen this modern day rebranding of Sonic. I don’t know if you’ve perceived this where after decades of Sonic games are universally crap and it being kind of a joke, the kind of companies leaned into that. And the Sonic branding that I recognize the most in like the modern day is this very like self-aware, me-me Sonic. But that’s like so different to how I see the brand and the kind of series kind of growing up, which is this very like earnest, self-assured, cool thing. Yeah, so I’ve noticed that transition too and I definitely hit that point with the 3D era of the series where I kind of like fell out of love with it a little bit, which is part of the reason I invited you on here, Jay, because I know that you sort of have more familiarity with that era than I do to plug some of the knowledge gaps. But yeah, Sonic the Hedgehog was engineered to be a mascot. We’re not going to go massively into the making of the series here because there are loads of good resources on this. I recommend the channel Stray Fox on YouTube for some really good comprehensive making of us on the games. But the top line is that Naoto Ishimura at Sega basically designed the character and then sort of superstar programmer Yuji Naka came in and helped build the game. And then it became this massive success, like fairly deep into the Mega Drive or the Genesis’s lifespan. And then over time, there are a few more sort of Sonic games in the 90s that are considered classics. Then when the Sega Saturn hits, Sega starts running into trouble. There’s a couple of really quite interesting Sega spin-offs that come on the add-on hardware for the Genesis or the Mega Drive, the 32X and the Sega CD, which we’ll talk about a bit later. So that whole era of Sonic is quite classic. There’s a bunch of Game Gear and Master System games mixed in there as well. So there’s a lot of Sonic at one time. And then it sort of goes a bit fallow in the mid 90s as the famous Sonic Extreme project fails to come together and nothing much happens. But then in 1998, the Dreamcast hits and you get Sonic Adventure. And then this kicks off the 3D era of Sonic. Sonic Adventure is actually acclaimed by critics. You have to go a bit deeper into the series history before you get, or sorry, a bit closer to the present before you get to Sonic being endlessly dunked on. But Crick’s mostly liked Sonic Adventure. And then, yeah, from there, it becomes more of a multi-format series. The Dreamcast dies and then Sonic games have to be found on GameCube. I think the GameCube kind of becomes a de facto home for Sonic a little bit, even though some of the games are multi-format. And then you get to the kind of modern era of HD consoles and Sonic becomes very kind of contentious to say that’s very much a low point for Sonic when you’ve got Sonic 2006, which is considered one of the worst games of the series. 3D game features Sonic sort of romancing a human princess. That’s been extensively memed, so we don’t need to re-litigate that. And then, yeah, you get to kind of, you get some like good games along the way, basically. Even when Sonic seems quite bad, there’s always something good going on with Sonic, I think. Like one good game every few years, whether it’s like a DS version of another game or, you know, Sonic Generations, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. There’s like bright spots along the way. And then you get to the modern day, where Sonic still seems to exist as this kind of like big branding exercise. And all of the kind of, I have no real concept of it. The kind of like home console games have been releasing since Sonic Lost World, which is the last one I kind of played and hated. And then so after that, they’ve become kind of like almost anime tie-in games, which is its own kind of baffling thing. But yeah, a really weird history where it almost feels like there are multiple kind of like streams of Sonic in there. Like the kind of, it’s almost unrecognizable to me as someone who used to, who grew up playing the Mega Drive games. But then over time, Sega’s kind of rediscovered its lineage and sort of like worked with basically fan game developers to kind of revive some of the better parts of his history and also to build on that, even with like a brand new game in Sonic Mania. So it definitely had a kind of like a weird, interesting history. But the big question, I think, Matthew, for our listeners is what do you think of Sonic the Hedgehog and what’s your history with the series? Um, so I dunk a lot on Sonic the Hedgehog. And what this is a bit awkward because I was going back over some end-gamer reviews. And actually I was pretty generous to games which are largely reviled. Like I think I actually, you know, for all my big talk, I’ve been quite kind to Sonic in reviews, which I can’t really explain. I don’t really know what happened there. I think it may be a combination of that kind of buzz around some kind of exclusives on the Wii and DS. You know, when someone puts a bit of effort into something, you maybe gave it a bit more of a pass, which maybe explains some of that. Yeah, I had a Mega Drive when we were kids. We had a Mega Drive, yeah, played Sonic’s one to three. I don’t think we ever had the weird Knuckles cart. And liked them fine. I was always, so when we were kids, like there was a house across the river and the boys who lived there, they had a SNES and we had a Mega Drive. And we basically spent, you know, 50, 50 of our time like in one house or the other. So we kind of played both. But I was always super envious of the Nintendo stuff. That said, Sonic, why don’t I have as much of affection for it? When I do hear or see footage from one to three, I am very nostalgic for it. I love the sound of the games. I love the looks of those games. They’re such distinct things. But yeah, me and Sonic, we just totally part ways when he goes 3D. And it’s just interesting hearing Jay talk about, you know, kind of being a bit into both because the thing I’ve never been able to wrap my head around is like the psychology of the modern Sonic fan, particularly like when I was working on Nintendo mags. Sonic used to do really well and the perception was it was doing really well with much younger gamers who couldn’t possibly have had a relationship with Sonic when he was quote unquote good in 2D. And that’s what I could never understand. Someone who went into Sonic only in 3D, having affection for this, what was quite, you know, I didn’t like the character and I didn’t like the gameplay basically. And yeah, so I was hoping this episode I could get a better feel for like, what it is about basically adventure forward that had any impact on people. Yeah, so Jay, to kind of like dial in on that period where Sonic goes from being 2D to 3D, what do you think kind of goes through the sort of, what do you think Sega kind of tackles there? What do you think they think about in terms of like making Sonic work? And what are the ways in which you think that kind of results in some real mixed affair games in the coming years? It’s interesting, isn’t it? So like, you kind of talked about how there’s almost like these waves of games. It’s almost like Sega would do like maybe like a trilogy or like a quartet of a certain style of game. And that’s how they develop everything past the kind of Mega Drive era. They do like three or four games in a particular style. You’ve got like the Sonic Advance 1, 2, 3, done. It’s like Sonic Adventure, like 1, 2, Heroes done. And then kind of like, they’d always like kind of switch gears after a certain point. So you have like the Sonic Adventure games, which are very, very different in kind of what they want out of the character. And they have the kind of very earnest kind of like grand, like epic kind of feel that they’re striving for. And then further down the line, it’s almost like you backtrack on that. It’s almost like people get nostalgic for the wave before that, which is like the Mega Drive era where Sonic was simple, there was less story, he goes fast. So then you have things like Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Colors, which are much more stripped down on the story front and much more about like nice locations and you go fast through them with tales occasionally. It’s almost like a back and forth of trying to figure out what the generation who was into the immediate prior series was nostalgic for is maybe one way of approaching it. And then so like, we had that spree of like the story like games, and then we had Sonic Forces, which was them trying to tap back into that serious style with like a billion characters. And I haven’t played that game. It looks terrible from everything that I read. It wasn’t great. That’s the one you can make your own Sonic, right? Yeah, that was super tapping into maybe like the kind of like the Dreamcast era of like Sonic fandom. So maybe the next one is gonna swing again to something where it’s much more stripped down on the story and it’s much more about like going fast in nice locations. There’s multiple aspects that people like to it and it’s hard to make a good Sonic game, I think. Something that I’m sure we’ll talk about. You can never please everyone, but the brand is big enough that it will keep going. So we’ll keep trying things and they won’t always work. Sometimes they do and sometimes they’ll change gears after that anyway. It is very interesting. That’s actually the amazing thing is that I don’t think there are a few other mascots that could survive as many duds as Sonic has. Sega must just have such an attachment to him or they’re just scraping by what’s doable. But by all accounts, nothing post-Mega Drive has ever come close to as big as it was on Mega Drive. Do you think it’s the strength of the character? There’s something so innately kid, like eight-year-old appeal to this character that every generation will, they don’t even have to play the games. They’ll just see this character in like mixed media or YouTube videos or whatever. And people become fans. That’s the kind of conclusion I came to. Like when, so for example, kind of a handy sort of stat that shows this is one of the best selling issues of official Nintendo magazine ever was Sonic Unleashed, was the werehog on the cover, which was an abysmal game. On Wii, I thought it was an abysmal game. Like I think we gave it like in the 50s on Endgamer. And yeah, like for some, that’s what I couldn’t understand. It was like, who was looking at that and going like, yeah, cool, we love this. You know, where did that love come from? And at the time people were like, oh, Sonic actually exists like beyond the games in a way you maybe don’t appreciate, you know, like people who like the cartoons or the comics or whatever. Do you think there’s any truth in that? Oh, absolutely. I think after a certain point, so I did buy the Wii version of Sonic Unleashed when I was a teenager. And I almost feel like it’s, it doesn’t matter if the games aren’t that great because you can see that like, it’s hard, it’s a really hard thing to explain. I can’t quite tap into my own psychology on this. It’s almost like there’s an idealized version of Sonic and it’s just fun to see how close every game gets to that. And when they’re bad, they’re mostly not inoffensively bad. Or they mostly are inoffensively bad. Like, I don’t have bad memories of Sonic Unleashed but I wouldn’t rush to play it. And I don’t know why that is. Maybe the bar for Sonic is different. It kind of, you get to allow yourself a different kind of expectation that is lower maybe. I think there has to be a bit of that because so in the run up to this episode, I thought, you know, I better refresh myself on a lot of Sonic. And so I started watching a lot of Sonic ranking videos on YouTube. And even on those videos, when they were in like the top five of 15, like even the second to last entry, so the second best Sonic game, the guy doing the video was still like, I mostly hate this game. And you were like, like, this is the second best game and I only like a quarter of it. And I was like, what is it in your psychology that allows that to happen? In Mario, you’d have to go like 20 games deep before you got to, okay, this is maybe less than a masterpiece, but Sonic, it was like even the number one entry is like, oh God, like as long as you ignore this stuff, which like makes me just want to sort of jump off a cliff, this is the best Sonic game. Yeah, unless that’s just like part of the meme of being a Sonic fan, I don’t know. I almost wonder if it’s, the closest comparison I have, and this might be way off base, but it’s like watching comic book movies before they got like actually consistently good, where, I mean, I’m sure Samuel has an experience on this one. Like if a film had a certain amount of references or you had this feel like it was tapping into some aspect in some way of this comic property that you liked, then that film would be a success, even if the film wasn’t very good. And I almost feel like that is almost what it feels like in that kind of era of like middling Sonic games. There was some aspect of the old games that I remember and it taps into some imagery, iconography or musical kind of feel. And if it like ticks enough boxes, not enough to necessarily make it like a great or particularly good game, it’s still like, you’re not coming out of that feeling like you were ripped off. Yeah, I think a big part of it is that even in those eras where there are patchy Sonic games, there are usually some other good Sonic games around it. So, or at least like some Sonic games aren’t like totally bad. So, Sonic 2006 is released very close to Sonic Rush or the DS for example, which I don’t think is like amazing, but was a 2D Sonic game. I think it’s a bit too fast moving personally and a bit too focused on like whacking a boost button, which is a problem I have with most of the 3D Sonics actually. But it’s still a pretty good 2D Sonic game that releases alongside a 3D game that’s considered a disaster on home consoles basically. And this tracks through the GameCube era as well. I mean, I don’t know, Sonic Heroes is actually a big selling game. I was looking up, it sold almost 4 million copies. So you’ll probably find that’s actually a huge moment for creating Sonic fans, Matthew, like you referenced, like people who you can plausibly see five years later buying a copy of official Nintendo magazine that has Sonic Unleashed on the cover. I can see that being plausible. Oh, 100%. I know people who are a couple years younger than me. I’ve spoken to them about this recently and they said Sonic Heroes was their childhood Sonic game. They loved it and they bought future games hoping it was close to Sonic Heroes. Which I’m sure will make a lot of people feel very old. Here’s the other thing as well. Sega, I mean this character more than any other. Sega is so, so good at making sure that you can play it on every single format imaginable. So next year we’re going to see Sonic Origins, this collection that brings Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Knuckles and Sonic CD into one collection for modern consoles. When I got back into Sonic, basically I turned 17 or 18 and then I just bought Sonic Mega Collection on PS2. Suddenly I had every single Sonic game including some quite skilled ones in one place. I think that reheating Sonic in these compilation packages has also kept the character evergreen. I own Sonic the Hedgehog on the iPod, not the iPhone, the iPod. You could play it with the buttons on the iPod. Did it work properly? Not really. But that just shows how pervasive Sonic is. His greatest hits never really go away. I think that’s quite key to keeping his appeal seemingly evergreen. My buddy had the same version on the big old chunky iPod. I remember him playing through that and 100%ing Sonic 1 during English class with the big wheel. A very difficult process. That’s a very of its time kind of anecdote. But I appreciate it. At the same time as well, even when Sonic Heroes has a mixed critical reception, you have the Sonic Advance games, which I think are a kind of mixed bag, but I think the first one and the second one are pretty good. The first one in particular I really liked. I played a lot of that at the time. It’s always been kept around good and bad and at the same time, the modern games, I think the problem that always hit was they could never figure out how to make Sonic work in 3D in a way that balanced the speed well with good exploration and platforming, which is what the Mega Drive… This is, I think, the key to the Mega Drive game success is that they’re not that fast. They’re pretty fast and they have set PC moments, but you can also explore and find different pathways and different power-ups and stuff, and there are rewards for doing that. You can speed run it, but you don’t have to play it that way. I think that’s what Sonic loses when you get to the Unleashed era, where you do have this amazing spectacle in Sonic Unleashed when you’re not playing as the werehog, where you’re just running through these real-world locations and it’s very fast and beautiful, but it’s not a great platformer. It’s like whack the boost button and then just home in on enemies to kill them and move on. I always felt like the homing attack was basically them putting their hands up and saying, yeah, he’s an uncontrollable mess. This is a fundamentally broken character and this is our fix to it. And our fix becomes the core component of all these games for 15 years, which is just mad. Nintendo would never let that happen. I also feel like they were a bit like, so when you talk about Sonic Unleashed, I feel like that was a point where they hit the HD era and it suddenly becomes more expensive to make world content in games. And they came up with this formula for Unleashed, which is like go very fast through a world that looks very pretty for its time and still holds it pretty well. But it’s expensive to make raw game content when you’re going through the content that fast. So I kind of like talk about this in my notes later on, but one of the issues with the kind of HD era is that the games become very short because I guess it becomes much more expensive to make the game longer, I guess, at that point. That’s a good point. I hadn’t really thought about that, but yeah, obviously. They should have slowed it right down, gone like walking simulator with it. They should have had Sonic walking wistfully through like Greece while he picks up audio logs of like Big the Cat, it’s like Dear Esther, that’d be amazing. See, I was thinking, I immediately thought of the trip when you said that, like Steve Coogan and Rob Blyden. But yeah, I, that’s a good point, Jay. So you think that the werehog stuff, because you’re moving slowly, they don’t have to create as much like level content, basically, too. I would definitely like they had this issue of we have to like pad this game out. And this is an issue, again, that a lot of the 3D games have is we only have so many like asset sets for a world and like, so like, okay, we’ve created this pool of world assets for a Greece level. What can we do to make it so you don’t go through this in like two minutes? And the werehog being this like, strange kind of stripped down death may cry-esque gameplay where you’re going through these worlds very slowly gets like something of their money’s worth, I guess, out of that. Just to kind of like throw a bit of my personal history into this, because I suppose I drove the creation of this episode more than Matthew, so if you must blame someone, blame me. Basically Sonic 1 was the first game that I, first good game I ever played, like my aunt and uncle had a Mega Drive and I had played like Mario is Missing, an educational game on my parents’ old PC, but we didn’t have like games as it were. So, seeing this in action was amazing and I think like, I think the lack of story does is part of the reason I have a much more affection for this early era of Sonic games and less so for later. Like when Sonic starts sounding like a kind of like Valley Girl, I just, that doesn’t quite do it for me. I just, I don’t, I don’t have any kind of investment in Sonic lore. I thought Sonic was cool as a kid because he didn’t say anything. He just ran around like destroying robots and then in these quite muted levels, that’s the weird thing about Sonic 1. We’ll talk about this later, but it’s not that colourful a game, the first Sonic game. The later ones are much more sort of like cute and full of kind of like weird characters and stuff. But Sonic 1 was quite a muted sort of game and I don’t know, like enough for my adult kind of like aunt and uncle to buy it and enjoy it, I suppose. But yeah, the other kind of weird thing about Sonic’s popularity in Europe is that obviously the Mega Drive is extremely popular here, Sega really had a kind of sort of strangle hold on the market and you know, were definitely kind of like doing better here than they were in America. And that kind of led to things like Sonic the comic where there was this kind of weird legacy sort of interest in Sonic that comes from people reading these like fairly good for what they were, comic stories from the early to mid 90s. So Sonic does have a kind of very specific UK history that I don’t think is replicated by other countries. Do you think there’s something in that Jay? Yeah. I don’t know we had things like the Sega world in London, which was this kind of big 90s arcade as well. There is something very like, like Ant and Dec about Sonic isn’t it? He’s this kind of cool, kind of winking. He kind of appeals to an English kind of, kind of kid appeal. There’s something he’s very Dennis the Menace isn’t he? Like, the English Dennis the Menace instead of the American Dennis the Menace. It’s hard to put my finger on but there is something very kind of, it works well as a kind of like a popular British character in a way that probably covers a lot of different like various influences and kind of kind of roots but I think that’s fair to say. The thing that throws me slightly and going back to your recommendation earlier about about that YouTube series because I watched, you sent those to me to watch as well, about the making of the earlier games and there’s quite a big portion in each episode about character creation and about how careful they were to get it, you know, like how much hinged on getting Sonic right and then the importance in those early days of like getting Tails right and then Knuckles right. It felt like any new character felt like a bit of a make or break moment for the series and what I don’t understand then is just the tidal wave of shit that follows everything post Knuckles. The Sonic supporting cast, that’s my big beef, I think, with the 3D Sonic games is they are the worst video game characters ever created. That sexy bat, isn’t there a squirrel, a crocodile, that big the cat, were they from the comics? When did they happen? When did they get so careless with characters? So I think that was like the adventure era where, like, I almost wonder if you’re, you’re very right in that the original, they kind of made it a big deal in the original games that there’d be a new character, like one new character feels like a big deal. So it almost from their perspective feels like they’d set up this paradigm where it’s special that there’s a new character. So then if the next game has three new characters, that makes that game three times as special. And then maybe it just kind of steamrolls from there. It almost feels like the Sonic cast of characters is almost like a kind of like a band tryout where if a character has responded to well by the fandom, they’ll stick around for future games and characters that get kind of… Because he’s got like, there’s like 20 of them now. There’s even more that maybe made one appearance. This graveyard of characters was the big thing. There’s like a whole kind of crowd of them. Yeah, yeah. There are ones that will have popped up in maybe like one spin-off game on the DS that never returned after that and stuff like that. It’s a real vast kind of enterprise of Sonic and his buddies. Yeah. And the very odd thing about that, of course, is that that’s where I think there’s a big generational divide, Jay. There are some Sonic fans who really dig that stuff. And then I’m completely switched off by it. If it’s not Sonic, Tails or Knuckles, I’m just like, I can’t, I can’t, I cannot do this. Sorry. And yeah, coming up with stuff like obviously Shadow was a low point. But the truth is that the kind of like wheels were already coming off a little bit when they did Knuckles Chaotix. And that introduces suddenly like Knuckles friends, including Charmy the Bee, and the Armadillo guy. It’s like, it’s just quite a it’s quite a trip. So it, it does very quickly, Sonic becomes franchised very quickly. And then that just kind of goes out of control over the adventure games. This taps really well into the kind of fandom aspect, because all of them are kind of designed around a template, which means that if you’re like a Sonic fan, you can create your I mean, like the joke of your own original Sonic character is something that like, even that the Sonic Twitter account at this point will make fun of. But I guess it was genius marketing to make all these characters kind of fit the same kind of visual template, because you can draw your own Sonic character, who looks maybe approximately as good as any Sonic character that they are introduced past a certain point. So it’s very much like it kind of it’s it’s that kind of My Little Pony aspect where you can create your own and they all look the same. So they all look just as authentic as each other. Deeply cursed. Matthew, I’d love to ask you a bit more about covering Sonic when you were on the Nintendo Max. So Nintendo, the Nintendo kind of games that come out of these these sort of areas of Sonic are quite odd, like they make some specific rather like bespoke Sonic games for the Wii. What were they they like to cover for you at the time? That thing I sort of referencing earlier, I think just because they were making bespoke games and exclusives, we maybe gave them more of a pass, well, some of them more of a pass than we needed to, like, I think I gave I gave like secret rings 82%, which is absolutely mad. I mean, that’s the Arabian Nightsonic. But that was like, that was like one of the first big post-launch Wii exclusives. And you know, we’d instantly had that little dip. I’d maybe been on the mag for like five, five months at that point. So still kind of sort of finding my feet. I mean, we’re still in the, you know, I’m still dealing with the whole Red Steel 90 fallout at this point. So you know, I think my secret rings 82 gets, I’m probably more embarrassed about that. But it gets like vanished in that sea of complaints, which is good. It was quite flashy, like visually it was it was it was quite snazzy. Yeah, they keep making these bespoke things. I think they nail it a couple of times. I think Sonic Colors is genuine, genuinely quite good. And that’s mainly because it’s it kind of steps away from what makes a Sonic game Sonic. Like actually they were sort of doing their own thing and whether by accident they they just happen to find a combination of things that work better for me anyway, the less Sonic is like traditional 3D Sonic just running into the screen and reaction tests the better it is, which is kind of sounds a bit counterintuitive. I actually really liked Lost World as well, but mainly because it rips off Mario Galaxy and anything which is even galaxy-esque is enough to satisfy me. They were definitely they weren’t treated as like second-class citizens, which was definitely nice. It’s quite refreshing that like all through my time on Nintendo mags, Sega treated them like big releases, the Wii games, you know, we got developer access trips, things like that, which a lot of people weren’t doing in third party. So, yeah, they felt they did feel like quite quite a big deal. And, you know, there was weird stuff like the BioWare RPG, which is which is kind of a mad idea when you think about it. But just the excitement of BioWare making a Sonic thing exclusively for DS was enough to kind of kind of get us get us super involved. So, yeah, it was it was trickier on NGamer, I think, because we still carried a bit of a bit of a kind of fuck Sonic kind of attitude, you know, left over from the kind of console wars a bit and just his GameCube games largely being rubbish. So we were a lot more down on Sonic than O&M, who kind of took him to heart a lot quicker. And that was definitely tough, like, when I joined O&M, because I just wanted to carry on with the right. We all know Sonic shit, but the readers of O&M don’t actually think that. So that was that was like personally quite jarring. Interesting. Yeah, that’s sounds like a real professional challenge, trying to change your perception on Sonic. Well, it’s not fake. Yeah, I genuinely did think Lost World was all right. But then any goodwill of that was instantly destroyed by that. They did that terrible kind of character action platformer one, the one which I described as uncharted like on the cover. Sonic Boom is that? Yeah, it’s like move over uncharted. Yikes, here comes Sonic Boom. I think it’s got 40 amneticwriticals on it. Oh, brutal. So Jay, for you, what’s the moment that you kind of like fall out of love with Sonic a little bit? So again, I have a lot of kind of distinct memories of that kind of mid-2000s kind of Wii DS era where I would be consistently, you know, reading the coverage in O&M, buying games like Sonic and the Secret Rings and Black Knight that weren’t really that good, but it was just kind of fun to kind of participate almost. I feel like a lot of the high watermark of that kind of Nintendo fan kind of embracing Sonic in that era was very much Sonic appearing in Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which at the time felt like the biggest kind of like big event. It was a big deal at the time. Like, obviously, like Smash Bros now has everyone in it from any game, regardless of platform. But at the time, kind of like, oh, Mario and Sonic are in a game and they can punch each other. That was a big deal. I feel like I just hit a point where so Sonic Generations, which came out when I was studying university, was kind of like the high watermark of like, right, this was like a solid game. I played that with my, like my roommates had a great time with that. And then everything after that was kind of just a bit downhill. Sonic Lost Worlds, I remember being like fine, but kind of like kind of an irritating game to play. It was just like not as good as Mario Galaxy. I didn’t really like strive for anything more. Oh, had a good soundtrack though. All Sonic games reliably sound pretty good. And that’s always going to be like a through line, I think. I think that’s always, even in the bad games, I’m sure that will always sound pretty good. And then past that point, we had, you know, Sonic Boom came out and that was this kind of dreadful misfire where the development was this big story. And Sonic Forces was the one which again people slated. I haven’t really jumped back in because I suspect we’re going to get more of these middle-end games. I don’t know. I think, yeah, I think that kind of Sonic Generations kind of capped off my interest and I haven’t really dove back in since. That makes sense, yeah. So I suppose then, like, before we get into our sort of like list of the best Sonic games, what about the future of Sonic? So we know next year there’s Origins Collections coming up featuring the widescreen versions of the Sonic 1 and 2 that are currently seen on mobile and nowhere else, which is very bizarre. But there’s also going to be like some kind of new Sonic game coming out next year, which I suspect will probably be like another sort of middling 3D one. But they haven’t said much about what it is. And at the same time, there’s a remaster of Colors coming out, which suggests, like you say, Matthew and Jay, like it suggests that Sega is quite aware that this was the one that was acclaimed out of that whole Nintendo kind of like exclusive set of games from them. So yeah, the future of Sonic then, like Jay, is there anything that you specifically want Sonic to do in future? Or like, are you just not invested at this point? So if I always find it fun to see what they’re up to, like I tune into that kind of Sonic Central Direct they did recently. It’s kind of fun to follow. It’s kind of an endearing brand to me, even if I’m not going to leap to play the most, like, the latest, like, 60% Metacritic platformer they released. I suspect if my theory on the patent holds true, we’ll kind of see a backflip, like flip-flopping between something that ties into the kind of Mega Drive era in the way that I feel like Colors did. Colors is very much like, you know, you’ve got Sonic and Tails and they go through colorful levels and there’s not much in the way of story. And to me, that was them doing kind of a throwback to the Mega Drive era. And then maybe we’ll see another extremely self-serious, ambitious adventure game that is also a miss. I’m not sure what I want out of Sonic anymore is the thing. It’s kind of more interesting to talk about than it is to play at this point. I’m happy with the games that exist. I’m not rushing to play anything new. And that is kind of the purgatory they’re in, aren’t they? I think it’s kind of very difficult and expensive to make a really, really universally appealing Sonic game. And if they release something that’s alright, it’ll still probably sell pretty well. I remember reading that Sonic Forces, which was slated critically, still sold super well. And anecdotally a lot of people were like, hey, my six-year-old son loves this game, and that’s probably the healthiest way to view it. So the cycle begins afresh. And again, Samuel was right, that they’re really good at putting out all the old games. I feel like the Mega Collection was a big point of which they hooked a certain, a slightly younger generation in that PS2 GameCube era to the old games and gave them a way to play all this old stuff. And that was a great collection. That was more generous a collection than they’ll release now, because that had all the games that are in the upcoming Origins Collection, but it also had a few extra games like Sonic 3D Blast and then it had a bunch of extras with a… You could view all the old Sonic comics and stuff and there’s a gallery of marketing materials and stuff. It was this big package. I think they’ll always do well to keep access to the old stuff that people like. So they’ll always have a new generation of people who were born decades after the Mega Drive era, growing up but still having access to those games and enjoying them because they’re pretty good and then playing middling 3D games, then growing out of it. And it’ll happen forever because this is a successfully marketable character. They’ll find new ways to keep him going. We’ll have the movie that everyone thought was alright and I’m sure they’ll have new cartoons forever. And he’ll be around longer than us. We’ll all be dead and gone and Sonic will still be kicking and doing backflips and giving a thumbs up. Yep, that’s a good unifying theory on Sonic there. I like that. I think that it massively helps that the Mega Drive games are very timeless. So to have to dunk on another game here, I played Ristar recently or Ristar, I don’t know how you say that, but a late in the day Sonic team, a late Mega Drive game basically, had really nice graphics and is a more kind of like methodical version of Sonic, like is a bit more kind of puzzly and it’s really, really boring to play now. And I think that like when you play also like the Alex Kidd games, for example, they feel extremely dated or, you know, your kind of mileage on this will vary, but I tried playing Golden Axe recently or Echo the Dolphin. I think a lot of these games kind of like date out a little bit, probably not helped by the fact that you can play loads of really good modern sort of versions of these types of games, like indie games. Sonic, I think, is very evergreen. I think it’s because it is so fast. Like it feels very, it’s such a responsive feeling game. It looks and it looks really nice. And it partly is my sort of nostalgia. But for this podcast, I did play a bunch of them that I hadn’t played before. And, you know, I think it just holds up really well as a kind of like archetype of 2D platforming. So I think that’s part of it. Like you can re-release these games and they are still good. Matthew, I would, I’m really keen to hear more on what you think about this. Like, do you think Sonic has any kind of future in it? And do you have any kind of like nostalgic sort of, I don’t know, will to want to play them in the modern day? Not really. Like I say, if I hear the music, I’m always back to a certain time and place. I did like the Sonic Mania. I thought that, I thought that was great. And I’d happily play more of that. I think the one thing that potentially excites me about Sonic is that it is, you know, outside of Nintendo, a big character kind of platformer that is very bright and very kind of cartoonish and fantastical, but can also be on platforms outside of Nintendo’s own. I am interested in seeing people apply the power of PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles and PC to worlds with that outlook, if that makes sense, because Nintendo have a natural kind of technical limitation. There aren’t many people who are trying to do that kind of vibe of things on cutting edge technology. As much as I don’t like the games that they made in the 360 era, I can admire the crazy craft and look of Sonic Unleashed running through these incredible 3D landscapes. They’re rotten to play, but they look amazing. That kind of excites me. The idea of that match of arcadey imagination and technology beyond what Nintendo can do on their own platforms is maybe the thing I’m always a little bit interested in. I think in terms of what I want from the future of Sonic, I think they should move heaven and earth to get more mania made. Everyone really enjoyed that. It will come up in our top five lists in a second. But I think that that’s just a perfect example of what people actually wanted for so, so long. And Sega wouldn’t give it to them. And then eventually it took this really interesting developer, Christian Whitehead, and a team of talented artists and sound designers and stuff to make a contemporary Sonic game. And that’s what I realized. That’s all I really want from Sonic now. I don’t need the greatest hits played out necessarily. But I think even though there are sort of like hard limits to the excitement I can get from playing a new version of a Mega Drive game, I think that it’s such a strong template to do quite interesting level design. And you only ever really get a taste of that in Sonic Mania. And it has a few original levels, but they all look amazing. And so, yeah, to me, it seems like the no-brainer is just keep making more of that. But it doesn’t seem like they’re going to, or at least they’re not going to anytime soon. But yeah, OK, cool. Let’s take a short break there then, and we’ll come back with me and Jay both have a top five Sonic games list where we’ll cover off all the classics. I don’t. And a few games that aren’t classics. Classics. Welcome back to this podcast, all about Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, we really did that on purpose. And if you’re still listening, well done. But thank you for joining us. In this part, we’re gonna count down, well, me and Jay both have two top five lists of Sonic games where we’re gonna cover off a whole bunch of the best entries in the series. I don’t know much about Jay’s list, actually. So that will be a bit of excitement for me to see what he’s put in there as someone who’s played more of the 3D games than I have. Jay, is there anything you wanna say about your list? I’ve tried to kind of orient my picks so each one sums up as much of a certain era of the Sonic games, just so there’s more to talk about that way. So my definition of best Sonic games is maybe a bit looser. And we’ll see. Yeah, we’ll see how it goes. Get the apologies in early. I like it. Yeah, apologize in advance. Well, so for me, I’ve actually just covered off all of the really obvious classics to make sure we have a chance to talk about them, but also kind of like to try and codify them into an order that I’m sort of interested in. So before we get to that, then, I was curious if there was any kind of like honorable mentions or weird spin-offs you wanted to discuss. The Dark Brotherhood already came up, a BioWare RPG made by, sorry, an RPG made by BioWare at the height of its kind of powers or maybe slightly before, just before it was bought by EA. It’s this 2008 kind of like Sonic lore heavy, text heavy game that’s actually like pretty good for what it is. So Matthew, first of all, did you play this? And do you have any kind of thoughts on it? Yeah, I reviewed this. I gave it 79 in Endgamer, which was maybe a bit generous. My review focused entirely on the battle system. So I don’t know if the story just kind of absolutely passed me by, but it had a kind of more of a like Mario and Luigi type, very kind of interactive sort of turn based battling with kind of almost like quick time events where you kind of like oh and danny kind of rhythm games, which I thought was interesting. And yeah, I don’t really remember like how deep it was as an RPG. Like it didn’t have like, you weren’t like romance in characters. Yeah, it wasn’t like, you know, if you talk to Dr. Robotnik enough times, you get to sleep with him. And it’s not a matter of fact, but maybe it should have been. I think the Sonic fans would have actually liked that. My notes on this one are, I did get some notes on this one because it’s a weird and interesting game. I did play this when it came out. It was like pretty good. I remember it being pretty fun. I think they did an interesting job in trying to kind of like weld 20 years of like disparate canon, something you maybe call canon together in terms of the story side of thing. But this game is mostly well known for the fact that like at the last minute, they had a composer compose a unique soundtrack for it. But under circumstances that are not public, they had to remove them all last minute and they replaced them entirely by downloading midis off fans like Sonic fan sites, putting them all using the same sound font like MIDI sound font they put together and then just stuck them in the game. Because these are all different midis using different sound fonts initially, which means that the final game’s music has a bunch of missing audio tracks. So tracks that are meant to have percussion just don’t have them and stuff like this. It’s one of these weird facts that didn’t come up when this came out. I don’t recall this game having bad music or anything, but in retrospect, you can YouTube the songs and it just sounds like nothing. There’s just bleeps and bloops over empty signs. Yeah, I heard that, too, when it did the meme arounds about how bad this soundtrack was. I had no recollection of that. No memory of it. It was this kind of blank spot. It’s very weird. Yeah, very bizarre that they would have this original music that it just sort of vanishes. Yeah, as far as I know, I don’t think Sega ever really addressed it, like what happened there. Maybe it was another Michael Jackson soundtrack. And he stopped doing that, yeah. Wow, why did we take a chance on him in 2007? You know, like the pen that clearly… They’re like, guys, I think Michael’s ready to return to the fold. Are you sure? Are you definitely sure? Yeah, so that was a really interesting one. But also, if people wanna like check that out, and I’m not saying you necessarily should, it’s really, really cheap on eBay. So yeah, but it’s definitely kind of an interesting use of all of the different characters they threw into Sonic. I believe it has Big the Cat in it. So… It has everyone in it, yeah. Everyone turns up. You work with it, I’m pretty sure Robotnik is on your side as well. Yeah, I think he’s one of your party members. I think so, yeah. So it gets into like the psychology of Robotnik, if that’s what you want. It also ends on a big cliffhanger that never got resolved. So it’s just kind of, as in terms of story, it just kind of like does its own thing and then never caps it off, as it were. But weirdly, it gets quite mass effective later on as well, and takes you to these like sci-fi worlds that are a bit less, kind of like familiarly, kind of like Sonic looking, very strange game. But yeah, definitely kind of product of an era where Sega was going like super, you know, here’s a bunch of different games every year based on this series. So yeah, that was worth noting. None of the Game Gear or Master System games have made our list, as far as I know, Jay. I don’t think they have for you, right? Yeah, so they are like, I would say, they’re not necessarily also rams. I know Sonic fans have a lot of affection for these. The first one, I remember being completely rock hard. Like, I have played most of it, and it’s really difficult because when you get hit once, you lose all your rings, which is like, nightmarish. But, you know, I just wanted to kind of mention those because, I’ll be honest, I don’t have the same relationship to those as other players do, but there were sure were a lot of them on Game Gear, so that was worth mentioning. And I was wondering if either of you had any thoughts on the racing games from Sumo Digital. They were all very well reviewed. The Sonic and Sega Racing, Transform, and the three of them in total. I’m not a fan, personally. I just always saw it as a poor man’s Mario Kart. I’ve had loads of people go, no, that’s not true, blah, blah, blah. But I’ve played them. They left me really cold. I remember O&M, we reviewed, because one was a Wii U launch title, and we gave it like, it wasn’t a kick in or anything. It was like a seven out of 10. And we got a really snotty email from one of the people who made it, which just colored my thoughts on it. I think I’m in the same boat. Like, it was just Mario Kart, but not really as tight. Like, Mario Kart has a very, like, very particular tight feel, which is kind of timeless, and they’ve affected that early on. The Sonic ones just felt a little bit floatier, didn’t feel as good in a solid. Well, items aren’t as clean. Also, why is Sonic driving a car? He’s, like, established as being faster than a car. It’s the classic, the classic nonsense of that game. Yeah, I think that that whole thing would have been much better if he was just, like, carrying the kind of, like, shell of a car, but running, like a Flintstone. Like a Flintstone. Exactly, yeah, that should have been how they did that. I think they’re quite good as, like, a sort of collection of Sega-related imagery. Yeah, I think they’re perfectly fine, but I agree, they’re no Mario Kart. There were some on-foot Sonic racing games, weren’t there? Yeah, that’s right. Sonic R, I think, is the one that… I can’t remember which format that’s on, actually. Was that a Sega Saturn and PC game? Which was surfing on, like, gravity boards. That was Sonic Riders, yeah. I mean, come on. Yeah, that was right around the time that Sonic was being mega-slated as well in pretty much everything, but yeah, that’s right. Sonic R, I think it was made available on the Sonic Gems collection later on. I would say that stretches the definition of gems quite far. Yeah, I did buy that collection, though, and it was a bit disappointing. But yeah, those are the kind of ones I wanted to note, and otherwise I think the rest will kind of come up. Are there any, kind of, if you wanted to mention Matthew or Jay? Dr. Robotnik’s Bean Bean Machine is great, but it’s just another game. It’s just, it’s Poyopop, right? Yeah, Poyopoi, it’s basically a reskin of a different game, yeah. And it wasn’t, like, high-end enough to actually feature Sonic at any point, so it just simply features characters, specifically from the early 90s Saturday morning cartoon version of Sonic, and features villains in those incarnations, and that’s all it features. I wondered who all those dudes were. They’re just very, kind of, weird-looking characters. Yeah, they’re purely ripped off from this one, this one cartoon at the time. Sonic’s had a lot of, like, you could do a whole extra podcast around Sonic’s middling extra media products, but probably isn’t worth it. Do you, did either of you ever play the Sonic arcade popcorn game? So there was an arcade machine, and it was a Sonic game, and I don’t really remember what the mechanic was, or how the game looked on screen, but as you played it, the machine made popcorn, like you won a box of sweet popcorn that the machine also made. So it wasn’t like a home thing. I played this in a seafront in Bournemouth or Poole or something. You were running away from Robotnik or something and banging a big old button, and the more you banged it, the more popcorn the machine made or something. I’ve never been given food by a video game before. That’s incredible. Yeah. Actually, that sounds like quite a cursed machine because you could find it years later. It’s just full of toxic popcorn. Yeah, that’s the thing. After a while, that’s got to be in quite rough shape, that popcorn dispenser. A bit of a cursed item, I would say. Yeah, but I swear I’m not dreaming this thing. No, that’s fine. I’d still rather play that than Sonic Unleashed, to be honest. The only arcade thing I’ve played with Sonic on it was the… There’s a little kind of basketball thing you can play, and Sonic isn’t explicitly on the side of it, but it’s the one arcade machine that actually kind of works in my parents’ hometown in Brixton, so I ended up inevitably playing it a lot. I thought you were going to say your parents’ house. That’d be pretty good, wouldn’t it? Just in the middle of their living room. I was wondering if there are any other honorable mentions? Jay, is there anything else you wanted to note here? No, that kind of covers it. There’s just so many… I forgot that Sonic Riders existed, but then as soon as it’s mentioned, you just go, oh yeah, that existed. There’s just a lot of Sonic games, isn’t there? One thing I always coveted as a kid when I was reading the Argos catalog was Knuckles Chaotix on the 32X. Yeah, that was… I remember when the Sonic Mega Collection came out, the big omissions were Sonic CD and Knuckles Chaotix, especially because Sonic Heroes came out and it had all these characters from Knuckles Chaotix, and then a lot of people would be like, well, I haven’t seen these before, these are the only characters I haven’t seen, and it turns out that from this very particular obscure game, but then the reality was that it wasn’t that good. Apparently it was originally going to be a full Sonic game, but then Sega looked at it halfway through development and were like, this has been downgraded to a Knuckles game. Yeah, it was once known as a very memorable title, Sonic Crackers, and it was like Sonic and Tails were tethered together, and there’s a prototype out there that you can actually play on emulators and stuff for what that game might have been. But yeah, it turned into Knuckles Chaotix, which is quite bad. I’ve played it. I played it this week. It has one of the worst tutorials of all time, extremely long, and basically the tethering mechanic kind of like is the challenge of the game. They’ve basically made it so your movement and kind of like combat abilities are less fun and therefore your challenge as a player is to overcome the bad design decisions they’ve made to kind of ruin 2D Sonic, which is quite wild. But also you should probably just be put into one of these collections anyway for like posterity sake. I love the idea that Sega will like look at a Sonic game in development and then like downgrade it like a list of like characters. So like if it’s looking if it’s carrying on looking good, they can keep Sonic. But then if it’s not looking so good, it becomes a Tails game. Then it becomes like a Knuckles game. And then if it’s like really bad, you get downgraded to like Creams Chaotic. Or like, we’re just one of these dealers. Big the Cat game coming through. Big the Cat’s Chaotix, yeah. Yeah, okay, good stuff. Yeah, so yeah, I was sort of thinking about mentioning Sonic Dreams Collection, that really weird like fan game thing that got made. But it’s not technically Sonic, so I’ll leave it out. In which case then, Jay, let’s get to our top five. How about you go first with your number five and then we’ll count down from there. My number five is Sonic Rush 2005. So like I think I mentioned before, like that kind of Wii and DS era of kind of like Nintendo consoles was like probably like the peak of my like just kind of like joyous young interest in games. And this was like a solid game, Metacritic 82%. It’s like a perfectly fine platformer. It kind of followed on from the, it was the same team, the Dimps team, working with Sonic Team. So Dimps, they’re like a Japanese studio. They do a lot of kind of mobile ports or like recreations of Sonic games and like a lot of licensed stuff with like Dragon Ball games and stuff. So they’d worked with Sonic Team on Sonic Advance and Sonic Rush is just them doing Sonic Advance on the DS. Sonic lends himself well to kind of like low poly 3D. I think he’s a very like angular character, which fits the kind of hardware limitations of the DS. This is just like a perfectly fine game. It started off the boost button function, which I think is justifiably contentious. I think this is the part where they started. This is the point in time historically where they started to think like Sonic games are going as fast as possible. But in the kind of like the 2D, I think it works better in the 2D platformer because it’s easier to like kill yourself going too fast. You can throw Sonic into pits and stuff. So there is some sort of there’s a sense of like strategy to it. Maybe the most remembered thing about this game, I think, in like retrospect in terms of like, I don’t know, the wider kind of Sonic fandom is that it has a really cool and interesting soundtrack by Hideki Naganuma, who composed music to Jet Set Radio. And like we mentioned before that like Sonic has always had this kind of like always comes on top with like the music. It’s always like full effort. And this is a this is a really good soundtrack. It’s kind of this kind of like funky kind of kind of 90s throwback vibe to it. It’s very weird. Somewhat infamously, the last boss music is like a violin playing over a looped sample from a Malcolm X speech. That is wild. Yeah, you can look it up. It’s real weird. No. And yeah, I think Sonic Rush is like a kind of like a perfectly fine encapsulation of the like somewhat successful transition to like the 2D hardware or like the kind of like the Nintendo like handheld hardware. Yeah, I just can’t get I can’t get over that, that factoid. That’s like amazing. I didn’t know that at all, Jay. You actually ambushed me and Matthew out of nowhere with that one. Yeah, I think this game is perfectly fine. I think this is a point where like like it’s fine. You know what I mean? I think there’s a certain point where you can’t get too much better or too much worse with the 2D kind of side on perspective handheld Sonic games. And to me, this is maybe the best encapsulation of that era of these games. Yeah. And frankly, I just wanted to mention the weird music fact. I mean, that’s a great fact for sure. But like, yeah, so it kind of follows on from Dim’s also made the Sonic Advance games, like you say. I personally preferred the first one because the pace of it was quite methodical. I don’t think they’re all like, I don’t think any of them are quite as good as the Mega Drive ones. But I did play a lot of them and they looked really nice. The Sonic Advance games as well. Sonic Advance games, I think, had really good sprite art. And I think that kind of like showed like a lot of the kind of like fan kind of pixel art and artwork and fan games would lean heavily into the art developed for those games. Because it was kind of like you had like the kind of proportion sprites of like the kind of Mega Drive era, but kind of with the designs and color palettes of the kind of modern, at the time, modern kind of Sonic Adventure era. And they look really good. And although like all the artwork in that game holds up really well. And it would be really cool to see some sort of like, I don’t know, Sonic Advance collection. I love that. I don’t know how that hasn’t happened. Like it’s not, you know, those seem like that seems like such a no brainer to me. And I think it’s maybe it’s on my mind slightly because I just saw that before we started recording this, there’s a Castlevania Advance collection that just got rated by an Australian Ratings Board. So it kind of makes me think, are there actually like a bunch of GBA games that should probably be on more formats that have just been kind of like left to it? And are we maybe going to finally see that change a little bit over the next few years with like that Advance Wars redo coming out as well? But yeah, Sonic Rush, like I think perfectly sort of reasonable good like early DS game as well. Like I think a lot of people just bought it because it was around in the early DS days. Yeah, I mean, it’s quite wild that it’s like a 2D game, but then there were like 3D boss battles. That is a wild choice, even though I remember the boss battles being pretty bad. But yeah, sounds okay. Yeah. So my number five is Sonic CD. So this is a game that was released on another of the Mega Drive’s kind of like additional peripheral things that are quite hard to track down now in Europe. They’ll cost you a little bit of money to get them. Sonic CD then ended up being like a weirdly obscure Sonic game, even though it was very much a kind of like, you know, of that era of 2D games. It was originally started out as a Sonic 2 version of Sonic 2 that was going to come to the Sega CD, but then turned into its own game. And what you actually get is a weird sort of like parallel version of Sonic 2 that kind of like uses a lot of the sort of imagery of Sonic 1 as kind of starting point for this like time travel platformer where there are four different versions of every level with a matching track, music track for every level as well. And it’s, let me just say, the soundtrack, the original Japanese soundtrack for this game fucking rules. It’s like one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard. I actually only sat down and played this properly for the first time like about three weeks ago because I knew this episode was coming up. I thought, I’ve played Sonic CD before, I know I’ve got to the end, like relative close to the end of the game, but I’ve never played it with the original Japanese music because I played the Sonic Gems Collection version. And it’s really, really fucking good. And so Christian Whitehead, who worked on Sonic Mania, this is one of the first things he did was to basically salvage Sonic CD as it was and to make it run in widescreen. But holy shit, the music in this game is so, so good. It’s kind of like early 90s club soundtrack infused thing. And it actually ends up making Sonic CD feel super credible as a platformer to me. Like it feels really like almost cool for a Sonic game, which is a weird thing to say. But the music is just really, really good. Jay, I don’t know if you have a take on this one. Yeah, so I think I’ve never played it with the original soundtrack. I think I have played the collection versions. My takeaway from this in that kind of era of like the kind of Mega Drive games was this is a really hard and maze like platformer. They have these big levels and with these different kind of versions. It also has a really cool intro. Everyone loves this. Have you seen the… So the intro to this that was originally on the original release is this like heavily compressed, almost like pixel art trace over of this kind of like hand drawn 2D animation intro they made for it. And when the Sonic Mega Collection came out, I believe that’s the first time that intro was actually shown as it was originally made in this kind of like early to mid 90s like OVA anime style. And it’s this really cool kind of like animated kind of Sonic, almost like if this game is like a movie, this is like kind of the opening credits crawl to it. And that like image of this kind of like anime kind of cartoonish Sonic very heavily kind of influenced a lot of the work that a lot of the artists brought over on to into Sonic Mania. So I’m sure we’ll both talk about that later on. But Sonic Mania had like a lot of tie in animation material that kind of draws heavily from the kind of a really cool intro to Sonic CD. But other than that, yeah, not too much experience in this one myself, honestly. I remember this being really hard. But it’s very ambitious, isn’t it, for this time. And it is interesting to see how they had this kind of, you’re right, this parallel invention, and then Sonic 3, with the main Sonic team from Sonic 2, kind of went on and did something different and kind of became ambitious in a different way. And it is kind of interesting from this kind of historical development point, almost. Yeah, it’s like, it is almost probably as close as you can get to like a cult Sonic game, because it was like quite hard to find. And yeah, it introduces Sonic’s girlfriend, Amy, which, you know, I can’t defend that, but she is actually pretty much the only sort of like other cutesy character in it. Otherwise, it’s kind of just, it is Sonic running through these quite wild looking levels in terms of like color palette. They look really, really weird because of the time travel stuff. I think that none of the levels have individually have that much of an identity. They’re like not compared to Sonic 2 and 3, where the identity is really like clear what they’re doing. But the fact that it kind of goes from like being in a jungle to being like Akira in the same level is just really like quite wild to see play out. Because it has like, it has basically the kind of principles of it is that if you’re in the future, then it’s like harder, the game is harder. If you’re in the past, the game is a lot easier. The layout is roughly similar, but they kind of swap out enemies and obstacles and things like that. I would say as a player, it’s a really incoherent time travel system. Like I, going through it once, I didn’t understand how it really worked at all other than knowing that if you’re in the past, it’s basically an easier game to finish. But there’s like a true ending to unlock basically by kind of fixing each of the timelines. I couldn’t imagine doing that because it just seems too hard to do something like that. But to run through, yeah, a really pleasurable Sonic game. Just not the best of that era, but well worth playing. Do you think it’s the best way of playing that today? So I don’t know if it’s still available because I think they delisted a bunch of the Sonic games, but I own it on… It got released on Xbox 360 and PS3 in a very nice version on the PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Arcade. And that’s the way to play it. I think the Xbox one, that’s how I played it. I got stuck on quite a boring bit in The Last of Us 2 and just decided to spend a waste of Saturday playing Sonic CD. But the soundtrack, it’s so, so good. It’s on Spotify. So earlier when we were talking about how the Mega Drive had this almost larger appeal in the UK proportionally maybe than the US. When you mentioned the club soundtrack, it takes me back to that earlier point. Do you think there’s something in the fact that a lot of the Mega Drive games were tapping into this almost club scene aesthetic? I think a lot about Streets of Rage 1 and 2, which had this very mid-90s club soundtrack. And do you think the fact that they tapped heavily into that, synchronized with the UK’s emerging club scene at the time, perhaps? There’s something in that? I think there is something in that because, I think as Matthew, you would have seen in that Stray Fox video, they were big into capturing the angular CG art in the original Sonic of what kind of early CG looked like basically. And that kind of color and shape-wise ends up being sort of like, has some sort of crossover with music culture of the time, like music videos and weirdly I’ve been watching old episodes of Top of the Pops on BBC iPlayer. They’re up to 1990 and every fucking ident and transition in that looks like a Sonic special stage. Yeah, that tracks me. That totally tracks me. Yeah. So I think I think there’s something in that. Yeah. But what’s your number four, Jay? My number four is Sonic 3 and Knuckles. So now we’re getting fully on into the kind of like the Mega Drive era. I’d say Sonic 2 is probably individually like the tighter game. But I kind of wanted to talk about this one just because of how interesting I think this is. Just because of what it did that like nothing before or after will ever do anything like this. Which is to say that Sonic 3 and Knuckles is two separate games that were originally envisioned to be one big kind of finale game for the Mega Drive era. But then like development ran on too fast. So they split it into two games and it became the kind of the famous lock on cartridge. So for any listeners who don’t know about this, Sonic 3 is just a standalone cartridge. You know, you can just play Sonic 3. It’s a platform and maybe approximately as long as Sonic 2, a little bit longer maybe. And then Sonic and Knuckles, which is essentially like a Sonic 4, is in itself like a standalone, another standalone game. This one introduces Knuckles as a playable character. So you can play as Sonic and Knuckles. But the top of the actual physical cartridge has in itself like a slot for another cartridge, which meant that you could combine it with all the previous Sonic games and create like some horrible hybrid Frankenstein game. And then Sonic 3 and Knuckles essentially is the intended use of this. It kind of combines Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles into this huge long platformer game where like kind of progress from the first half when you’re playing through the levels of Sonic 3 kind of comes over into Sonic and Knuckles. For example, you’re collecting like the Chaos Emeralds which are the kind of like the bonus stage pickups you get through the first three Sonic games. And you collect them as normal in Sonic 3. And then if you’ve collected all of them in the first half of Sonic 3 and Knuckles and then you get to the second half, then you go through and like power them up and they become like Super Emeralds. And that unlocks like a special ending or a special like super form for Sonic. Really weird technology. And I think it’s super interesting. And I did actually at some point like have this cartridge. And I remember bringing this to my friend’s house and being like, we can combine our Sonic games into one hideous Sonic game. And that was kind of really weird and interesting. Yeah. So I understand that this was like not known at release that this was basically the same project that due to like, I think like marketing time restraints was basically forced into two projects. And yeah, like when you play them together, it’s a really complete feeling Sonic game. So this is number four on my list, actually. So we’ve ticked that off. I think that I actually put this like lower down because I don’t have the same relationship with it that I do with the earlier Sonic games. Like it was, my parents were a bit too cheap, but they didn’t have much money in the 90s. So they didn’t buy me like everything I wanted, which is fine. But like that’s how I ended up missing out on it. I borrowed Sonic 1 and 2 from friends, but I never had Sonic Knuckles and Sonic 3. So this is another one I played through this week. And I agree that the idea that you merge the two into one sort of like super game is quite interesting. And it probably makes them for the most like complete feeling Sonic game of the lot because you have these three playable characters, Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. You can play through the whole game as them. They all have super forms. I think Tails has a form that has like these little creatures called Flickies that fucking destroy enemies on screen like little parasites. Like that’s quite wild really. But yeah, there’s some really good levels in it. I think it’s got one of the worst levels in the whole series though, which is Carnival Night Zone. That is fucking abysmal. Basically the version of Casino Night, but like with more of a kind of carnival clown kind of theme. And like just full of like a really confusingly laid out level. A lot of backtracking, which is never really that fun to do in a Sonic game. I remember vividly, like a friend of mine, like a sleepover, we were like going to beat Sonic 3 and getting to the infamous barrel. There’s a barrel in this level, in this game, which it kind of bobs up and down in like a physics way. And it looks like you’re meant to bounce it so high that you can like slip under it and go to the next section of the level. But it doesn’t work that way. And if you attempt to do this, you almost get it to do that. But you will never bounce hard. Like I don’t think you can really feasibly do it, especially because the levels have time limits on. So I remember getting to this barrel and getting stuck. And the correct method, which is not explained or used anywhere else in the game, is to stand on it and then just press up and down on the D-pad in a way that kind of influences the platform to like kind of fly out the way. Apparently at the time, there was like a Sega cheats hotline prior to the internet. And you’d ring it up and they would say like, Hi, welcome to the Sega hotline. If you’re asking about the Sonic 3 barrel, here’s what you do. Yeah, that’s like the kind of Simpson’s joke about please type in the number of your crime. If you want to select regicide, please press 1. Yeah, that’s like a really, I think I remember the barrel you’re talking about. I think I only did it through like immense trial and error. And yeah, but there are some like really fun levels in this too. In terms of music as well, it’s pretty good. Not as good as Sonic CD, I would say. But, you know, it was working with more limited hardware. Ice Cap Zone has phenomenal music. That’s really nice. And generally speaking, just feels like the most complete of the Mega Drive and Genesis games when combined. I would also say that to people who want to play this one, there’s a really simple way to do it. The only way you can actually buy it from a digital storefront now is from Steam. But then if you download it from there, you can combine it with this really nice mod called Angel Island Revisited, which basically lets you play on widescreen. And you can add like other mods to it, change the visuals and do level select, all this kind of stuff. So that’s how I played it this week. Yeah, it’s good. Matthew, did you ever play Sonic 3? Do you have any memories of this one? Yeah, I played Sonic 3. I didn’t have the Knuckles cart as well. I liked Sonic 3. All I really remember about it is the bit where you run along and that huge battleship drops bombs. And it being like, absolutely, what a visual blockbuster. And it’s kind of uncharted in its day, just a, whoa, I’ve never seen anything that big and all this moving stuff. And then it sets all the level on fire and everything. That was pretty wild. It does feel like they’re going for the last hurrah and getting as much out of the Mega Drive hardware as they can, doesn’t it? So what’s your number three, Jay? My number three is Sonic Generations 2011. Didn’t make my list, but it’s definitely my favorite of the kind of like 3D era Sonic games. Yeah, so in terms of like what is objectively the best 3D Sonic game to play, I would probably say like Colors or this, but I think I prefer this. I think it’s a bigger game. I think it’s more interesting. So this is kind of like a 2D, 3D platformer hybrid. This is then building on Sonic Unleashed and taking all the stuff that people like from that, making a game out of that, and then there’s no werehog sections where you’re going through levels slowly as a big guy. I feel like this was quite an expensive project. So I remember around this time this was coming out, there being a huge marketing blitz for this. And this was then the first time they brought back quote unquote classic Sonic. So the big gimmick of this game is that Sonic from the Mega Drive era and Sonic from the modern HD era like meet up through time travel and go back through like the most popular level from each of the games, each mainline Sonic game, but kind of like reimagined in this engine. So when we talked earlier about like the issue with these games is they have to figure a way to like get as much mileage out of these like, I don’t know, asset sets as possible. The classic Sonic edition feels like a really like smart way of doing it because again, the older Sonic games don’t actually involve you speeding through levels that fast. And by bringing back that kind of old Mega Drive kind of control scheme, so you’d play through each level as like 2D Sonic or like classic Sonic where you play through them all as purely as like a side on platformer. And then you play through like a modern like running towards the screen kind of a fast paced kind of modern Sonic version of each level. So you’ve got like a lot of mileage in a way that feels like it isn’t actually just padded out. It feels actually kind of like an earnest kind of celebration, if you will, of the franchise. This is the nicest looking Sonic game in terms of like the 3D games. Again, I think this is probably the most expensive one. I don’t have like numbers on that. That’s just my feeling I get from it. I think you’re right. Yeah. Just from the number of like kind of like original levels based on older levels they had to build, like it feels quite like a pricey game. And it’s really cool. It’s just really cool to play through. Like they do Green Hill Zone. They go back to Green Hill Zone a lot in the Sonic franchise. I think every time they do a nostalgia throwback. But then you’ve got like levels from like Sonic 2 and 3 and they’ve got like remixes of all the music and it all sounds great and it looks nice. This got a 77 on Metacritic, which I think is like a reasonable score. This style, this like fast running towards the screen style is I think is not going to get better than this. I think there’s a limit to how good it is because to an extent it does feel like you’re playing like almost on rails. The actual amount of interactivity you have is high. And probably if you were to like time out how much time you play in these levels, you probably realize the actual like total play time when you’re like doing the fast paced mod and Sonic stuff is not very high. I know one of the criticisms for this game was that if you just play through and don’t want to do all the the extra achievements and all the challenges and stuff, it’s pretty short. Yeah, I think this is a pretty solid game. I think one of the issues with the the fact that you’re going through the older going through all the games is that it starts at a high and then gets worse because no one has nostalgia for Sonic Colors or Sonic Adventure 06 by the time this was coming out. So you start on the coolest, most memorable games and then you dwindle off that point. Yeah, I think that’s a big problem with it for sure. When I got past the halfway point in this game, I didn’t really recognize anything. I thought this was probably nostalgia for someone, but I was there thinking, damn, I’d love to have seen what Castino Night Zone from Sonic 2 looks like when you do it in this game, for example. I am very surprised they haven’t done like a, just almost like a Final Fantasy VII remake where they just do all the levels of the first three Sonic games, but using this engine. It almost would have struck me as like a no-brainer doing like a generation style, like let’s do all of the levels from one and all of the levels in two. Yeah, but they do Sonic Lost World instead, and it’s such a bizarre trajectory to these 3D games. But yeah, this is now 10 years old, this game. This was Sonic’s 20th anniversary, so yeah, it itself is like kind of an artifact. I was wondering, Matthew, did you cover this one at all when you were working on Nintendo Max? I think I remember it being played and reviewed on other platforms. It had very long loading times, I seem to recall. Or was it Unleashed? One of them, all I’d ever see was the loading screen and then like 10 seconds of action. With a general point about the running into the screen games, they look absolutely amazing when they’re being played properly and you’re absolutely acing it. But the second any of it goes wrong, they literally skid to a halt and they’re so flat. I’ve always thought the design is so fundamentally flawed in that it’s a gamble that, you know, if it works, it looks brilliant, absolutely amazing, but at all other times it looks rank or it just doesn’t feel right. That’s always been my beef with the 3D running into the screen format. Yeah, same. I think the fact that you’ve got more 2D-oriented levels here and the nostalgia, I think this is the best combination of papering over the cracks with nostalgia. But then also, yeah, like you said, there’s no werehog stuff either. So it is just the platforming. It’s about as good as it can get, really. I like the idea of Classic Sonic meeting Modern Sonic and just taking stock of what his life is going to become, like all the shitty mates he’s going to make. How did you let me turn into you? I just, yeah, I mean, what a tragic fate. I would look like a reverse where you have Sonic Generations where you have the Modern Sonic and then there’s like a Future Sonic and you just play through levels of games that don’t exist yet. And they just make up all these future middling Sonic games and have you play through like a stage from each one. Yeah, like the end of 22 Jump Street, but for Sonic games. Absolutely, 100%. I also think this game suffered as well because they had to pick the most memorable level from all the Sonic games. After a certain point, they mostly. Pick the first level of the 3D games. The first levels tend to always be a take on Green Hill. Most of the levels in this game were grassy playing levels, strangely enough. It is what it is, really. There’s a danger of covering the entire series and putting it all on a level playing field when everyone knows the only one is the best one. Talking of Sonic Nostalgia, my number 3, I wonder if this is in your list, Jay, is Sonic Mania. A contemporary Sonic game made to look like the Mega Drive games, but with the benefits of modern hardware in terms of sound and visuals. I would say that, like I mentioned earlier, I would love to see a version of this game that’s all original levels. This has a lot of remixing of Sonic imagery. I think it’s 8 classic levels to 4 brand new levels, but the brand new levels, including Press Garden Zone with all these beautiful cherry blossom style tree effects, just looks really unique as a level idea and just gives you a taste of what a full game like this could look like. How do you feel about this one, Jay? I love this. If this didn’t have Sonic and Sega, we would call this an indie game. That taps into my line of work and my line of interest. It’s like a bunch of fans coming together. The history of this game is interesting. We’ve talked about Christian Whitehead, and him being a programmer. He got his start making Sonic fan games, and then he made his own engine to essentially make classic Mega Drive Sonic games in a modern PC format with widescreen and stuff. Then he worked with Sega to make widescreen versions of the old games, and essentially pitched this as what if I made a new game in this style? And that’s a really cool success story. I’m glad this got made, you know what I mean? It’s really cool that there’s this fan love for the Sonic brand, which has always been embraced by Sonic much more than Nintendo embraces its fan game community or doesn’t do so. So it feels like the high watermark of the enduring love of the fans meeting with the games they were making. I do feel like this is not… Samuel, you mentioned that you would love more games like this. I feel like it’s not going to happen. It feels like it was very much like a right place at the right time, the right group of people together, which is a shame. I really like this game. If someone were to ask me I’ve never played a Sonic game, what Sonic game would you recommend to me? I would probably give them this one. You’re right, the new stages look. Is it Studiopolis? Yeah, I believe so. Really interesting. Great pixel art. It all looks great. It kind of introduces these new boss robots that feel so stripped out of a 90s Sonic game that didn’t happen. But it also just holds its own in the present day. You can jump into this with no nostalgia and probably find this to be a pretty good time, I think. I wonder if there’s an element to this because it’s not a Sega Japan game. It’s kind of like it’s not really necessarily seen as on the same playing field as these 3D Sonic games they’re making. They’re like, oh yeah, we made this side project thing but that’s not the future of Sonic. The future of Sonic is tied into an anime that you’ll never watch. That’s kind of yeah, I feel like they should be Sega should have made like 3 of these. It seems like it’s a perpetual seller and like the Switch sales and stuff. It’s like, people wanted this experience and then they got a taste of what a modern, like original Sonic game would look like and then yeah, like you say, it just seems like that’s kind of it. And it’s like, well, why? I mean, people like this, it was critically acclaimed, it’s Sonic in a good Sonic game, it’s just there should be more of them but there aren’t and yeah, what a bummer. But yeah, for what it is, it’s very, very good. And I think the only reason I put it at number three, I think it probably is objectively the best one. Just from, you know. Yeah, I think in terms of again, if you were to recommend someone who’s quite familiar with games and wanted to jump into the series and you didn’t want to have the baggage of some of the 3D games or over reliance and nostalgia, this is a solid one. Absolutely, yeah. Matthew, do you have any thoughts on this one? Yeah, I really liked it. Just much of what you said. I hope they make more. I was actually just looking at the popcorn machine that I mentioned and apparently it is referenced in the TV studio level in this popcorn bit. Oh, incredible. I know because the people who made this are like 9th Circle of Hell level Sonic nerds, it has incredibly specific references. Really obscure ones. For example, in the Studioopolis level, there is a tone that plays on a screen and that is a reference to a Sonic Direct stream fault that happened once where this tone played over it and then they put that in as a reference. It is deep level stuff that us Sonic purveyors from the outside would not understand. I hear it as a reference to Game Gear games and stuff like that, one-off characters from those. Obviously the best reference is The Boss Battle that is just Mean Bean Machine. That was incredible. I was so happy. It was a really good reference. I just wasn’t expecting it. It delights you out of nowhere, which is great about this. It feels like a post-ironic Sonic game. It almost is like a reconstruction of Sonic’s been ironic and self-aware. What if we made something that feels quite joyous and fun, but still has that kind of self-awareness almost? Yeah, for sure. Sonic Mania, just fantastic. We’re up to my number two because we’ve covered your number two. Is that right? That’s correct. Sonic the Hedgehog, I’ve got the original one here. Again, objectively, I don’t think this is the best one, but since it’s my top five, I have to put it this high. Quite a muted colour palette to the levels in this one. It’s weirdly not that jolly game. Yeah, it’s quite melancholy, isn’t it? I guess at this point, Sonic didn’t have his many friends. You’re just this one little guy and you’re running around these worlds and they’re all kind of ruins. I don’t know, it’s very odd, isn’t it, the vibe of it? Yeah, it is a bit like, melancholy is a good word, I think. Just quite muted and strange. Some of the music in the world is a bit like melancholy, too. Starlight Zone’s got quite an odd sort of vibe to it. It’s, yeah, a bit bizarre, but I think in terms of difficulty, I think it might be the most well balanced Sonic game. It doesn’t have loads and loads of fuck you kind of falls into an abyss death, which, the worst thing about Sonic is when you run into a death that you feel is unfair. And that’s a problem that persists in even the best Mega Drive games, it can be really annoying. This is a really good beginner Sonic game. It’s the first game I ever completed, actually. It’s definitely probably the slowest one, especially when you get to, like, is it like Marble? What’s it called? Marble, yeah. Do you mean the second level with the volcanoes? And you’re doing a lot of standing around and pushing blocks. At that point you’re not doing anything close to what you would picture normally as a Sonic game. You’re not running around really fast and doing lightning speed reaction things. It just slowed right down. And then there’s the special stage as well which is proper, I took some hallucinogenics, kind of like wild imagery of multicoloured birds in the background and this big spinning chassis of rings and booping things. It’s just really fucking wild. Matthew, did you play the original Sonic that much? Do you have any thoughts on this one? Yeah, yeah, yeah I did. I much prefer Sonic 2. I think Sonic 1 is a little… I don’t know. Maybe it is because I don’t really like Sonic’s jump and the fact that it does have a bit more slower stuff going on near the start. Maybe it doesn’t show him off to his best strengths. I think maybe I played Sonic 2 first, weirdly. I can’t really remember the order of it. The thing that stood out for me watching the little making of documentaries it’s very easy to forget the kind of crazy stuff Yuji Naka was doing to make this work and that the reason he is famous is because he’s an absolute shithole programmer and because all the games he’s designed have been terrible ever since this. You forget that his strength was this and he does absolutely earn his place in the hall of fame for what he does. So while it’s easy to dunk on him, I don’t know, it just feels like he’s mismatched with what he’s trying to make. He’s now in a position where he’s beyond what he’s actually good at, which is making impossible things happen on the 16-bit hardware. I find it really interesting he’s credited as Sonic’s creator when it doesn’t appear to really be the case when you read about the making of this game. It really feels like a group effort. Sonic was made in a lab, designed to make the most 90s character. It was Oshima who made creative Sonic and Tails as well. When they talk about how Tails is made in that documentary, again, it’s a similar thing. There was a competition to make a sidekick character. Then Oshima made the winning design basically. Yeah, it’s like… Yujin Aki could do stuff like making a level twist around in real time and stuff that was considered quite revolutionary. Earned his place at the table, but you’re right, he’s not credited as a designer, he’s credited as a programmer. So it’s quite an interesting thing. Is that you saying no, Matthew, to a Billy Hatcher in the giant egg episode of The Back Page? Yeah, 100%. Just a man who never found his place in the 3D world is my Yujin Aki take. Just like Sonic the Hedgehog. Okay, so Jay, we’ve reached your number one, right? Yes, that’s correct. I will preface this by asking truly what does it mean for a Sonic game to be good? Should the number one Sonic game be the objectively best or should it be the one that tries to be the best game? In this in mind, my number one Sonic game is Sonic Adventure 2, 2001. Here comes Jay to burn the entire episode down. Here we go. This was originally released on the Dreamcast. I think most people probably would have played this on the GameCube when it was re-released as Sonic Adventure 2 Battle with some extra multiplayer components. So yep, this is a 3D platformer. This got 89% on Metacritic, which is really interesting because I think the retrospective view on these games is that everyone hated them, but these reviewed well at the time. Sonic Adventure 1 really is a very rough game and it feels like it was very much kind of like a testing ground. We talked before with Sonic Extreme and there was multiple attempts to try and figure out what makes Sonic work in 3D. Or if it can work, what can you do with this franchise and how can it evolve? Sonic 1 is like, it’s rough, it’s kind of endearing, hasn’t aged super well. I think Sonic Adventure 2 is like, they took everything that they learned from that and made something that’s a lot more refined. This is like a wild game. So one of the things we mentioned before, these games often suffer from, especially in the HD era, you can’t do that many levels, you can’t have that much content because it’s expensive to produce and Sonic goes too fast. This is like before Sonic was rocketing, he’s going fast, he’s got to go fast but he’s not going super fast. And also again, producing assets in the HD era is much more expensive than it was in the Dreamcast, Playstation 2 era. So this has quite a lot of content. So the premise of this game, which was at the time a 20th anniversary, so this was them going all out, is that there’s two story campaigns, you have the hero story and the dark story, and each of them has three playable characters. We’re now hitting the point where Sonic has a million friends, there’s all the different Sonic flavours you’ve got, there’s a Sonic for every day of the week, and then you beat these two stories, they have these intersecting plot lines, and three gameplay modes, so you play through these platforming sections where you’re going through a Sonic or Shadow, and then you have these kind of treasure hunting levels where you play as Knuckles or new character Rouge the Bat, and then you have like action mech combat, it’s just weird choices, just weird choices, the third gameplay is where you’re playing as Tails driving a mech or Eggman driving a mech, just like, who would come up with that? It’s so strange. Like, this game is the peak of, when we talked as well about Sonic becoming this kind of ironic, post self-aware thing, I think Sonic Adventure 2 is like the point at which it was most ambitious, the most earnest the franchise gets. The plotline of this game introduces Shadow the Hedgehog without any hint of irony. It takes itself very seriously. it’s got lots of grand set pieces and stuff, fully voiced cutscenes, a whole mini game where you play in the Chao Garden, which is this kind of Tamagotchi like creature breeding and raising side game. It’s just a wild game. I think this is to a certain age bracket of people playing Sonic games or the fandom who have stuck around for so long. This is the point at which this is the most endearing to them. This is the thing that endures for them. I think for me, I played this when I was like 10 and I was like this is the coolest game I’ve ever played. And maybe that’s the healthiest way to view Sonic is what is the most exciting Sonic game when you’re 10 years old. And I think this encapsulates everything around that aspect of Sonic. And I think it’s still great, but also like it’s not. Like it’s not that great a game, but it tries to do so much you can’t help like admire what it strives for. Do either of you have much experience or history with this one? It’s a big like blank spot on my Sonic knowledge is the adventure games. What about you, Matthew? Yeah, I bought this on GameCube in an attempt to like get my head around it and I kind of can’t stand it. For me, everything you’ve said about like how wild it is, I just see that as a just mess. Like it’s a game that tries to be three different games. Only one of those is partially good, which is the kind of platforming element of it. Like you say, the treasure hunt and the mech stuff, I thought garbage. The cutscenes, the story, it’s the character. Here is just where like all the character stuff just comes to the front and it’s so naff and shapeless. And it’s basically everything Nintendo weren’t doing. You know, Nintendo was so disciplined and so careful not to kind of overstep the mark with anything. And this was just like a jumbler stuff. But I think the point you make about the one you play when you’re 10 is like super, super relevant. And I can understand if this was like, you know, as a gateway drug. I can certainly understand why someone could play this and then following on from that, enjoy everything that’s happened since, or be into elements of what happened since. Where for me, I was like, this is the full stop on Sonic for me. I think for me as well, it was a sense of like, I grew up with Sonic in this like 2D form with like limited story. I liked the character, I liked the iconography. And then having played those and having those memories, and it’s like, right, we jumped to 3D. Now it’s all serious. Now it’s very like, it wants to do so much with the storytelling. It’s very serious. At some point, it gets so like, tonally strange. At some point, Sonic and his friends watch archived footage of Dr. Robotnik’s grandfather delivering his last words before he’s executed by the US government for committing war crimes. It’s like a Rick and Morty episode or something. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s everything I hate about Nomura games as well. It’s extremely Kingdom Hearts. This is like pre-Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts. This is someone who just completely misjudges the look of something and the tone of the storytelling and goes, it looks completely dumb and cartoony but I’m going to marry something that is so self-serious to it and there’s going to be government conspiracies and there’s going to be a law you don’t really understand. The story is going to be way more complicated than we can ever actually convey in our limited dialogue and limited voice acting. It’s just, whatever branch of game storytelling that is, everything on that branch I cannot stand. Sonic and Kingdom Hearts have got a surprising amount of shared DNA. It’s everything but the kitchen sink, all of it bad. Yeah, except one has goofy in it. It’s true. You can sum this up at the end of this game, Shadow the Hedgehog dies and then the credits roll with like sad music playing over it. It’s very serious. You really get the impression that they felt like they were creating something grand and epic. And I think to me, I find that more, even now, I find that more endearing than Sonic just being kind of snarky and self-aware about not being very good. I appreciate when creatives try and do something grand rather than kind of like sell themselves short upfront. I don’t know what it would be like to play this going in blind right now. I’ve watched a video playthroughs of older Sonic fans who never played this going back and playing it. And they found this one the best of the 3D bunch. They found this kind of cute and novel. I think this is to a certain generation of the fans, this is what they remember and what they want Sonic to strive to be again. It has a great soundtrack. It has this punk, rocky… I don’t know, it’s very weird. There’s multiple Knuckles raps. It’s very memorable. Any other famous historical speeches in it? Not in this one. I did read that all the Knuckle raps were written and recorded in the same day. The soundtrack recently got a vinyl re-release because it’s so popular to this day. More so than a lot of the soundtracks that came after this point. Sonic wears branded shoes in this game only. There was a brand of shoes called Soap which were designed so you could grind on rails in real life like Sonic. And he wears licensed trainers for the whole game. How many people broke themselves trying to copy Sonic? That’s the most early naughty things I’ve ever heard of. That people were trying to grind on rails. This game’s aesthetic is so early naughties. I think it feels like a time capsule in a way that something like Sonic CD feels like a time capsule of what they were going for in the mid 90s. This feels so early naughties. I think it’s held on because it’s so endearingly a representation of that era. That’s why it’s maintained itself. But I also can’t say this is a great game. But it’s so much fun. This is the thing I was talking about. All the videos they watch, they get to their number one choice and they’re like, it’s not very good. But it is the best. And that’s Sonic. That’s not Sonic. I can plausibly see why critics at the time liked it. Just because it was such a… The Dreamcast was so beloved by the people who owned it. And that goodwill has never gone away. And it actually has a really good final burst of… Well, I guess I can’t comment on this. I haven’t played it. But they have Shenmue 2, this, Rez, and then a fairly solid action stealth game called Headhunter in the last burst of life for the Dreamcast. That’s a pretty solid outro to it. So maybe people kind of like tied in the demise of Sega in the hardware market with this a little bit. And there’s kind of some extra goodwill that comes from that. I don’t know. But I can see why critics wouldn’t have hated it at the time, basically. But also, I suppose the fundamentals of 3D platforming were still being, like, you know, perfected by Nintendo. It’s not like Nintendo absolutely knocked it out of the park at the same time. Like, this is Mario Sunshine. This is like a troublesome era for 3D platformers. Some weird stuff happens. But at least, you know, they didn’t give Mario, like, 15 friends and tie it all up in a mad FBI conspiracy. Anything else you wanted to kind of, like, add on this one? Jay, point me once my number one. Yeah, so I think this is… They were doing some crazy stuff with this time. So, like, the Chao Garden, I mentioned that. This is one of these things that the fans say every single game when you’re bringing back the Chao Garden. There were these little, like, blue fairy creatures that you could raise, and you could collect items in the levels, like, to increase their stats, and then you could have, like, little battles with them. They could breed and, like, mutate. Sonic shouldn’t be breeding anything. Sonic shouldn’t be breeding anything. A firm rule I have. Sonic should not be breeding anything. They had some really cool, on the GameCube version, they had some really cool interactivity with Sonic Advance, where you could port, like, Chao’s into Sonic Advance and then, like, bring them back, and you could get, like, rare versions of Chao’s, so you could get, like, special metallic-colored ones or transparent ones. And it was this surprisingly deep system that I believe they were playing around with back in, like, Nights, the, uh, Sega Saturn. And this is the evolution of, like, some systems that they invented in Nights. It just feels like such an ambitious game, like, even when I think about, like, Mario Sunshine, which, in retrospect, is, like, it doesn’t have much, there’s not much, like, to that game. It’s quite small-scale. And then compared to Sonic, which is, like, we’ve got this, like, X-Files storyline, multiple campaigns, and, like, this breeding side game, for some reason. This has, like, driving levels and stuff as well. They’re all bad. Like, the driving levels are bad. But, like, it’s just… We’re glad that they’re… Yeah, it’s just, there’s something so enduring. Maybe it’s just, like, as a creative, like, the idea that they strive for something so great and, like, hit the landing to 10-year-olds. I don’t know. I find it… I find it very… Yeah, it’s weird, because normally those games do speak to me. Like, a lot of my favourite games are, like, big swings that don’t quite land, but they’re closer to landing, I think. I think that this, on paper, big swing, yes, but it’s just so… It’s all a little bit too wide of a mark. It’s the danger zone. This is almost, like… This could almost be one of my favourite games I think. It’s just everything’s just an inch out and that puts it in. Just a nightmare zone. You probably arrived with it slightly too old as well, Matthew. Yeah, that is definitely it. I think what this started with Sonic games is that this feeling of, like, they’re striving for something greater. I wonder if part of the Sonic cycle is people hoping they finally stick the landing with one of these games. Because it’s like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. They never truly live up to what they attempted with games like this. I know games like Sonic Forces was recently kind of like a Sonic Adventure throwback and being very serious and story-focused. People didn’t like that one either. It’s almost like you can tell that there’s a particular kind of vision they have attempted to hit with these games. And they managed to succeed on the 2D games. Sonic Mania is a perfect encapsulation of it succeeds at trying to do what it’s trying to do. But maybe the tragedy of Sonic and the enduring legacy is that they never succeeded to really quite get exactly… There was never the perfect Sonic Adventure game. But they almost got there. And I think that’s what keeps a lot of people around all these years. Maybe the next one is the one that finally actually is the all-round super great Sonic Adventure game that they never got to make. Well, it’s nice to hear you sort of explain the kind of like… I feel like I’ve got a better grasp of why the fandom likes this era of Sonic more. The twisted mentality that I did. All right, great. Well, they were down to my number one, which is on the opposite end of the scale, really, which is Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Really obvious choice, but it had to be in here. I played this game probably more than any other game as a kid. I actually never finished it until I was an adult, because I think the final boss in this game fucking sucks. It’s really hard. Yeah, and there are no rings at the start of the level, so when it resets, you just get hit once and you’re dead, and then you have to start the entire fucking game again. It’s just insane. When you play it these days, you can obviously hard save at a certain point before the final boss, and then just do it normally. It’s quite a spectacle of a final boss, this giant mech suit that shoots these spike hands at you and stuff. But generally speaking, I picked this because I think the first four levels, so Emerald Hill Zone, and then Chemical Plant, and Aquatic Ruins, and Casino Night Zone, are just a really fun come home from school, I’m just going to blast through these levels for an hour and have a really fucking good time, sort of like platforming experience. So this one has quite an interesting background, as I’m sure you both know from watching these videos. It was actually made in America because Yuji Naka fell out with Sega of Japan. Didn’t sound like they were paying him very well, so he left and then got convinced by Mark Cerny to move to America and join the Sega Technical Institute, the very unfortunate acronym of STI. And yeah, so from there, they make this basically kind of like mega sort of Sonic game. And even though their original vision was like much wider, they had loads of fucking levels in mind and like alternate versions of levels in mind. It was something I kind of didn’t know until I watched that documentary this week. What they end up with I think is like a really beautiful looking game with like really clear identity for each of the different levels, even though I do think they trail off a little bit towards the end. And yeah, just a real feeling of sort of spectacle. It feels like a very grand sort of like blockbuster Mega Drive game and just a bit more colourful and fun to play than Sonic 1. So yeah, either of you have thoughts on this one? Very much with you on this one I have like pretty most memories of, fondest memories of. Yeah, just really jaunty. I always got super stressed out. I didn’t like that water level early on though. Yeah, Sonic Drowning is quite a grim thing to see. Very disturbing, yeah. That has put me off. My negative feelings towards all water levels largely can be traced back to the stress of drowning in that game. Yeah, it’s a good point. Waiting for those big bubbles to appear. Yeah, the music gets super aggressive. What I really like about that level is that if you’re really careful, you can avoid going into the water altogether. You have to go across these quite tight swinging puzzles at the start. And then if you do that, you don’t actually get stuck in the long water stretch where you can drown. I quite like that as an alternate route through the level. Generally speaking, I think the level design in this is pretty good. Thanks for the tip, Games Master. Thank you, Ed. No problem. So yeah, Sonic 2, a lot of affection for it. I’ve played it to death now. It was quite interesting as an adult to come back and play Sonic CD and Sonic 3 and Knuckles without having the same level of experience with them and being like, okay, these are… I don’t think Sonic CD is a better game than Sonic 2, but Sonic 3 and Knuckles probably is overall. If you were to put them all side by side as new games now, you’d probably think that that was the best one because it’s got so much content in it. But yeah, Sonic 2 just gets everything right and justifiably a classic. Anything to add on this one, Jay? This was my favorite of the Mega Drive ones when I was younger. I remember around like Metropolis Zone towards the end, it getting really hard. Again, I’ve never beaten this in a single stretch. I’ve never beaten the final boss. Very hard. This was probably the one I played the most. It’s the most accessible, I think, out of maybe including Sonic 1, although Sonic 1 is a little bit easier. I feel like the addition of like Tails means that you can kind of do something along the lines of co-op where someone else can control Tails. It’s just good fun. Yeah, I have a lot of positive memory of this one. Pretty much echo the same sentiments as both of you. Yeah, great. I think I like… Tails are kind of like an AI companion who you kind of send to their death in order to defeat a boss. I quite like that as a dynamic. Okay, cool. Well, we’re wrapped up then. We did it. We did a whole episode about Sonic the Hedgehog and we’re still listening. Well done. Oh, it’s good. It didn’t turn into just an endless dunkathon. I thought that was some legit Sonic chat. Yeah, it was a bit like our Yakuza episode where it’s kind of like a careful like, well, what is this and what are the different eras of this? And yeah, I very much enjoyed it. So thank you for joining us, Jay. Where can people find you on social media? You can find me on Twitter. My studio is called Byton Studio. B-Y-T-T-E-N. And if you want to look at our game, Cassette Beasts, you can go on cassettebeasts.com. Yeah, that’s well worth a look. I think if you have kind of like a history of Pokemon, you’ll dig what Jay is working on. And at the same time, if you want to follow us on Twitter, I’m Samuel W. Roberts. Where can people find you, Matthew? I’m MrBuzzle, underscore pesto. If you want to follow the podcast on Twitter, it’s Back Page Pod. If you want to email us a question to read out in a future episode, it’s backpagegames.gmail.com. And yeah, if you’d like to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, we’d really appreciate that. Any of those we get is just good for us finding new listeners. So thank you to everyone who’s done it so far. And we’ll be back next week with an episode about cover features. So look forward to that.