Retro collections, eh? Everybody seems to love them – from bored twenty year olds hoping to relive memories of their pixellated past, to teenagers trying to discover exactly why their older brother goes misty-eyed at the mention of the words ‘Mega Drive’, to younger gamers who appreciate the simplicity and bright, colourful graphics of yesteryear. None of that murky Call of Duty: Finest Hour stuff – not that a pre-teenage child should be playing that game. But their parents probably bought it for them anyway. Ahem.
Sonic Mega Collection Plus is, rather unsurprisingly, a compilation of classic games starring Sonic the Hedgehog. Over twenty full games (albeit old ones) on a single disc, the majority of which involve racing around 2D platform levels collecting rings and defeating your foes. Unlike Sonic’s greatest rival of the time (none other than good old Super Mario), the emphasis is on speeding through the multicoloured worlds rather than exploration.
The games (which have been ported from the Mega Drive and Game Gear) have had no enhancements at all, and are left exactly as SEGA created them all those years ago – which, depending on how you look at it, is either a blessing or a curse. In a rather lazy move by SEGA, however, near-identical versions of the same game appear on the disc – such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Mean Bean Machine for Game Gear and Mega Drive. For crying out loud, give us a little bit of credit, SEGA – just because the public are gullible enough to buy a ‘brand new’ FIFA game every year, doesn’t mean we should have two versions of what is essentially the same game just to up the ‘total games on disc’ tally.
The Sonic games on the disc are a bit of a mixed bag – while Sonics 1, 2, 3 and Knuckles are excellent platformers that are still enjoyable to this day, and Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine is as addictive as ever, games like Sonic 3D, Sonic Labyrinth, Sonic Drift and Sonic Spinball are comparatively tedious and unexciting. The blurb on the back may encourage you to ‘celebrate Sonic’s roots’ – but trust us, not all of these games are worth celebrating. The best you can say about some of them is that they’re interesting to experience, if only to see how much videogames have progressed since the early nineties.
It’s pleasing to say, however, that the ‘traditional’ Sonic platformers on the disc still retain that wonderful, arcade-like feel - those memorable tunes floating from your television once again, the pixellated paradise flying across your screen as you run and jump from ledge to block to platform. It’s a wonderful feeling that will bring back fond memories of the Green Hill Zone and the Floating Isle to anyone who remembers Santa bringing you a Mega Drive on that Christmas morning years ago. For the rest of us, it really is a pleasure to experience some of the classic games that were the pinnacle of platform gaming all of those years ago. Hell, most of the worlds we see in these games are more inventive than anything some modern developers can come up with!
The inclusion of a save function which allows you to save your progress at any time and return to where you left of means that, for some gamers, all of the frustration that came from running out of lives on the original games (which, without a save function, meant starting again from the very beginning) has now vanished, making enjoying these retro titles much easier. On the other hand, some (supposedly) hardcore gamers might complain that, with the added save mode, the game lacks challenge and incentive to replay the games. Our advice is to ignore these people – they don’t have to save if they don’t have to.
Though this compilation of some games (some classic, some classically rubbish) is certainly very entertaining, it’s a hard package to recommend to the masses. On the one hand, many gamers will fail to find entertainment in these simplistic, multicoloured, old-school titles that were made before it became an unwritten rule for all videogames to feature big guns, big breasts, or both. On the other hand, arcade purists, retro fans, older gamers who regret selling their old consoles, and those just looking for a piece of videogames history will find it in this collection. Limited appeal, sure – but if you want to see what all of the fuss is about when your dad and older brother say ‘they don’t make games like they used to’, you need look no further than this.
James Hamilton
