When I was, I'm thinking around 12 years old, the Sega Genesis came out and it really changed gaming for a lot of people. The NES was a real game changer and saved the video game industry from a home use standpoint but the Genesis was really something futuristic at the time. It blew us away.
No game encapsulated how different Genesis was from Nintendo than the Sonic the Hedgehog games in my opinion
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can you hear the music in your head?
This game came out a few years after the system was released and Sega honestly needed it badly because now they had to contend with the SNES which in many ways, if not all ways, was a superior system to the Sega Genesis. Sonic was exactly what they needed to stay in the battle.
I don't think i need to tell you about how different this game was to the mascot games of the Nintendo. Mario was one of the major players, if not the number one icon of Nintendo at the time and Sega actually did a good job of making it seem like Mario was slow and old while Sonic was the young, hip, fast, exciting character between the two.
Their Sega does what Nintendon't advertising campaign was actually quite brilliant and for a little while there it looked like Sega was going to take over the home console wars. Sony would have other things in mind for a few years later that would totally screw that up but that is another story altogether.
The Sonic games were just amazing and one of the major things about it that appealed to so many of us was that most of the levels didn't have just one way of getting through them, which is something that Mario games up to this point didn't really possess.
You could fall off a cliff, lose some of your rings, find yourself in a totally different area and still end up completing the level. That was a lot of fun actually. Plus the fact that if you just had 1 ring you could take a hit and this was a pretty novel method of allocating lives. Powerups didn't really exist in the original Sonic you just had to stay alive. This of course would change in later games but for the most part they weren't necessary.
Now I'm gonna get to the point of this entire thing: I highly suggest that you leave your fond memories of the Sonic side-scrolling games in your memories and do not try to go back and revisit those days even with a remastered version of the games.
I tried it, played it for about half an hour, got motion sickness at a couple of points, got frustrated and then quit. Thankfully it was free so it's not like I wasted money but like a lot of things in life I feel as though the fond memories you have as a kid probably sitting on the floor with a CRT television (it would have had to be, plasmas didn't exist for many years after) and plugging away at a game with 3 buttons. These were probably great times for you but I'm here to tell you, just leave those memories alone.
Like a lot of the TV shows you loved in the late 80's and early 90's it is not a good idea to go back and rewatch / replay them for the most part. I now kind of wonder what it is about Sonic that ever drew me to it in the first place. Time has not been kind to the gameplay, that is for sure and I feel as though I have kind of ruined a part of my youth by even attempting to go back and relive it.
I think this would be true for a vast majority of all of the games back then. Maybe it is just better to leave them alone. I know that I will... this experience was a real eye-opener for me.
Have there been any games that you tried to go back and relive the magic only to feel the same as I have described above? if so let me know in the comments!