The Game Gear love on the Nintendo 3DS continues this week as two new Sonic games arrive on Nintendo’s downloadable retro service – and if you’re looking for a pair of obscure, challenging titles to sink your teeth into, this might well be the week you’ve been waiting for!
Sonic 2 and Sonic Labyrinth are the games on offer this time around, at least on the US version of the eShop. European 3DS owners will only find Sonic 2 on their version of the eShop this week, with Labyrinth already having been released at an earlier date.
SEGA has provided some descriptions of the game on their blog, as below:
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
As with the other Sonic games that appeared on both 16-bit and 8-bit systems, Sonic 2 was a unique take on the game instead of just a half-the-bits adaptation. There were unique levels, different music, and a challenge suited for a portable system. Notably, Sonic 2 also had unique boss enemies — instead of fighting incarnations of Robotnik, Sonic did battle with unique robot enemies, before facing down the bad doctor in a climactic battle worthy of the epic end-encounter of the Genesis version.
Features:
- Ride a runaway mining cart and fly on hang gliders, feather-light bubbles and whirling flywheels to zip through Zones.
- Face six terrifying Master Robots on your journey to stop the evil Dr. Eggman!
- Bonus Hint! The panel which swings around at the end of levels will always feature a Robotnik, denying you any sort of bonus … unless you have a “0″ in the 1s place of your ring total (10, 20, etc), in which case you will be awarded 10 bonus rings.
Sonic Labyrinth
If there’s one thing I hate — just one thing — it’s when an ambiguously named evil mastermind replaces my favorite shoes with a pair of cursed sneakers. Next thing you know all your friends are robots of some kind and you’re rolling around trying to free them from eternal metal servitude while collecting rings and power-ups. With all our social progression and whatnot that may seem pretty outlandish these days, but back in the 90s that kind of situation was called a “weekday”.
It is also totally what happens in Sonic Labyrinth, where Dr. Eggman (née Robotnik) has taken Sonic’s shoes, but look, Sonic can tuck-and-roll faster than most Olympians can sprint, and that’s what you’ll be doing, while collecting chaos emeralds and navigating your way to glory. This game falls into the category — like Sonic Spinball or Mean Bean Machine — of applying the Sonic characters to a different sort of game idea, experimenting with the maze-and-puzzle format which was a natural for the portable console.
Will you be downloading Sonic 2 or Sonic Labyrinth for your 3DS? Let us know in the comments!
Source: SEGA Blog
While the Master System version is way better thanks to more balanced difficulty, I picked up Sonic 2 anyway just to have the version of it for on the go, since the MS version was my first Sonic game so I of course adore it due to nostalgia.
I’d sooner recommend downloading the Wii Virtual Console version of Sonic 2 unless you’re ready for dealing with some serious difficulty spikes. But hey at least this version has save states!
(The Wii Virtual Console version of Sonic 2 meaning the 8-bit Master System version I mean, not the more famous Mega Drive/Genesis one obviously).
sonic 2 was the first 2d platformer i played the first sonic game however was sonic spinball
I just went on the Nintendo eShop yesterday actually… and.. HOW is Sonic Blast considered 4 stars? Or Tails Adventure as 5? And I even think I saw Labyrinth today, and it was rated highly too, like.. how? They’re top picks on the eShop. Yay..?
I unironically like Tails Adventure a lot. It may very well be my favorite Sonic game not starring Sonic. So I’m not super surprised about that. But the eShop doesn’t look like it has many titles at all rated 3 or lower, at least in a cursory look. This is probably just a symptom of that.
Tails Adventure is Excellent.
Put tails adventure on the wii u to plz
I just know Sonic 2 8-bit as the game where Tails dies…