Welcome to the Archive site of The Sonic Stadium (2008-2023)
Please note that this site is no longer being updated or maintained; as a result, there may be design issues, and links to images and other media may be broken. Links to posts may redirect you to the same article on the current Sonic Stadium website.
Sonic’s legacy in comics is almost as old as his legacy in games. From 1991 onward, Sonic’s stories have been depicted in sequential art, from one-shots to decades-spanning series. From a little promo comic to IDW, and with three different series from three different companies running at the franchise’s height of popularity in the 90s, the breadth and length of Sonic’s comic legacy is nearly unmatched in the video game space.
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The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
Back in the 90s, when Sonic was the newest, hottest video game property on the block, having a cartoon was always a telltale sign that a game series had truly made it. Mario had a series of them, Legend of Zelda had one, Earthworm Jim had one, and even Bubsy almosthad one.
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There is perhaps nobody more eager or proud to be wishing Sonic the Hedgehog a happy 30th birthday than Takashi Iizuka. Having been deeply involved with the franchise since Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the Sonic Team leader’s hands have touched every single era of the blue blur’s legacy. From designing stages for the Mega Drive classics, to directing fan favourites like Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, to producing the fine-tuned boost-era titles Sonic Colours and Sonic Generations – he’s seen it all.
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It is hard to believe, but a blue hedgehog that runs at the speed of sound is now 30 years old today. So, let’s take a moment to reflect on the impact that the franchise has had around the world.
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With Sonic’s 30th Anniversary in tow, we wanted to look back on some of the more memorable and Influential moments (or arcs) in the games’ stories. These aren’t simply surprising or epic situations, but story arcs, notable moments or any kind of cutscene that made a lasting impact on the series’ continuity and character development.
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The original Sonic the Hedgehog is a game that has been ported and re-released on as many consoles, mobile devices and toasters as you can shake a stick at, and for very good reason. It’s a bona fide classic. The 1991 Mega Drive release remains one of the most iconic video games ever made, and cemented the blue blur’s status as a pop culture icon.
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Thirty years. SEGA’s plucky blue hedgehog has been running for three whole decades. For some of us 1990s kids who grew up playing the original game on Mega Drive/Genesis, it seems absolutely crazy to think that not only would we still be playing Sonic games, but that the SEGA mascot’s popularity is stronger than ever in 2021. For those that grew up in the 2000s, the fact that Sonic Adventure 2 released twenty years ago may make you feel similarly ancient.
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The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
It’s been quite a while since we’ve had a proper Sonic compilation game, and with the recently announced Sonic Origins on the horizon, a couple TSS Staffers got together to share our hopes and expectations.
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Finally. We’ve all waited nearly six months for a morsel of information on what SEGA may be planning to celebrate Sonic the Hedgehog’s 30th Anniversary. For a character best known for his lightning-fast speed, updates have been almost-controversially slow. But yesterday, SEGA revealed a special livestream taking place on May 27th focusing on Sonic announcements and news. So, what could they have lined up?
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The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
Update: On May 4, Double Jump.Tokyo announced plans to move onto an Asset Mirroring System to diversify cryptocurrency payment sources and move towards environmentally sustainable options.
Debates have since ensued over what does and doesn’t constitute an environmental impact, and whether or not NFTs themselves contribute to that environmental impact. The short answer is, no, SEGA’s NFTs won’t dramatically contribute to the massive global resource sink that is crypto mining. However, this investment indisputably moves SEGA into that economy, and that itself has caused concern for many fans, including myself with regards to what direction their business is moving. In this article, we will address what exactly the technology is, why it’s controversial, and why I personally am concerned.
So let’s address this by first starting with the baseline. What is the blockchain, what is cryptocurrency, and what is an NFT?
Blockchain technology is a manner of storing data where all new data is grouped into chunks (or “blocks”) and added to the end of a long running chain of data. Each chunk has a unique ID or a “hash,” and the blockchain knows what order all the blocks are in because each block contains the hash of the previous block. Because you can only add new blocks at the end of the chain, blockchains act as a running record, or a timeline, of the data. Every person participating in the blockchain keeps copy of the blockchain and becomes partially responsible for helping maintain the blockchain.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are two of the most widely used cryptocurrencies today, and they both currently require “mining” to sustain themselves. The currency itself is the reward users are issued for helping create new blocks and, in turn, helping maintain the blockchain. But the process of creating new blocks is like having your computer play a guessing game with every other mining computer.
I’m oversimplifying this, but here’s basically what happens:
The blockchain needs to get its next block because it contains all the new transaction data that it needs to store (stuff like “Sonic transferred 0.01 Ethereum to Tails”). It does so by incentivizing miners to figure out what the next block’s hash will be. Using an algorithm, your computer processor churns out guesses as quickly as it can. If it can correctly guess what the new hash will be, the new block is created, and the first person to do it gets awarded with some cryptocurrency for doing so. To find the “right” guess for the next hash, miners could be attempting tens of millions of incorrect guesses before a new block is made.
So if you have a computer that can process hash guesses faster than others in this constant worldwide lottery, you have a better chance at “winning” the next block’s reward. Or if you have a really nice GPU capable of mining. Or a whole rack of computers. Or an entire warehouse. Or an industrial complex strategically located near a cheap coal-fueled power grid. All of those processors doing all that computing work to produce tens of millions of wrong guess calculations just so the blockchain can process another ten or fifteen seconds of data, and only one person or business (or pool of people) gets rewarded each time.
Much like cryptocurrency, NFTs are a kind of data that can be stored in a blockchain. NFTs are a piece of metadata that specify a URL to a file, and an owner. So, for example, if I’m a digital artist, and I want to sell my work, I can host it on a server (or find a hosting service), use a service to create an NFT of that art, and sell it on a marketplace with whatever selling rules I choose attached to it. The catch is, it will be bought with cryptocurrency, because NFTs are generally sold in cryptocurrency marketplaces. However, any NFT runs into at least one important risk: if that file specified by the NFT ever disappears from the server, or if the server outright goes away, (or if you run into complications with marketplaces and terms of service) you may eventually wind up owning a dead URL.
Because the whole crypto economy is still in wild flux, a lot of companies are making very public, often cynically motivated moves into crypto to wrangle quick profit out of it, to establish themselves as impact-making players in the crypto space, or to just avoid being left behind. Kodak tried and failed to gain foot in that space, right before moving into pharmaceuticals (no really, they actually did that). You may remember that time years ago when a New York iced tea bottler spiked their stock value by changing their name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” The current NFT boom was in part sparked by the NBA selling collectable video clips, the rarest of which are reselling for literally hundred of thousands of dollars. You can bet every entertainment company is discussing NFTs internally whether they actually intend to mint them or not. And if they aren’t discussing it, their investors are.
Maintaining a blockchain does require a certain amount of power across all the computers working within it, but when people discuss the ecological impact of cryptocurrency and NFTs, they usually mean mining. So long as cryptocurrencies hold significant monetary value, there will be an arms race to get them, and the only ways to compete are through either size or efficiency, and both come with huge caveats.
When these fossil fuels burn, they release toxins and great amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (this is what people mean when they refer to a “carbon footprint”). Far, far more than we normally make with our lungs. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means higher global temperature because carbon dioxide traps the heat generated by our sun’s radiation. Higher global temperature means disrupted weather patterns. Hotter hots, harsher and more frequent storms, and the oceans slowly encroaching on coastline. On top of the environmental impact, electricity is subject to supply and demand, so higher electrical demand means higher cost for everyone on that electrical grid.
Continued development of more efficient mining technology may, at best, only briefly mitigate the problem. Many cryptocurrency blockchains are designed in such a way that the complexity of the algorithm needed to find the next hash increases once a certain number of blocks are formed. More complexity means more computing power needed, and thus the only possible way more efficient mining could actually work is if advancement itself outpaces the rate that blocks are mined.
So with ALL that out of the way, let’s get back to SEGA.
SEGA entered agreement with and bought a stake in Double Jump.Tokyo, a blockchain/crypto-focused company whose central game My Crypto Heroes allows users to buy and sell game characters and items on crypto marketplaces. My Crypto Heroes’ economy runs on Ethereum, the second most prolific cryptocurrency, just behind Bitcoin. Ethereum is a Proof-of-Work blockchain where anyone’s chance of getting a payday is proportional to the amount of processing power they’re contributing, thus, it is a currency that encourages competitive mining. Ethereum has expressed interest in moving towards a Proof-of-Stake structure that limits who can mine and how much, but they haven’t fully executed on that yet, plus even Proof-of-Stake systems still requires some amount of mining.
We do not yet know what cryptocurrency system SEGA will be operating in, but Ethereum remains at the heart of the NFT marketplace as we currently know it, and Double Jump.Tokyo itself currently deals in Ethereum. Even if SEGA does not do any mining themselves, they will likely be entering an economy that is built on the back of mining.
Thus, opinion splits here:
Do you believe that any engagement with a wasteful mining system is tacit acceptance or approval of that system? OR do you believe SEGA should only be held accountable for what they are directly doing?
Wherever you fall with that will be purely philosophical.
My personal feelings on SEGA selling NFTs is in how it represents them as a business and how they treat their own legacy of games. There isn’t any need use NFTs to make digital collectables. SEGA has made both physical and digital collectables for years through their mobile games, their MMOs, and their partnerships with toy companies. NFTs in concept aren’t a hot new idea. They’re an old idea in a much more obtuse package with a lot of strings attached.
While most of SEGA’s traditional customers don’t own or use Bitcoin or Ethereum, SEGA still sees NFTs as enough of a priority to buy part of a company and get in on crypto. I don’t know if SEGA legitimately sees a long-term plan for positioning themselves in the crypto space, but if they are, selling scans of classic game art is an unambitious and uncreative start.
Optimistically, I’d say that this is just a business diversification that they can divest out of if (when) the bubble bursts. Pessimistically, this is SEGA joining the blockchain to make investors happy or to chase a big pay off. I am not implying in any way that this is SEGA moving away from publishing traditional video games. But companies build reputation by having a clear, strong philosophy, and using that philosophy to drive decisions; I’m concerned that SEGA is buying into this somewhat dubious one – and hopefully they won’t be following in the shallow footsteps of companies like Atari. Nobody should follow in the footsteps of Atari.
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
This year is a year of anniversaries for Sonic in more ways then one, because not only is the franchise itself turning 30, but Ian Flynn’s first published Sonic work, Archie Sonic #160, turns 15. This means that Flynn has now been writing comics for roughly half of the franchise’s entire lifespan, and the time between his first comic, and his next IDW story arc starting later this year, is roughly the same amount of time as between Sonic 1 and Sonic 2006. Yes, that makes folks like myself who remember when they picked up #160 feel rather old!
Since his debut, Ian Flynn has written well over 200 Sonic comics across five ongoing series, alongside a selection of mini-series and one-shots, as well as a couple of Sonic Boom episodes. This gives him the largest body of work of any Sonic writer.
Flynn had been applying for years to the Sonic comic before he was finally brought on. Both he and artist Tracy Yardley! were given a chance to work on the comic by then-editor of the book, Mike Pellerito. Yardley debuted a bit earlier than Flynn in Sonic X #5. Their first story, “See Ya Later Chao,” was written and drawn in 2005, though wouldn’t make it into the book until years later. Though initially not brought on in that capacity, Ian Flynn soon became the head writer of the Archie Sonic book, writing the bulk of the stories from his debut issue on.
Flynn and Yardley!’s debut story, “Birthday Bash,” was a two-part storyline that turned “Evil Sonic” into Scourge the Hedgehog, briefly brought back old school Archie badniks Octobot and Crocbot as a strange fused monstrosity, and also introduced fan favorites Bean the Duck and Bark the Polar Bear as money-grubbing mercs for hire. This duo’s opening chapter would be the first of many, as Yardley became a fairly consistent presence in the Archie books for years. Both Flynn and Yardley would hone their craft over time, introducing bigger and better stories with better art.
On a more personal note, 160 was my big jumping-back-on point for the comics, after dropping them twice in the past. I never dropped them again after this. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Flynn and Yardley significantly redefined how the comics looked and read for the rest of their run. As someone who loved their work, and thought they only got better with time, I was quite content with that.
What are your experiences with Ian Flynn and Tracy Yardley!’s work? Did you pick up #160? Have you ever read that or any other part of Flynn’s Archie run? Let us know in the comments!
I’ve got at least one article in the work about Ian Flynn’s Archie run, in commemoration of this anniversary, so stay tuned for that!
Unfortunately, it does not appear that issue #160 has been reprinted in any capacity, but other Flynn stories from #162 onward were reprinted in the Sonic Sagas collection, which can still be found on Amazon.
Special Note: Tracy Yardley!’s pen name ends with an exclamation point. I thought it fitting to include it here.
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It has been 10 years sine the devestating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, causing massive loss of life. The folowing nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Diachii power plant still has lasting repurcussions, affecting a huge number of lives of those living in and around the Prefecture. A large area around the wrecked power plant – known as the exclusion zone – is still deemed too radioactive to safely live in.
The Youtube channel, Exploring the Beaten Path, spent time in the Fukushima exclusion zone back in 2019, investigating those places that stand frozen in time since 2011. As part of their exploration, a pair of daring explorers has ventured into the ruins of a SEGA Games Hall (with it’s SEGASonic logo still intact on the building) to get a glimpse into life so suddenly brought to a halt a decade ago.
You can check out the video below:
On this sombre anniversary, the thoughts of everyone at TSS are with those who were and still are affected by this disaster.
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So, the Sonic the Hedgehog movie is about a year old now. Like many, I was absolutely surprised to see that it wasn’t a train wreck. I actually rather enjoyed it! With a sequel on the horizon, there are many things I’d like to see, as well as a few things I hope I don’t.
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I was at E3 2010 when I heard the news that Roger Craig Smith would be taking over as Sonic’s voice actor. As I sat in a corner of the convention center and hurriedly typed out an article about it for Sonic Stadium, I was only feeling one thing: excitement. This, on top of playing Sonic Colors – easily the most promising Sonic game I had experienced in years – really made it feel like SEGA was working hard to revitalize the character.
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Sonic Prime, the latest Sonic the Hedgehog animation due for release on Netflix in 2022, will descend from a long dynasty of animations that reach all the way back from 1993’s slapstick Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, through to the modern charm of Sonic Mania Adventures. Each show has cultivated its own personality, and legion of Sonic the Hedgehog fanatics to boot. Similarly, there are now a multitude of genre-crossing Sonic the Hedgehog video game titles, that you’d be hard pushed to not find something for everyone in the Sonic the Hedgehog universe.
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I came to Balan Wonderworld with a lot of skepticism. The last time a Yuji Naka game really grabbed me was 2003’s Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, and while PROPE developed a handful of cool novelties, the studio’s most significant work ever was a Wii game smuggled inside a Wii U game case. Now with Square Enix, Yuji Naka has been given “one chance” to make a platforming game for the RPG giant, and we have our first taste in today’s new demo.
And having played it, I struggle to be optimistic. At all. Moreso with each platform I played the demo on.
Screenshots and animation taken from Switch version.
Despite the style and story and world and characters that scream “NiGHTS into Dreams,” Balan Wonderworld is a basic-to-a-fault 3D platformer. The male or female protagonist in a bout of emotional strife find themself entering a magical theater. Your character is greeted by the ever energetic and whimsical Balan, given a bird, and told to find his or her heart in a fantasy world of memory and emotion.
The demo presents four levels and a boss: the whole of Chapter 1, as well as individual levels from Chapters 4 and 6. The levels themselves are presented as dreamlike sky islands themed around someone external to the story who is also experiencing difficulties in their life. Chapter 1 focuses on a farmer whose corn crop is ruined by a freak tornado. Its levels are full of giant corncobs, haybails, pumpkins, and picket fences. The chapter eventually pits you against the farmer himself, tainted by his depression and transformed by a mysterious masked being.
Balan Wonderworld’s controls are reduced to standard analog movement and a single action such as jump or attack. The costumes your character can equip are the game’s main gimmick, each with a special ability that replaces your action.
These special abilities add some variety, but they quickly go from novelty to obligation. On their own, the protagonist can only jump, but donning the wolf suit turns your jump into a spinning jump that can break blocks or damage enemies. Soon after, you encounter a kangaroo that replaces your jump with a single flutter-jump, akin to the jump in a Yoshi game. You’re never asked to get clever with these costumes; it’s always obvious which you need to use to move forward. Late costumes in the demo include a gear robot that can activate special gear boxes, a bat that can perform Sonic’s homing attack, and a fox that, and I am not joking, will periodically turn you into an invulnerable, uncontrollable box, but when the game decides to, not when the player decides to. The first time I got this costume, I immediately died, as my character became a box whose momentum slowly slid it off the edge of a narrow platform and into the abyss.
That inexplicable box might be the best metaphor for this game. It feels simple, yes, but also sloppy, unrefined, and aimless. As soon as you control your character, you’ll feel an incredible disconnect as their animation shows them sprinting at top speed… as they slowly trod forward at an agonizing pace. No matter what costume you wear, the character’s dismal speed and anemic jump barely change. Enemies appear infrequently, rarely pose a threat, and are dispatched with the most basic head-jump or suit power. Stage design gives some room to explore, but blocky layouts and ledges only give the illusion of scalability and hem you into the places where the game expects you to go. The game sells itself on the themes of expression and choice but doesn’t give the player the tools to accomplish either.
I opted to try the Switch version of the demo first, and was met with muddy textures, no anti-aliasing, and periodic framerate drops. The jaggies are noticeably worse on handheld mode’s 720p screen. I hoped moving to my Xbox One S would resolve this, and some of the lighting does indeed seem slightly better, but the game retains its incredibly cheap and unpolished visuals. Chapter 1’s stage geometry uses an effect that warps the level towards or away from you as if on the inside or outside of a sphere, but the seams where the stage deforms are incredibly noticeable from a distance and may actually be one of the culprits for the jerky framerate. NPCs constantly dancing in unison vanish when you get too close, and props that litter the stage don’t react to your presence or interactions. The whole environment feels static and detached from your character.
The Steam version came with its own complications. Running it on a 2080 at 1080p, anti-aliasing off and graphics set to their lowest, the game struggled to reach above 20 frames per second. The only exception was when I Alt+Tabbed to another window, at which point, the framerate shot up to 60, until I brought the game back into focus.
The back half of the demo shows some promise. It increases the complexity a bit, but the gameplay in this demo fails to grasp the most basic expectations of modern 3D platformers. If it hopes to deliver on a satisfying experience, the game has huge hurdles to overcome. It’s a $60 game competing with modern benchmarks like Super Mario 3D World, A Hat in Time, and New Super Lucky’s Tale. Keep an eye on reviews when it launches in March, but if you want to test it out now, you can do so on most major platforms.
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
Can you believe that Sonic the Hedgehog, a game series whose design has often been compared to the physics of pinball, has never had a ball-flipping table to call its very own? Not even SEGA, who once dabbled in producing licensed pinball machines, thought to build a table for its very own Casino Night-visiting mascot. This is a matter that Ryan McQuaid, avid Sonic fan and pinball restoration wizard, hopes to rectify with his award-nominated homebrew project, ‘Sonic Spinball’.
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Good day, and welcome all to the inaugural Stadium Events, our upcoming special events, streams, podcasts, and assorted miscellanea.
Are you not on our Discord? You should probably be on our Discord. You can do so here (and don’t forget to read the #rules!).
Did you know Sonic Stadium has a Twitch channel? It does, with content every week! If you can’t watch live, the VODs are archived for two weeks, and later on YouTube (eventually, there’s still a lot of uploadin’ work to be done).
Here’s what you can catch this week:
Sunday Jan 17 7 PM EST / 4 PM PST / (Mon) 12 AM GMT
Almost Every Sonic GX and guest attempt to play every Sonic game, no matter how obscure! Lego Dimensions – Main Story Part 3
Saturday Jan 23 7 PM EST / 4 PM PST / (Mon) 12 AM GMT
Sonic Mania on Luna Shigs tests out Sonic Mania on Amazon’s new streaming platform
Sunday Jan 24 7 PM EST / 4 PM PST / (Mon) 12 AM GMT
Almost Every Sonic GX and guest attempt to play every Sonic game, no matter how obscure! Lego Dimensions – Main Story Part 4
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
Ever wonder what it would be like if, instead of being live action, Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog was just an extended episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog? No? Well too bad, animator and Youtuber FlippinDingDong clearly did, and the result is great:
Not only is the animation spot on, to the point that I briefly thought this was just a dub of a scene from the show, but the voice acting is also a superb imitation of Long John Baldry’s performance. Got to love how he rolls those Rs!
YouTube isn’t exactly the friendliest place for animators these days, so be sure to head over there to give this video a comment and a like to help it with the algorithm! Definitely deserves it in my opinion.
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What happens when you combine the eternal classic Tetris with SEGA’s adorably funny Puyo Puyo? Well, you get Puyo Puyo Tetris, a multiplayer puzzle game that was so successful that it warranted a full-on sequel!
While Sonic the Hedgehog is our main focus, we occasionally like to take a dive into SEGA and Sonic Team’s other offerings, and we’ve found something special in this mash-up series!
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SEGA’s 60th anniversary website is having a weeklong celebration of Sonic this week, and they’re starting things off with some Sonic avatars and wallpapers. The wallpapers utilize the 30th anniversary render released earlier this year, while the avatars use Sonic Mania stock art. To download them, you can either sign up over 60th anniversary website (which nets you a free copy of NiGHTS for Steam), or check them out below:
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
The Sonic Stadium may link to retailers and earn a small commission on purchases made from users who click those links. These links will only appear in articles related to the product, in an unobtrusive manner, and do not influence our editorial decisions in any way.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, we don’t mean Christmas – pfft! – but instead Next-Gen Console Day! This month sees the launch of two new platforms in the Xbox and PlayStation family of gaming systems, and we couldn’t be more excited about both. Today, Microsoft formally releases the Xbox Series X and S, and with backwards compatibility a major factor we decided to dig into the archives and check which Sonic the Hedgehog titles you can play from Day One.
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While many mods exist for the sake of giving a different gameplay experience, there are others whose only interest is to say “Oh man, look at this insane thing I can make this game do!!” Technical achievement won’t interest player, but it it can be impressive in its own way: making things bigger, faster, stronger, or just proving you can do the unexpected for its own sake. In this roundup, let’s look at some technically impressive or technically noteworthy games.
Why put your file size in the name of your hack? Because this game is big. It’s very big. How big is it? It combines all stages, special stages, and characters from Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, and Sonic & Knuckles into one massive 37 Zone odyssey. The hack uses bank switching to press itself into a format that Genesis standards can allow, some custom sound drivers, and the Sonic & Knuckles engine by way of Sonic 3’s save system. That save system will prove extremely valuable when you put three hours in, and see you’ve only reached Zone 24. Only reached Zone 24.
Beyond the expected character choices, you can select the co-op team of Knuckles & Tails to trek from Green Hill to Sky Sanctuary. The game claims to have followed the logical progression of the emeralds, letting you collect them in Sonic 1 & 2, but staying true to Knuckles stealing them in 3 (sadly, I can’t confirm since I went for the novel Knuckles & Tails playthrough). In a rather unusual choice, this beta prioritizes alpha and beta versions of Sonic 2 stages and names, and includes Wood Zone, Dust Hill Zone, and Hidden Palace Zone among others. The only place to be wary is the stage select cheat, which caused the game to crash when I attempted to load certain levels, often by trying to put characters on incompatible stages (such as Knuckles in S&K Death Egg Zone), but also when I just tried to select a stage normally.
To myself as a non-developer, the impressive feat is just the scale of it all. This is marathon Sonic, a game to occupy most of a day if you let it. Even if its technical achievements don’t do much for you, having those four landmark games stitched together into a single contiguous experience gives a whole era of gaming a gravitas it doesn’t have when separate. It’s not more than the sum of its parts, only because that sum in itself is already strong.
In the realm of getting DOOM to play on every device and in every context known to man, DOOM in Sonic Mania adds an additional menu choice from the Sonic Mania main menu that… just lets you play DOOM. Yeah. DOOM, the 1993 shooter. In Sonic Mania. With controller support. That’s… kind of it. I don’t want to downplay the personal amusement I get playing DOOM from within Sonic Mania itself, but it does exactly what it says it does, and it seems to do it well. Soon as I made my menu selection, I was running around boxy 3D environments blasting demons in the face with a shotgun.
That said, your results may vary, and not just because it’s a shooter that’s older than Sonic 3. The controls feel pretty good on a gamepad, but the limits of Sonic Mania’s button inputs mean concessions had to be made. There’s no mouse support, you’ll have to toggle between strafing and turning, and changing weapons require button combinations. You’ll also need a legitimate copy of DOOM, such as Ultimate Doom on Steam, so you can snag the WAD and put it in the mod’s root folder. If you don’t, you’ll be restricted to the game’s included freeware WAD which will not support custom WADs. On the other hand, if you do, it’ll load in a nifty bonus WAD that replaces Doom Guy’s sprites with Sonic’s face and cartoony gloved hands.
I was unable to test adding other WADs such as Doom II or Chex Quest, but they do appear to be supported.
So this one requires a bit of clarification. J2ME, or Java 2 Platform Micro Edition, is a Java platform that a number of phone games run on. No, not games on your iPhone or Android. Old flip phones. The kind that used your number pad as the controller. During the years I owned a an old color screen Nokia, I bought and played a handful of… generally terrible games, including a port of Sonic 1 that could, at best, be described as functional.
Sonic Mania J2ME doesn’t make many modifications from the original, but it does show off what can be done to this specific version of the game, such as sprite and music replacement. Marble Zone has Lava Reef music, and Sprint Yard Zone has a few Studiopolis designs.
I personally like this, and I don’t expect many others to. It’s an effort to poke at a really esoteric version of Sonic and pick it apart. It’s just… it’s going to be weird to play. Keep your expectations low. The sprite replacement in this version isn’t thorough, and the game it’s built off of is… it’s bad. It’s a bad but still playable version of Sonic 1. The midi music is grating and will just stop after a loop or two, and there are no sound effects. Sonic’s sprite rotation will regularly glitch until he’s just running backwards and upside-down while descending small slopes. Many animations are linked to framerate, and to quote the hack’s description, “Limit to 30 FPS for a smooth but tolerable experience. Limit to 15 FPS for correct object and animation speeds.” And none of this is the hack’s doing, that’s just the nature of its source material. If you play this, do so for the proof of concept and accept that it’s doing what it can with the tools it has.
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If I wasn’t playing Pantufa during something called “Sonic Hacking Contest,” it being a hack would have never crossed my mind. A homage, or a Freedom Planet-esque Sonic-like? Sure! But a ROM hack? Heck no! That should speak to the kind of experience Pantufa has in store for you: certainly something with lots of Sonic elements, but a surprisingly original experience in its own right.
How original? Well, for starters, Pantufa simply feels different from a classic Sonic character. He is a bit heavier, a bit slower, and when he jumps, there’s a moment before the character curls into a ball that leaves him vulnerable to enemies. Said enemies don’t provide the kind of bounce you’d expect from a Sonic game when you jump on them. Pantufa also has a slight double jump, which is effective for getting a little bit of additional height or maneuverability, without feeling overpowering or negating some of the more difficult platforming design. The physics feel like they come out of a Sonic game, but the way the character interacts with them changes things enough that it often feels like a very different game. These differences extend to how health and power-ups work, too.
Instead of rings, Pantufa has three hit points, and while the game does still have shields, these shields are now stackable. The game does have a few other power-ups that work as expected, including speed shoes and invincibility. These power ups can still be found in item monitors, but they can also be found in breakable Super Mario Bros-esque bricks and item blocks in the first stage, because why not? I’ve played plenty of Sonic hacks that introduce new characters and moves, but I don’t think I’ve ever played one that practically built a new game. Yet somehow, Pantufa manages that.
The level design can also feel pretty different from a classic Sonic game, particularly the opening level. This build of Pantufa has three levels, and they each show off fairly different kinds of level design. The first level, Pipes of Green, is expansive and explorative, and while it’s certainly possible to just run from the beginning to the end, you’ll be missing a lot if you do. Here, the standard way to move through the stage is to take a path through an underground area at the midway point, before emerging back on the surface, where you need to hit a green switch to activate some platforms to progress to the end.
However, if you explore the level a bit and pay attention to your surroundings, you’ll find that there is a little more to it. For one, there’s an entire path that lets you bypass the underground area, that you can only reach by activating some invisible blocks (by jumping into them, Super Mario Bros style). If you miss these blocks and run through the underground area, you’ll still be able to reach this path by backtracking after hitting the green switch and jumping onto a newly activated green platform that takes you up to this area. If you backtrack through the upper path as well, you’ll reach more green platforms, which can now take you to some hidden shield power-ups. Is all this exploration and backtracking necessary? Not really. But it’s fun, and it’s something the game is actually designed to accommodate, unlike the any of Sonic’s 16-bit titles.
On the much more linear side of things is the demo’s second stage, Mount Fade, which is a simple linear platforming level. It’s fun to run through, with lots of places that utilize the classic Sonic rolling mechanics, and it also has a great visual style. It takes place on a snowy mountain and tries hard to evoke a wintery feeling, with pine trees, snowmen, and gigantic candles that go out as you pass them. It’s an impressive use of the Genesis’s limited color palette to create some gorgeous spritework.
The final stage, Shandon Hill, is easily the most “Sonic-like” of the three stages. It’s speedy, has loads of places where the character can actually cut loose and run, and there’s even a momentum gimmick: flexible palm trees that can send the Pantufa soaring through the air at high speeds. These trees offer a great way gain enough momentum to speed through the stage’s more complex, curvy geometry, allowing Pantufa to speed up walls and on ceilings. Much like the first level, Shandon Hill is somewhat expansive, but has a much greater focus on speed and momentum then platforming, and it’s not hard to beat it in less than a minute. The way the palm trees can toss Pantufa around really open up the stage, though, and there are upper paths you can only reach by hitting them in the right pattern. Much like Mount Fade, Shandon Hill also looks great. The level has a gorgeous neon color palette that kind of evokes the 80s neon aesthetic.
On top of the demos for this hack, Pantufa the Cat: Extended Edition also contains the entirety of the character’s previous 2011 ROM hack, called “Classic Mode” on the main menu. There is also an additional hack that utilizes much of that game’s assets, called Classic DX. While neither of these hacks are as polished or as nice looking as the new one, and feel a bit more like Sonic 1 hacks, they are still worth playing in their own right.
So Pantufa the Cat: Extended Edition by VAdePEGA is a definite recommendation from me. Check it out on the Sonic Hacking Contest website, here!
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What’s that? You want Sonic the Hedgehog news, sonny? Well, it just so happens that we’ve got a whole LIBRARY’S worth of news stories and features covering the last twenty years! We could tell you when Archie Sonic #117 hit comic store shelves… or we could tell you something interesting instead. How about the biggest Sonic stories to hit the internet since The Sonic Stadium opened its doors in 2000?
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It’s true that for the last two decades, we’ve been on top of the latest and greatest Sonic the Hedgehog news. But I wanted The Sonic Stadium to be more than just an information resource. My goal has been to create meaningful contributions to expand and enrich the online Sonic community. Which is why you might remember Sonic Stadium just as much for its list of wacky projects as you might for news and opinion.
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Two decades is a long time for most people. For Sonic the Hedgehog, it’s probably an absolute eternity, actually. On 24th October in the year 2000, I launched the very first iteration of The Sonic Stadium. I was fifteen years old, a year away from my high school finals and the worst of what we called the ‘World Wide Web’ was still only being foreseen by the late and great David Bowie. It truly was a different time.
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Twenty years. That’s how long this humble little Sonic the Hedgehog fan site has been kicking around for. The Sonic Stadium launched on 24 October 2000 and hasn’t taken a break (server crashes aside) ever since, making it possibly the oldest, longest-running Sonic site still active to this day. Over the next couple weeks, we will be celebrating our anniversary in style with special Twitch and Discord channel launches, special features and more!
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