Sonic Month: Sonic the Hedgehog CD (2011 Remaster)

The lettering makes it looks like he changed his name
to Soniccd the Hedgehog.

I’ve been promising a new Sonic Month for years, never got around to it. Well, it’s time. And I’m starting with Sonic CD, a 2D Sonic game that was originally made for the Sega CD, an add-on to the Sega Mega Drive that allowed the console to play CD games. Thanks to it, the Mega Drive could play games with video cutscenes, as an example. The original came out in North America on November 23rd, 1993. I should mention that, since I play the game on Steam, this isn’t actually the original version, but rather the remake/remaster developed by Christian Whitehead, which was also released on PS3, Xbox 360, iOS, Android and a few more, around December 2011. The Steam version came out on January 19th, 2012. I got my copy of this game through a bundle on Humble Bundle, by the way.

After playing for a bit, I realized; it’s the first time I play through an entire 2D Sonic game! I’ve played some Sonic titles with 2D segments, like Sonic Colors, but nothing from the speedy hedgehog’s classic two-dimensional days. This was a new experience for me, and I’ll admit I was rather surprised at how much precise platforming there is to do here. I thought older Sonic games had far more areas that allowed for free running; we are talking about the speed demon of video games after all. Maybe it’s unique to this one, considering the very special concept behind it.

Little Planet really is small. Way too small for the 21 levels to come.

The plot: In Sonic’s world, for one month every year, a planetoid nicknamed Little Planet comes down over Never Lake, then resumes its trip across space, only to return the next year. It makes no sense whatsoever on a scientific or physical level, just roll with it. One year, Sonic decides to visit it, jumping his way towards the sphere. That's when he finds out that Doctor Ivo Robotnik has captured it!

Little Planet is home to seven Time Stones, magical artefacts that are totally not a replacement for the Chaos Emeralds that unlock the ability to travel through time. With those, Eggman plans to rule across the past, present, and future. Sonic will need to travel the seven areas of the planetoid across all three eras, gather all seven Time Stones, and stop Eggman in order to save the world and create a good future for everyone!

Determination 100

There’s also something in there about a fan of the blue hedgehog that gets kidnapped by a robotic duplicate of him also created by Eggman. Yup! Sonic CD marks the first canon appearance of both Amy Rose and Metal Sonic, who would become important characters to the franchise.

Death by choking glomp, versus death by evil robot doppelganger.
Good thing I have a shield!

This is all Round 1. Top: Present and Past.
Bottom: Bad Future and Good Future.
Also, yes, it's the picture in my title card.

The game is split in seven Rounds, each divided into three Zones – two levels and a boss fight. Every level is then split across three time periods – the past, the present, and the future (which itself can be split between a “bad” and a “good” future). In each world, the past looks like a clean, pretty land that hasn’t been impacted much by the arrival of technology yet. The present shows Eggman having taken over, with badniks and technology creeping in. The bad future is desolate, decrepit, and depressing – technology has, indeed, destroyed the land. The “good future”, which appears only if Sonic successfully changed the course of events, will instead show that technology has managed to live in harmony with nature, creating worlds busting with color and in which machines don’t bother the environment at all, helping it even. There are differences in the levels’ layout depending on the time period, and the music also changes to reflect the time period and its current state.

Now I just gotta run half a mile at top speed to time
travel, and... Wait, how is that supposed to work?

It’s possible to travel through time by passing a post that says either Past or Future, and then running at high speed for a certain period of time. I would do the "88 Miles per hour" joke, but the Steam achievements already do it for me. Going to the past yields the best results, since it allows to change the present and the future for the better, but it’s also a lot harder as the levels are designed devilishly with Past posts located at tough places, all while making it ridiculously easy to pass by Future posts while running at top speed.

Pictured: Infinity Run- Er, Super Peel-Out.

Sonic also has a couple new tricks up his nonexistent sleeve, as far as his own speed is concerned. If you make Sonic stand still, then press up or down and hit the Z key (on Steam) repeatedly, Sonic will build up speed in place and speed off afterwards. The down variant creates his Spin Dash. The up variant is a new move, named the Super Peel-Out, which charges faster before allowing Sonic to speed off, at the cost of being unable to harm enemies in the way, which the Spin Dash can do.

In order to defeat Eggman, getting to the end of the game isn’t enough; to get a good ending, one of two things must be achieved:

1. Collect all Time Stones. Sonic must finish one level of each Round with 50 rings, enter the ring portal that appears after the Goal post, and destroy all the UFOs in the then-unlocked Special Stage. Once per Round, for seven rounds.

2. The Past versions of the first and second zones of each Round contain two items that Sonic can destroy: Robot Transporters and Metal Sonic hologram projectors. Destroy the former, and all badniks will vanish from the other time periods, along with guaranteeing a good future for that Round. Destroy the Metal Sonic hologram, and animals will come back to the Zone; this one is actually optional, but it does help.

Hurray, the Chaos Emerald Infinity Gem
MacGuffin Time Stone is mine!

Note that these methods aren’t hybrids. You can’t do one or the other in each world; you need either all 7 Time Stones, or all 14 Transporters destroyed. Because this tough-as-all-Heck game would be too easy otherwise, come on now.

These robot transporters, to be exact.

Someone with actual talent, and hours of training, would probably be able to pull this off. This is probably the worst game to choose for a gamer’s first time playing around in Sonic’s 2D days, because the good ending is notoriously difficult to get, even for talented players.

And a talented player I ain’t! Allow me to recap of my own experience playing the game.

"I'm ready for my anime!"

First – wow, the animated intro and endings. This already threw me off, because I wasn’t expecting it. To start, we have a sweet minute and a half of Sonic running towards Never Lake and finding the Little Planet captured by Robotnik. All in the dynamic style of a ‘90s anime. The endings are similar; barring the last couple seconds, which differ between the bad and the good endings, the rest is mostly made of animated clips of events taken from the game, with Sonic beating Robotnik. The bad ending reveals that despite his defeat, Robotnik got his hands on enough Time Stones to recapture Little Planet and, we can assume, start his plans of world domination thanks to them. The good ending shows animals and flowers returning to all areas of Little Planet, with no mad scientist in sight. The devs took full advantage of the Sega CD’s capabilities. “Let’s go crazy, let’s get some full animations on the disk!” I love it.

Sonic’s reputation as a speedster may have influenced some preconceived thoughts about the way his 2D levels are built – lots of free space to run, not a lot of obstacles. Well, here, nope! I think it’s because of the Past/Future concept of the game, but the levels here are labyrinthine and large. It’s very easy to get lost. Sure, you can just try to run towards the right since the exit is always over there, but the level designs don’t always make it simple.

Fifty rings, goal post, warp ring...
Now, time to visit the third dimension for a minute.

And when I said that gathering everything to achieve the good ending was difficult, I wasn’t joking. The levels have rings all over the place, so getting to 50 is easy, not to mention gathering rings in multiple time periods will help tremendously. That said, losing all of Sonic’s rings is also very easy, due to all the blocks of spikes in each area and the large amount of enemies to be found… usually in the most inconvenient places, no less. I already mentioned that it can be tricky to travel to the past in order to destroy the Transporters; even if you manage to get there, now you need to find the damn thing in the level! Hope you’re not gonna run by a Future post by accident and be transported to the present before you’ve destroyed the machine. Also for the record, if you activate a Past or Future post and fail to time travel, that post becomes unusable. Can’t try again from the same starting point, unless you lose a life that is.

The Third Dimension screws completely
with me. My perspective is failing me!

Got your 50 rings? Got to the end of the level, and jumped into the big ring at the end? Good, you’re on your way to getting a Time Stone. You get to a Special Stage, which shifts the perspective to 3D. Sonic is now on a field and has to run around, and jump to destroy UFOs. There’s 6 per level, all over the track, and there’s all kinds of hazards in the area. The timer starts at 100 seconds. Have I mentioned that you lose 10 seconds every time Sonic runs into water? To top it off, the 3D perspective makes it quite difficult to hit the UFOs. Destroying all six is doable, no doubt, but it’s very tricky. And if you run out of time, since these stages take place after normal stages, you move on to that Round’s next normal stage. If said next stage is Zone 2 of that Round, you’re fine; if it’s Zone 3, AKA the boss, you’re screwed.

And for the record, no, there’s no way to go back to previous stages. Missed a Time Stone or a Transporter? Might as well start the whole game over. No level select for the main game. Sure, having the game in an updated version makes it possible to leave a level and come back if things aren’t going your way, but if you get to the bonus stage and fail it, in both normal levels of a Round… Yep.

For the record, there's 7 different Special Stages,
but I struggle to see even more than 2 different ones.

A still image can't really show the gratness of
this race between two speedy opponents. 

I do like that they included Amy Rose and Metal Sonic here. As an introduction to these two characters, it’s decent. As soon as Amy appears, she tries to follow Sonic around. When Metal Sonic appears, he kidnaps Amy. The boss of Round 6 is a race against Metal Sonic, one of the hardest segments in the whole game in my opinion (damn good thing you can get a free extra life just before the race, each time you try it). After Sonic has won the race, he frees Amy and gets a hug. Oh, the first of many glomps she’ll inflict on him throughout the franchise. Whether he likes it or not.

Oh, Eggman, you're full of air, aren't ya.

Speaking of the bosses – several of them are great. The first one is pretty generic, but the others use pretty inventive techniques. One Eggman fight is set underwater, and Eggman’s ship is surrounded by spinning bubbles – Sonic can break the bubbles to get some air and stay underwater for a longer period, and he needs to break most bubbles so he can get a clear shot at the ship. One fight has Eggman blocking the way and dropping bombs, and Sonic defeats him by running on a treadmill that destroys the scientist’s blockade little by little.

I am Sonic, destroyer of treadmills, breaker of speed radars!

Sorry Tails, I've dealt with the threat already.

One last thing I haven’t mentioned yet about this game, or rather, the Steam re-release, is that it improves the original game in a handful of areas. Among the examples, the framerate never drops below 60FPS, and one can choose to switch the soundtrack to the Japanese version. Most other examples are pretty minor, usually little tweaks here and there as quality-of-life ameliorations, details that were missing from the original and such. Achievements are included as well. Last but not least, in the 2011 digital remaster, upon completion of the game a first time as Sonic, Tails is unlocked as a playable character! (However, playing as him disables achievements.) That’s Tails alright; late to the party, showing up once the action has come and gone. Oh, and also, this edition comes with a Time Attack mode, if you want to brush up on your speedrunning skills.

And, well, I hate to declare defeat, but… I tried as much as possible, and I couldn’t get the good ending on my own. Sure, it’s easy to look up online, but achieving it myself would have been great. Alas, the game is already pretty tough to finish without the added challenge of getting the good ending. It’s the sort of thing that requires dozens of hours of practice, and time is unfortunately a luxury I don’t always have. So yeah, sorry folks – I can’t finish the game the best way, but I can get to the end. And, with this, I must of course acknowledge that my talent (or lack thereof) at the game shouldn’t impact my final words.

"It's all good, you're safe now."
"My hero! For your troubles, I shall stalk
you until the end of time!"

Because, as a game, it’s great! While the game gets pretty tough, its difficulty curve is consistent through the seven Rounds. The concept is inventive, and I don’t think it’s been done again since – each level having four versions, each with its own layout feel, mood and music, and a mission that relates to traveling across these four versions. I love the concept so much, I wished the Sonic franchise did it again. I doubt it could be implemented to 3D, though. I also like the variety in environments and bosses. I also assume my analysis of the content would be a lot more complete if I had some way to play the original version and compare it to this one, the 2011 remaster.

Remember, it's a time machine, not a time-space machine.
If you get trapped in a wall that wasn't there in the other
time period, it's your fault.
(For the record, this glitch happened to me only once.)

Now, if you like your Sonic game with minimal platforming, it won’t be your favorite. It gets pretty tough in that aspect, not to mention the labyrinthine design of the levels makes it hard for the blue speedster to keep any sort of momentum – so perhaps the time travel mechanic could have been implemented better or in a fairer way. The number of times I wanted to go to the past, but ran across a Future post while I was almost there… Also, while I can’t say I ran into the issue often, I met a glitch where Sonic got stuck in a wall as he time-travelled while he was going through a tube. There's a few levels with annoying elements, though nothing quite as bad as the Wacky Workbench, which takes place over trampoline platforms. Good luck even finding a place to run when you keep getting flung upwards!

The super-bright floor? Super-trampolines.
How do you want me to run when the entire
goddamned floor is made of trampolines?

The said, the special levels do look pretty great.

Last but not least, I like the idea behind the Special stages, but genuinely hate playing them due to being 2D sprites playing on a 3D plane. The perspective is bad and destroying all the UFOs is far too difficult, not to mention the many obstacles and the timer losing 10 seconds anytime Sonic runs or lands into water!

But aside from those issues, I like the game just fine. I guess it’s not the best 2D Sonic game to really get a feel of the Sonic franchise as it was at the time. And I won’t get a taste of the true classic Sonic anytime soon either, as next week I’ll be looking at Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Episode 1.