In the early 90’s I chose my side on the console divide and went with Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Megadrive. I could of went with Mario, but Sonic seemed newer, faster and more edgy than an overweight, slow, mustached Italian. I’ve never looked back. My first experience with Sonic was Sonic the Hedgehog 2. That game was a turning point for me as it was the first time I liked a video game more than the toys I had in the real world. From there I went back and played through Sonic the Hedgehog, the first one. I then got Sonic 3, a great game except for that damn barrel (if you’ve played it you’ll know what I’m talking about) and I remember actually having lucid dreams of playing Sonic & Knuckles shortly before its release. I used to wake up, run over to my Megadrive and suddenly remember that I didn’t actually have it yet.

All of my school books where covered in my drawings of Sonic, Super Sonic, Knuckles and the evil Dr. Robotnik. In fact, because of this game I started designing the art work for my own 2D platformer, which, sadly, never came to fruition. Check out the album link below, my character “Spike” is not a rip off of Sonic at all *sarcasm alert*

My old video game drawings and ideas

I can’t think of my childhood without thinking of Sonic The Hedgehog and his sidekick Tails. I used to get “Sonic The Comic” to read and watch the Sonic The Hedgehog TV show on SatAM. I’d probably watch it eating my favourite can of Sonic shaped spaghetti pieces.

Which is why I was so devastated to see Sonic die a death in the releases that followed S&K. They just wheren’t good anymore. Sadly to follow was Sega itself, who made a few very bad marketing decisions and ended up isolating themselves from their core fans.

Sega have since stopped making consoles and are now solely a game development company. Most recently I played “Sonic Advance 2″ on the GBA:SP. It was very good in my opinion, which gives me a bit of hope that there is still a chance that they can revive Sonic. Also, I have high hopes for the new Sonic release, “Sonic Unleashed”.

I still come back to the originals though every few years by playing them through an emulator on my PC. Time is very kind to the 16bit era of games as they look as good now as they ever did. I guess the only aspect that has changed is the resolution and size of the TV that I play them on. I played Sonic first on a 15″ CRT TV in my bedroom. Most recently I played through it again on my current 42″ 1080i Plasma. The colours are still as vivid and the gameplay still as excellent but Sonic is now looking very jagged around the edges due to his low pixel count.

It seems though that a bunch of die hard Sonic fans wheren’t happy with Sonic aging the way he was and have decided to give him a facelift.

The guys over at “sonicretro.org” are working on a complete remake of the original Sonic 2 game but this time they are bumping up the resolution to the eye bleed inducing 1080p. You can check out their progress here: Community Projects: Sonic 2 HD

Sonic in HD

I’ve already tried out one of the early Alpha’s from their site and it is looking quiet impressive, but it is very bug ridden so it will probably be a while before we even see a complete level released. If you don’t want to take a chance with the Alpha you can watch the video link below. Also bookmark their site and stumble & digg this project as much as you can to get it the support it needs and Sonic deserves.

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