Groundhog Day: Can you feel the sunshine, Sonic?

When I was a little kid I was a pretty huge Sonic the Hedgehog fan. I don't know what it was about the guy that I loved so much, but I did. I watched both of the cartoons and would get VHS copies when possible, I read and owned all of the comic books up until about issue 65, and obviously I played the games. All the games. Every single one I could get my hands on. These days I still appreciate Sonic quite a bit but I don't keep up with his games like I used to. I just play all the handheld Sonic games. It's probably got more to do with the fact that I'm a big handheld gamer than anything else. I used to be pretty big Mario nut too but the same thing happened there. Still, I've been pretty curious about the console Sonic games considering all the controversy they spur.

I feel really bad for the Sonic fans of the current generation. I meet with young Sonic fans very frequently and they seem perfectly happy in the same way that I was at their age, but I know when they get older there's probably going to be a variety of haters who give them shit for it. When I was a kid it didn't really matter that you loved Sonic. These days it's the cool thing to act like every Sonic the Hedgehog game is a failed abortion. You just need to play one Sonic game and not like it, then say every Sonic game sucks. Congratulations! You're a gamer now! Commence not letting people enjoy themselves!

To the haters out there: You guys played Sonic 2 every single day when you were kids and now you get pissed off because Sonic isn't like that anymore. Your idea of a day well spent is making an angry Youtube video about Sonic 4's physics. That's cute that you call yourselves fans. I never knew that only liking one or two games made you a fan. Hey. I liked Final Fantasy IV and VII. I guess I'm a Final Fantasy fan even though I don't like any other ones!

No, really. I'm serious. It's awesome that you try to dig through Sonic's back catalog for a game like Sonic CD, then turn around and proclaim it the greatest Sonic game of all time, then provide no real reason for why aside from the fact that it looks and plays like Sonic 2, then go on about how every other Sonic game sucks. Honestly. I feel your pain.



Sarcasm aside, I'm not pining for the return of Sonic. I loved both Sonic Adventures. I loved both Sonic Rushs. I even somewhat enjoyed Sonic Battle. When I was younger I absorbed Sonic like a sponge. I appreciate most Sonic games for being ambitious and trying out new and interesting things. I don't expect a Sonic game to be perfect. I expect it to be fun and for the most part they have been. I always find myself returning to Sonic. This even translates to handhelds long before Sonic was on the Gameboy Advance and DS.

One of my fondest Sonic related childhood memories was in Meridian, Idaho. Meridian was a weird combination of a rural and urban town, just outside of the state capital of Boise. It was my home for the majority of my elementary school years. This was the age of childhood fads like virtual pets and pogs. There was a shopping plaza down the road from my house that got frequent use. There was a tiny comic shop my Father would take me to frequently in order to fill a giant binder full of trading cards as well as a little chinese restaurant we both liked. Between those two locations was a local pawn shop, and there I discovered a Sega Game Gear that had three Sonic games: Sonic Chaos, Sonic Triple Trouble, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. There was a pretty badass Mickey Mouse game too, actually. Just recently my Groundhogs Day relationship with Sonic has compelled me to buy a Game Gear off eBay once more. I have no idea how I even held that machine when I was a child. It's gigantic, but Sonic Triple Trouble is still just as fun as it ever was. Knack the Weasel remains one of my favorite character designs in the Sonic universe.

It actually doesn't end there. I recently acquired a Neo Geo Pocket Color and a copy of Sonic Pocket Adventure. I bought my Neo Geo Pocket for SNK vs Capcom: Match of the Millenium, but I'll be damned if I wasn't gonna own that Sonic game I read about years ago in The Official Dreamcast Magazine. In my youth I was a total little Sega kid. My relationship with Sonic will probably lead me to eventually play every one of his games. My curiosity has even led to me hunting down a copy of Sonic 360. Memories aside, there is one specific Sonic game that I always return to on at least an annual basis. Sonic R for the Sega Saturn. Why? Because for a select few Sonic fans it was something they'd always wanted. Sonic's fast on his feet, yeah? Why can't there be a racing game where he just runs?



Sonic R is actually the first game I ever wrote about on Destructoid. That goes to show you how much I enjoyed this game as a kid. It was the most bare bones, low-key Sonic game you possibly could have gotten. It was a Sonic racing game with 5 tracks and some unlockables and it could last maybe 2 hours at the longest. It wasn't even made by Sega. Despite that this game has carved a niche for itself. There are a lot of underground fans of this game. Check out Youtube videos of the game you'll see a plethora of comments that show how dear this game is to a select few peoples' hearts.

To many people this game will just look like trash. To the ones who can accept this game for what it is, it's a unique and fun experience. Sonic's characters practically begged for a game that pit their abilities against eachother competitively. Their unique abilities like Tails' flight and Knuckles' gliding were something I always wanted to see in some sort of racer. Nevermind games like Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing. I've heard the game is actually great, but that's not the point. I wanted a racing game that felt more like an actual Sonic game.

See, the basic idea behind Sonic R was that you needed to explore the 4 main tracks in order to unlock the final one. You needed all seven Chaos Emeralds scattered around those tracks. Each emerald was hidden behind a door that requires you have so many rings to unlock. You would need to gather rings around the course, take the long way around the track to the hidden door and still place first to keep the emerald. Now for a little kid that's actually kind of complicated to do and still get first place. If you needed help you could unlock the game's hidden characters. To get them you needed to find 5 hidden tokens spread around any individual track, but you only needed to place third in the race. The hidden character would challenge you and if you won, you had a superior racer to help you get the Chaos Emeralds. For a young sonic fan however, those hidden characters were an amazing piece of fanservice: YOU COULD PLAY AS MECHA SONIC AND KNUCKLES. The comic books had recently made me really wish I could play as Mecha Knuckles, and this game delivered that. Awesome.

That's really about all there was to it. Simple as it was Sonic R is exactly what I wanted. I was young and innocent. I wasn't begging for the Next Generation Sonic Game that everyone else was at the time. I wasn't bitter at my Sega Saturn for not delivering Sonic Xtreme or any other such game to me. I had plenty of Sonic games already. It never even occurred to me that I needed more for my Sega Saturn aside from Sonic R and Sonic Jam (which was in itself quite incredible for a Sonic fan.) I was content to run around Sonic R's stages finding shortcuts and getting the unlockables over and over again. I pop this game in at least once a year to play a couple times, just because I still think it's good clean fun. This was a game that captured my imagination, and when I say that I'm not joking. The game had a "tag" mode where you would race around and tag other characters on the course. Me and my friends converted that into a "hide and seek" mode. We would play split-screen and divide the screen with a blanket so we couldn't see the other person's screen. One player would hide and the other would look around the course.



Sonic R in essence was nothing more than a fanservice game but it remains fairly unique and has a sort of identity to it. It was the only Sonic racing game that really still felt like it was a Sonic game and it had the most insanely cheerful soundtrack imaginable. The songs were so cheesy it was embarrassing, yet they got stuck in your head and kinda put you in a good mood. Sonic R's soundtrack lives on to this day via cameos in Super Smash Brothers Brawl and Sonic and Sega's All-Star Racing. Some of you may be surprised to hear that Sonic R's developer went on to make games like Lego Star Wars. It's composer went on to develop the soundtrack to Mass Effect. Either way there will be many people who see absolutely nothing about Sonic R that's appealing. These will be the sort of people who play it for a short period of time, never learn how to actually play the game, complain that the controls are terrible and decide it's the worst Sonic game ever made. These are the sort of people who lost their innocence a long time ago. The kind of people who don't actually want to enjoy anything. The kind of people who aren't genuinely fans of anything.

If the game is too flawed for you to enjoy, there's nothing wrong with that. Objectively the game really isn't all that good, but it was still creative. For me that's a lot of what makes the Sonic the Hedgehog games interesting. Chances are unless you're a really big Sonic fan you're not gonna have all that much fun with Sonic R. Just don't go pissing in other peoples' milk. That's my point. Let the young Sonic fans of this generation enjoy the same kind of innocent fun that I had. Sonic has never been perfect no matter how much you want prove it and you'll never have a genuinely objective argument for it. Admit that much to yourselves. Whatever you want to say about the quality of Sonic games, they're still better than most games aimed toward children. If you really think people deserve better, find something better and turn them on to it. Just let people enjoy Sonic if they want to, though.