This came out the same year as Sonic ‘06 and that atrocious GBA port of the first Genesis game. And yet, it is among my favorite Sonic games. It was actually my first exposure to the Blue Blur. I replayed it last year to see if it was still good, and I can say it absolutely is.

The racing gameplay has so much depth, far more than Mario Kart. It’s all about managing your air (gas), accomplished by performing tricks, grabbing item capsules, rotating the stick at specific moments, and accessing character-specific shortcuts. There’s even a tournament mod for this game available on PC. That’s when you know you made something special.

The side modes are no slouch either. The story is stupid, but that’s par for the course with Sonic. Love the Babylon Rogues though. The mission mode, while repetitive, encourages mastery of the courses with their ranking system. It’s also worth doing to unlock AiAi, Nights, and Ulala.

I only have two complaints with Sonic Riders. The first is the lack of a good tutorial. There is an in-game video explaining the core mechanics, but it’s hidden in the Extras menu. Even then, it doesn’t explain everything you can do. The second issue is that there are only 16 courses, and about half of them are reskins. Sonic Team could have added more courses and iterated on the mechanics with a good sequel, but instead they took away the core mechanics and eventually decided to make Mario Kart clones. What a shame, but at least we have this title.