Sonic the hedgehog is a game that was truly ahead of its time. The music in sonic 1 is so iconic, whenever you hear it you know what game it's from. The same can be said for the sound effects, whether it's collecting rings, finishing a level, or almost drowning. Each sound is truly iconic and special in its own way.

Another thing about sonic 1 that's amazing is the level design. The levels are full of spaces to explore and different routes to take. It really does baffle me how on Sega's first try they managed to get everything so right.

EDIT: thanks so much for all the support everyone, means a lot. after a LOT of thinking, i've decided that i'll still be writing reviews, just shorter, as to not exhaust myself. thanks again.

anyone who knows me knows that i love all the classic sonic games. they’re my comfort games and i’ve been playing them for probably a decade by now. a friend of mine recommended me to play this one again today so i decided to revisit it. this isn’t an unbiased review that’s trying to see if this game “still holds up” or “is as good as i thought it was when i was a kid.” far from it. i love this game lol. my rating is my general critique mixed with my biases and nostalgia i have towards it. sonic 1 is a game that i can pop in anytime and get enjoyment out of it.

green hill is my goat. marble is tolerable. spring yard is cool. labyrinth is ass. star light is awesome. scrap brain is mid. that’s it. that’s the whole review.

console wars, genesis vs super nintendo, america, who gives a fuck. you’ve heard it all before and it doesn’t impact the game’s quality very much at all. sonic defined a generation partly because of sega’s great marketing and shit or whatever, but if the game was no good then it wouldn’t have lasted. sonic 1 is a good game, always was. it didn’t age, it didn’t change. it’s sonic T. hedgehog on the Sega. for years little kids everywhere rushed to their shiny wrapped boxes under that prickly tree to find the Sega they wanted bundled with the sonic edgehog they wanted too. kids aren’t stupid, they knew sonic was our goat. it’s a great time with some dull moments that don’t hinder the overall package all that much. does it suffer from first game syndrome? certainly, but this only further proves that what was laid down here was great enough to allow the construction of the fantastic sequels…
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i’m burnt out man, what do i write next. critical analysis my ass, it’s 10:41 PM on a weekday and i should be sleeping, but guess what? i’m not. sonic the hedgehog sega genesis baby, it does wild shit. to get real for a second i genuinely wrote like a page of some critiques and shit i have with this game. scrapped. i’ve been slowly feeling like my reviews have been becoming really forced and this was it. this was the one that made me genuinely angry. i want to write more reviews but it is really hard. shits becoming stale for me and i feel like there’s nothing i can do. i’m trying to break away from this boxed up structure i see some of my reviews share. the same words and phrases again and again. Backloggd.com. maybe it’s time for me to play a video game and not write a review about it. maybe i should play games and genuinely let them penetrate my soul and allow me to soak in their great, mid, or even terrible juices without having the need to pull out iOS Notes to jot down thoughts or justify how i feel to a seemingly invisible opposing party. maybe it’s time to say goodbye to backloggd.com, just for a little while. to those who follow me and like my stuff i’ll always be thankful to you guys. it means a lot to me that my little ramblings and shit about video games actually interest people. never in my life did i think i’d gain a following on this site. to everyone who reads this mess of a review, thanks.

Sonic the Hedgehog is a platform video game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega for the Sega Genesis home video game console. The first game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, it was released in North America in June 1991 and in PAL regions and Japan the following month.

No, I didn’t proofread this, nor do I intend to.

I used to know one of the main devs of this game.
He was a moderator in a My Little Pony Source Filmmaker Discord server. Dude was a complete piece of work, think about the Discord moderator stereotype and he was exactly it.
Then one day, this game was released on Steam and almost instantaneously he was ridiculed and laughed out of the server, it was glorious to watch unfold.
Anywho, the game itself I refuse to play, not out of principle or anything like that, but because the game is a whopping 40+ gigabytes in storage size (it used to be almost twice that much before being downsized in later updates). Granted that isn't a lot compared to most AAA games these days, but considering how small Source Engine games tend to be in file size for the most part, it's insane and I refuse to have such a game take up so much of my PC's storage.
You fucked up my face indeed.

If hideo kojima makes a low budget half life stand-alone expansion.

In my opinion, whole half life franchise and source engine etc... existed for this game, just like a missing piece of a puzzle...

in other words: "a second deadly premonition incident"

One thing I used to do on Gmod when I was 14-15 was to go on gm_bigcity and spawn in like 300 Combine troops to hunt after me and arm myself with a bunch of M9K weapons to kill them all, or as many as I could until I died. Tacky, yeah, but this game and its sloppy mechanics/skirmishes reminded me of that. But what would I rather play right now, or at any moment in the future, for that matter? Yeah, Gmod.

This game has such a fatally bad understanding of the Half-Life world and aesthetic, as it feels like the creators wanted to fuse it with the cinematic, grandiose nature of the MGS games, a fusion that would barely work in good hands in the first place, let alone made by people who made a story and script as bad as this. This idea that we're finally playing as "the villain" is so transient and forced, even due to how the story unfolds. It is so divorced from everything that made the HL games great and is a pretty embarrassing stain on a lot of the amazing mods that have been created from Source and GoldSrc. For instance, Kelly Bailey's amazing, atmospheric scores for the original Half-Life games have been replaced by some stock music-ass, Epidemic Sound ass battle music that not only wildly varies in style but none of which fits with the game or HL2 for that matter, save for a pretty great main theme/menu theme and a few other themes done by composer Paul Humphrey. Still feels tangentially disconnected from the HL vibe, but it's still good and I'm giving credit where credit is due as a fellow musician.

The gunplay and firefights, as I alluded to earlier, are garbage. You're always meant to be in a big empty room killing 10s upon 10s of enemies, and the objectives are so unclear that half of the time you go through about 90 enemies in 10 minutes before you realize "Huh, maybe I'm meant to be going somewhere!" and find you can open this train car door hidden off to the side of the gigantic train station to move to the next section. The absolute worst. Did Half-Life 2 also not have a super-intensive HUD and not give you objectives through it? Yes. But it was able to easily display a point A and B through its excellent level design, which is impossible in HDTF, cuz every area is so big that it feels like you could hold two concurrent games of football in them. Act 2 as a whole is a masterclass in how NOT to do game/level design.

There are very minimal shades of passion and good gamescraft here and there. Some of the vistas throughout the game look quite nice, the choice to put a timer culminating to seven hours throughout the first act (referencing the duration of the Seven Hour War) was pretty cool, and the intersections between Mitchell and Gordon's journey were nice. These guys who made the game are very obviously Half-Life fans, which makes me sorta feel bad for loathing this game.

Not gonna say much more because "Hunt Down The Refund" is a pretty excellent deconstruction of everything wrong with the game. And just to mirror something he said in the video, yes, the audio mastering in the game is ungodly bad. There are cutscenes where voice actors are at entirely different volume levels and have completely different mastering of their voices, and there are sections where what people are saying becomes completely inaudible due to the terrible radio EQ. This problem couldn't even be visually subsided since the game doesn't have working subtitles, what an embarrassment. And yes, I'm gonna acknowledge but try to move past the protag in his presumable 40s-50s having a short-lived love interest in a girl he met when she was a child, which is obviously gross. That alone is enough to make me dislike this game, but there's so much more fundamentally wrong with it.

Anyways, this game's had enough of my energy already. At least I have a new answer for the times anyone asks me "What's your least favorite game?"

You fucked up my face/10