After drudging through Sonic’s latest adventure through mediocrity, I felt thoroughly deflated. In all honesty, I was starting to think I was just completely tapped out for this series and it would never give me the same highs it used to. As it turns out, all I needed was a brief refresher with a personal favorite of mine. It’s been a while since this series provided me any pleasure, but boy lemme tell ya, when Sonic hits it really hits.

For many, the predictable choice here would be Mania or 3&K, but despite their obviously quality, it wasn’t the skew of Sonic I was looking for today. Not even Sonic 2, a game I’ve loved for longer than I’ve had cogent memories, would scratch the particular itch I was looking for. Instead I reached for Sonic CD, a game that continues to stand tall as a singular pillar of excellence in this ridiculously far reaching series of games.

If you’ve known me online for the past few years, you should already know how hard I’ve fought on the Sonic CD frontlines in the past, and as such I won’t reiterate everything I’ve previously said of the game in this log - instead I just wanted to gush incessantly for a little bit about one of my favorite games of all time.

In retrospect, bringing in the character designer of Sonic to direct the sequel to the first game was an inspired choice, and this is felt as early as the very first level. Visually and sonically this thing is unparalleled in it’s swag (but you didn’t need me to confirm that), levels and their layouts are as chaotic as the series would ever see in this format, and the pace at which you can breeze through each zone is comical even by Sonic standards. Later titles like 2 or 3&K arguably worked better as 2D platformers for normal people rather than absolute freaks, but no other Sonic game understands the appeal of the character quite as well as this, and it’s obvious in all areas of its design.

Even the time travel, something that continually gets mocked by detractors of the game, is so effortlessly cool and natural for the character that it’s kinda weird playing the other games without the mechanic now. The main sticking points for most have to do with the execution of time travel itself, and its actual mechanical use in the story. If you personally land in this critical group of goblins, I hear you, but I just don’t care. You’re so concerned with traveling through time just for it’s “intended” function as a vehicle for the true ending of the game, when honestly, the best way to enjoy it may be to focus on the purely shallow benefits to it. On my most recent playthrough I disregarded the robot generators entirely, breezed through all seven special stages, and continued to utilize the time travel nearly 40 times in the run just to change the scenery and layouts while leisurely bouncing through all 7 of the game’s magnificent zones. Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that bring the most pleasure.

While on the note of the time travel, this most recent playthrough was done on the Sonic CD Restored version of the game along with it’s massive time travel overhaul, and while I’ll always be able to hang with even the nastiest ports of the game, this cleans up the experience to an honestly absurd degree. In fact, it was such a smooth experience I can’t help but wonder if people’s hatred of the game comes more from shitty ports than anything. While some of the changes here could be argued to be somewhat superfluous (from what I understand, time travel in the original CD version of the game is around 35% faster than the 2011 port, with CDR’s time travel being around 16% faster than even that), it’s clearly the closest representation of how the game not only was on release, but how it was always meant to be. Sure the time travel is absurdly fast here to the point where it’s maybe a bit too easy to pull off, but the core of the game shines so clearly with this port that I think it doesn’t take away from the experience at all.



In the bad timeline we landed in where this series is just inconceivably fucked up with no way to turn back, it’s nice to still have a title that shines bright in a sea of never-ending shadow. This game tickles my brain in a way not easily found elsewhere. The joy of flinging this blue bastard through pinball mazes from hell. The joy of effortlessly seeing all eras of time just for the sake of it. The joy of beating a level in 30 seconds or 5 minutes dictated only by how you feel like playing the game rather than by some slapdash gauntlet level design. The joy of true and uncompromising play.