[h1]You're too slow![/h1]
[b][u]Disclaimer:[/u][/b] I never played Super Mario World (only the NES one) but many of the features of the NES and SNES Mario titles were brought to New Super Mario Bros. which I played a lot when I was younger (all I'm saying is that I've been a Mario kid, and not a Sonic one, and these last 2 months have been the only time I've played Sonic games in my life). So in terms of a 16-bit comparison, I have no other benchmark to see if these games exceed or falter.
Sonic 1 is more of a platformer with puzzles rather than a Blast Processing simulator like 2, 3, and CD, with occasional Loop de Loops. It really does show its irrelevancy in that sense, especially with the lack of the Spin-Dash, which sucked for me since I played Sonic 2, Mania, and Generations before this and felt at many times the game was lacking a crucial mechanic (Though its [i]focus[/i] was on building up momentum instead of giving you the instant gratification that comes with Spin-Dashes, everything felt slower overall.)
As long as you're in a ball, you deal damage (unless it's just after you touch the ground and you take damage to whatever is there). Even though the spin-dash is absent, you can do a sick quick-roll immediately in front of a badnik to take it out. Having these ROMs in widescreen could've been great as Sonic scrolls horizontally most of the time and seeing more of his upcoming obstacles definitely lets you react better.
Teabagging is by far the strongest in this game because there are fewer intermediate frames of animation for ducking, something that I did in this game as a fidgeting mechanism while waiting for platforms to slowly come to me.
There are no [b]Saves[/b] in Sonic 1 or 2, so you end up repeating Green Hill over and over again whenever you decide to pop in Sonic 1, without ever revisiting [i]Spring Yard and Star Light Zones[/i] because of the pace breaking stages in between them making you want to end your run. You gotta rely on savestates in the emulator (where you get up to 4 slots for each game on the Genesis and Megadrive Collection), so it's advised to place a save upon reaching each quarter of the game to keep a permanent memory of your playthrough.
There are only 7 zones here, just like Sonic CD, but each of them has been dragged out to 3 acts, with the third one mainly being a boss fight in its second half, which is a far cry from the variety seen in Sonic 2 and 3K in the future. I like the music of every Zone apart from Marble Garden and the Final Zone, and they're just gonna keep getting better.
The sound effects for stuff like blades spinning or boulders breaking always irritated me. It always felt like the genesis couldn't reproduce that sound well enough and was instead spitting profusely at me. (it sometimes sounds even worse than the fire-spitting sound effect from Bowser in the first NES Mario game)
it's good that Sega gave away Sonic 2 instead of 1 back during their 60th anniversary, cause if I had started with this game instead, I would've probably dropped it after the first zone and gone on believing the lies about Sonic never being a good franchise.
[h1]Sonic CD (2012):[/h1]
I tried Sonic CD before it got delisted but refunded it because the uncapped framerate made the physics too wonky to play with (game speed was more than doubled). Mania redid the best parts of CD anyways, so I didn't have any regrets about not being able to beat Metal Sonic at the end of the 2nd last stage which I reached by flying through all the bad futures without a care in the world to fix Little Planet cause I was fed up of initiating a time travel as soon as I hit top speed after passing a sign accidentally.
Sega definitely beat Nintendo at shifting from chiptune music to higher bitrate CD-quality soundtracks with voices and stuff for Sonic CD (especially the weird, quirky kind with the JP soundtrack), and even though Nintendo beat them to the adaptive soundtrack race, I feel that for replay listens, Sega's approach for overhauling the Zone themes with contextual remixes was better than adding a Bongo track onto Mario soundtracks when you sit on Yoshi. The beeps and boops of the Genesis sound more like rock music compared to the SNES' softer but heavier music. Even though 1 and 2 are pop music, 3 is pop-rock; CD is the most experimental with its 90s SFX mash-ups.
Sonic CD has the same number of zones as Sonic 1, which also might explain how CD is more of a supplement to Sonic 1 rather than a sequel that defeats it in every category. Metal Sonic's appearance, in-game, and external promotional material with all the animated shorts and renders were all adding up to it being my favorite antagonist in the series, even more than Knuckles, even though he had more interaction with the player in the game that he was in; and it helped keep that abomination of a creation an elusive entity throughout.
