32. Sonic
Adventure
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: Sega
Year: 1999
Format: Dreamcast
Sonic the Hedgehog was basically the reason
I got into gaming. The cocky cobalt
rodent spoke to my youthful brain and said, “You totally want some of
this.” It was an invitation into a more
vibrant, thrilling world, where spectacle and liberation were the names of the
game. And it was an invitation I’ll
never regret accepting.
Admittedly the slight problem was that a good
half of Sonic’s games were pretty terrible, but the Mega Drive classics and a
fondness for Sonic Chaos on the
Master System kept me happy. But I
always craved a little more. And then I
found Sonic the Comic.
Egmont Fleetway’s comic started off as a sort
of official Sega magazine for younger readers, with news, reviews and features
supplemented by four comic strips – one about Sonic, the other three taking
various Sega licenses and making multi-issue stories of them. So my first issue, #16, was halfway through
the first Ecco the Dolphin story and
the second Golden Axe one. However, #16 also showed the future of the
comic by featuring a story starring Sonic’s sidekick Tails. As time went on, the Sonic strips gradually
pushed out the other comics and features until STC was purely an anthology comic set around its own take on
Sonic’s universe. And it was
brilliant. Giving my beloved hedgehog a
detailed world to inhabit, it made me crave a Sonic game that did more than the
basic story-light platformers he starred in.
Enter Sonic
Adventure. The first information I
came across – issue #36 of Sega Saturn
Magazine, fact fans, and I didn’t even have to check the issue number
because I am a gigantic nerd –
promised a deeper Sonic experience than before, with six distinct characters to
control over a large gameworld. What’s
more, since it was one of the first Dreamcast games to be revealed, and thus
one of the first 128-bit games, it looked amazing. That was enough to get me excited, and as the
months ticked by the little bits of information released kept anticipation
levels nice and high. It also helped
that the Dreamcast was the first console I’d ever properly waited for – the
Master System, Mega Drive and Saturn I’d owned had all been bought after their
releases (near the end of the console’s lifespan in the case of the first
two). The Dreamcast, on the other hand,
remains the only machine I’ve ever bought on launch day. My parents, bless ‘em, let me take the day
off school to play it (a thing unheard of in my house).
So anyway.
I ran home from Woolworths with my lovely new console and my lovely new
Sonic game to play on it. I booted it
up, and that gloriously overdone intro video burst across my telly, and I was
in heaven.
Here was a Sonic game that matched the scope
and depth of STC! One with a proper plot, a big cast, and the
strutting chutzpah that said “I am a big deal”!
Any glitches or bugs in there – and to be honest, I never noticed that
many – were pushed aside by the sheer look of the thing. The scale.
The fact that you could wander around the Master Emerald shrine at your
leisure. The actual, proper plot. The fact that it was actually fun to play
came second. But it was! The six different play styles all worked
nicely (although it seems I was the only human to enjoy the fishing levels),
and the fact that you could dip in and out of each one was a nice touch. The intersecting-then-diverging plots worked
well, and basically it was just a good, fun game. Not a classic. It doesn’t really hold up compared to most of the games on this list, but it
was astonishingly exciting at the time and it’s kept a place in my heart since,
so here it is.
MAGIC MOMENT: the rollercoaster ride
near the beginning of Sonic’s Twinkle Park level literally made my jaw drop.
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