Oh why do I do this to myself? I could have chosen something much simpler. I could have watched every show in the Brave series, I could have played the Super Robot Wars games that are available in English, I could have read the 50 books in my huge pile.
No, instead I chose to do this. This year is the 30th anniversary of Sonic the Hedgehog, the Blue Blur himself, and to mark this momentous occasion I have foolishly decided to start this new project where I go through all the Sonic media of the past 30 years.
This initially started as a playthrough of the main Sonic games for my own amusement. I’ve been a big fan of Sonic for most of my life with some of my earliest gaming memories being playing Sonic the Hedgehog on my brother’s Mega Drive. I thought it’d be great to revisit this franchise I enjoyed a lot as a kid. Pretty quickly though, I looked into all the Sonic games and it became hard to judge what counted as a main series game. Is Sonic CD one of the main games? Is Sonic 3D Blast? Where do the Master System games fit into this? What is the real Sonic 4?
All these questions came and I decided that it’d be much easier (and maybe more fun) to just play them all. I made a list of many games and set out to play them. As I did I realised that my thoughts on the games had evolved a lot since I was a child where if you asked me what I thought of Sonic 1, I’d say “It’s fun.” I realised quickly that my thoughts as a 28 year old were a lot more complex than that of a 5 year old. Yes, Sonic 1 is fun but it’s also irritating at times, questionable at others and often very satisfying. So I decided to do what I always do when I want to talk far too much about a 30 year old game, I would write about it.
With writing comes research and during the research phase, I discovered some obscure Sonic games and some pretty interesting info that comes from those games. You ever played Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car? Me either until now but while it’s a 3 minute children’s ride, it has some pretty neat history. I decided that my Sonic journey would include every Sonic game ever made, even the silly ones like this. The only exceptions to this are the ones I cannot play anymore such as the discontinued mobile games.
So this was already spiralling out of control and becoming a colossal undertaking when my partner asked me a dreaded question:
“Are you going to watch Sonic X?”
That’s right, Sonic is not just a series of games but also a ton of other media. There’s several well loved (and not so well loved) TV shows, there’s a series of comics that ran for 24 years, there’s a feature film. If I was going to do this, I couldn’t half-ass it. Talking about just the games is only telling half the story. So I decided that yes, I am going to watch Sonic X and not only am I going to watch it, I’m going to watch it twice in Japanese and English due to how different they are. I’m going to read all the Archie Comics (which admittedly I’ve wanted to do for a while anyway), I’m going to finally see the movie.
When will this start? I’m not entirely sure, I have a lot of work to do and a lot of games to play so it might be a little while before I start this project proper. I just wanted to post about it so people didn’t think this site was dead and got an update on what I was doing.
This isn’t just a project anymore, it’s a life’s work.
GameCenter CS 