Oh, cool! Somebody recognizing where my username is from! I like that!

I like the old-school, they just don't make them like this anymore. It's somewhat infamous for being a movie that many people subconsciously remember seeing and then go "Holy shit, I remember this movie! Thanks for posting this OMG! O_O" all over the YouTube comments.

Unico in the Island of Magic was the first movie I ever saw (as well as anime, cartoon, or even show. It's the first thing I ever watched on a TV), along with The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, and I spent a little under a decade trying to find it again myself, becoming something of an anime buff in the process, to put it lightly.

I've made a habit of watching them both on my birthday every year. Always puts me in a good mood. :P


As for your username and avatar, I'm quite familiar with that myself. The game so nice I played it twice, on Dreamcast and Gamecube!


The overall style of Sonic Spinball, you could instantly tell it wasn't from the guys who made the other games. The idea of a pinball game with light platforming elements was pretty novel, though. It wasn't quite as fun to play for score as it was to try to collect all the rings and beat the levels. Maybe that's what most people didn't like. The 8-bit versions, I didn't like those too much.


I've never played the PC version of 3D Blast, but I played the Genesis and Saturn games. The Saturn one had some nice graphics, but I preferred the music of the Genesis game. In fact, I'd think the game is hard to hate if only for the soundtrack, it's stellar and definitely the stuff of classic Sonic. It was gimmicky and not a real Sonic game, maybe. The levels didn't have the depth and complexity of the sidescrollers, or the speed for that matter, but they were pretty cool looking and still fun.

Though, the whole "kill five enemies and reach a checkpoint", while not managing to feel as empty as it could have, still felt pretty empty, though obstacles made up for the small enemy count. The bonus stages were alright, the Genesis ones were effortless but kind of cool looking. Bosses were one of the better parts of the game.


Sonic 3D Blast is, obviously, an isometric platformer. One of the first I'd played being Snake Rattle N' Roll from Rare on the NES. I've been a fan of that niche little genre, one made popular by Rare's ZX Spectrum games, starting with the isometric puzzle-platformer Knight Lore (back when they were Ultimate Play the Game), and with the SNES game Equinox (not from Ultimate) being one of the finest examples, large but split into multiple areas across an overworld map, and brimming with clever, but rarely frustrating, optical illusions.

Interestingly, since we didn't have the ZX Spectrum in the US, we ended up having a lot less games like this, while across the pond this genre was all the rage, so to speak, with developers trying to do what Ultimate was doing and developers favoring the isometric viewpoint as a method of achieving three dimensions in their platformers. Traveler's Tales, who made Sonic 3D Blast, was a British development group, almost all games of this style had come out of Europe.

It's probably why, from what I've seen, there's a few more fans of Sonic 3D Blast outside of the US than over here, and why most people who complained about the controls being confusing in both this game and Snake Rattle N' Roll seem to be from outside of the UK, while reviewers in the UK, from what I've found, rarely had an issue with it. They were more used to it! :D

I want a Sonic 20th anniversary music CD like the 10th anniversary one. 3CD's in a nice box please.

You never had an Amiga, did you? There were quite a few isometric games (mostly PD) , like Heimdall, Shadowlands, and Skeleton Krew, to name a few. Mystic Towers, which ultimately ended up as a DOS game, was developed on the Amiga.

No, I didn't, but I did have a C64, and there were still a few games of the genre like Head over Heels, but not nearly as many and none of them from Ultimate. That, and I didn't know anybody with an Amiga and never got one until much, much later. Having a home computer at the time was expensive enough as it was, especially if you couldn't pass it off as a business expense!

That wasn't the point, though...

yeah, the 10th anniversary was pretty nice

I'm more than sure that SEGA will come up with something interesting or good this year as well, let's just hope it will be better than that worthless mario 25th anniversary collection on the wii

I prefer the Sonic Gems version, The remastered FMVs are cool and the load times are completely eliminated. I play it on my Wii all the time. Although, if SEGA offered a PC download version, I'd probably get it.
Yeah, Sonic's hesitation towards Amy is kind of weird. But I always figured it was because he was kind of immature and wanted his freedom. Sonic himself is a symbol for freedom and probably the last one you'd ever see tied down. But I really like his relationship with Sally, so I don't want to see him end up with Amy.

I'd like to see SEGA start to branch off into re-releases for other consoles. They're releasing a new Genesis collection and that's all well and good but it's like the umpteenth time they've done it. I want to see Sega CD, 32X and Saturn games available for download. I hope this anniversary sees the re-release of every Sonic title regardless of what platform it's on. I still want Knuckles Chaotix on the Virtual Console, and it's the 15th anniversary of NiGHTS but I doubt we'll see a special edition of that title.

Seconded, Sonic Gems is great. But even if you don't have a GC/Wii, the original Sega CD version of Sonic CD is cheap (~$20 US) and the hardware is easily emulated.

God, seriously. Sega has rereleased Genesis games...more times than I care to count. They're even starting to rerelease Dreamcast games. But it's like they don't even remember the Saturn.

Not to mention that Sonic settling down with someone will make it harder to maintain continuity for the sequels.

Lack of Saturn rereleases may have to do with the obtuseness of the Saturn's hardware and the resulting difficulty in emulation.

Which is too bad because, while we now have the first to Shining Force games on Steam, we're probably never going to see a proper rerelease of Shining Force 3. Which is pretty bad when you know that Shining Force 3 was actually a three-part game, and only the first part made it to North America.

Actually, I have the original game and I do occasionally play it on my CDX. But I find the load times really drag so I mostly play on the Wii because of the improvements. I know some people would prefer to have a PC download version because they either prefer PC hardware or they don't have a Wii.
I'm glad that Dreamcast games are seeing a re-release. It's about time, but it does leave me feeling like they've skipped some consoles. Saturn is a tricky bitch to emulate, but I'm sure they could port those titles with a little bit of effort. I find the lack of attention to Sega CD and 32X to be weirder, those consoles have already received perfect emulation on PC.

No, I totally get why Sonic passed up Amy. It was because, at the time of Sonic CD, she was the bobby-soxer type with a schoolgirl crush, and probably underage. It was comical. I mean the guy who is always waffling over whether or not to tell the girl how he feels about her. The way I understand it, it's a Japanese thing. Something about how their society doesn't really allow for discussing one's "feelings" with another, and it's part of the reason for the high suicide rate, if not the whole reason.

Anyway, I still have my PC-CDROM version of Sonic CD, in pristine condition. Isn't there a community-developed patch for WinXP? Does it work with Virtual XP Mode, or do I need the real thing?

I think amy is supposed to represent and make fun/parody the fangirls of the franchise

Amy is 13 btw

regarding the PC version, I remember playing it on XP a couple of years ago so there is definitely a way to run it without problems, dont remember the exact details though

Yeah, I remember an article on the Sonic franchise in Electronic Gaming Monthly around the time Sonic 3 came out, and it had Sonic's, Tails', and Knuckles' "stats" in it. If I remember correctly, Knuckles was 22, and Sonic was 17 or 18, and Tails was 12. It also had their "Traction v. Speed v. Jump Height" comparisons too.

it's interesting to know but then again all of these details are really unimportant, the characters might be 150 years old for all I care - it will not matter. Mario is supposed to be a "ordinary plumber" and yet he can shoot fire out of his hands and break brick blocks with his head

Whatever happens in the future of this franchise...I just hope that they forget about all of the other terrible characters that were ever included in the series starting from the "Adventure series" (shadow, rouge, jet all of them suck)

I hope that knuckles will get his awesome hat back someday as well

Also: Tails is awesome :3

There was nothing particularly wrong with the concept of Shadow, it was just that horrid Shadow The Hedgehog game that sucked. He was rather good in Sonic Adventure 2.

While I can admit that he was an interesting concept in the second adventure game I do not think he was needed at all here, Sonic already had a "Rival" figure (Metal Sonic) and shadow should have dissapeared from the series a long time ago

not to mention that his voice actor sounds like a really bad Clint Eastwood impersonator