SEGAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (Sonic CD (PS))

Member Name: Closs

Product:	Sonic CD (PS)
Date:	07/10/03 (118 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Music, It's Sonic

Disadvantages: Not challenging

Sonic spins onto CD's for the first time allowing for bigger levels more music and badder bosses...
Except, barring the music, none of that is here.

Lets start with what little story there is, Dr. Robotnik (Eggman, whatever) has nicked the Time Stones and is trying to alter the future with them by changing the past where Sonic cannot stop him. Handily enough, Sonic discovers these Time Posts that will allow him to travel back and forth through time if he hits them while travelling fast enough. During Sonic's little adventure he meets up with Amy who then proceeds to get kidnapped by Metal Sonic, a diabolical creation designed to match Sonic in every way. So Sonic must not only stop Robotnik but he must also rescue Amy.

Sonic must run through several stages of mayhem, and I use 'run' in the lightest sense of the word as each stage has some of the worst level design ever created and is clearly not designed for running as getting to any decent speed is ridiculously hard. Some stages also feature pitfalls at the end of jumps which you can't see or even jumps which seem to have no end (leap of faith, anyone).
The Special Stages too, deserve mention due to how atrociously horrible they are. Sonic games have been known to feature innovative Special Stages with each instalment and the first thing that will strike out here is an amazing resemblance to a Mario Kart stage on the SNES. But this doesn't work like Mario Kart, instead you control a running Sonic around a course and you have to burst a certain amount of blimps hovering above the course in a set time limit. The viewpoint is terrible so you can never really tell where the blimps are in relation to Sonic position which makes earning Time Stones a real chore.
I won't go on about this forever instead I'll focus on what's actually good in the game.

When the game starts you are treated to an 'anime' style intro which is actually quite fun
to watch and is accompanied by some terrific music only made possible by the CD format, the theme song is vocalised and this is something that future Sonic games would make a standard feature. Depending which version you're playing (Japanese, or English) you'll have different music but each soundtrack is worthy of Sonic and has it's own charms. Sound effects too are the standard fair so you know what to expect from a Sonic game in this department in terms of ring noises and the familiar jumping effect. The graphics however are not an improvement on Sonic the Hedgehog 2 however, this game was in development before Sonic 2 and it shows. Sonic CD still uses the Sonic 1 sprites (plus a few animations) and some level objects are the same too.

The game does however feature the Time Travelling aspect which means that there are 3 different versions of almost every stage (barring boss stages) but all 3 still feature the terrible design aspects and also feature a host of extremely bad enemies who pose no real threat, also, killing them reveals flowers and not the animals of before, I have no explanation for this. If this wasn't bad enough it seems that Robotnik was having an 'off-day' when he came up with his Boss Machines as each and every one of them is predictable and only takes three hits before joining that big scrap-yard in the sky. Needless to say Sonic CD is not very challenging.

To add to not challenging, the game is short as in 7 stages short, that's less than Sonic 2 which is also harder than this making it clear which the better buy is.

Sonic CD was best redeeming feature is the music and if you must listen to it, buy the soundtrack because the game certainly isn't worth the time and effort

Summary: