Sonic Mega Collection

The Good
You know of the first four Sonic games already - good platformers. These are presented in mostly their original form, with the exception of a few graphical modifications. These do not affect the overall experience and die-hard fans should not be put off. Sonic Spinball is a slightly mediocre game - imagine the pinball areas in the Casino Night levels of Sonic 2, with the difficulty upped and the gameplay quality lowered - this one's an acquired taste. Mean Bean Machine is excellent - this is just Puyo Puyo with a Western twist and the Sonic license slapped on to make it sell. Flicky may be off-putting due to the dated graphics (I'm not kidding) but is an addictive game. Ristar is the best game on the disc, but you probably didn't know that this was there. Do you know why? Because in Sega's infinite wisdom, the company has chosen to lock it out until you start every other game 50 times. Personally I think that the people putting the disc together thought they were funny. One HUGE scar on the surface of this pretty little optical disc - NO SONIC CD: the best Sonic game ever has been sadly not included in the compilation due to hardware emulation difficulties (the game was on the Sega CD system). Knuckles' Chaotix (32x) is also missing, and while I miss it I don't see this as a huge problem.

Visually, the games still look great. Of course they have technically aged, with the possible exception of Ristar - it's use of the Genesis hardware and it's extreme colorfulness make it too hard to criticize. (Make sure you're using the RGB cable, or if you live in North America, the next best thing, S-Video - or Component if you can afford it!)

The audio's also hard to fault. Some of the menu songs on Spinball are so grating you'll wanna put your TV on mute. But the catchy songs of the other games (Chemical Plant in Sonic 2, anyone? Starlight Zone in the original?) are still good after all those years.

Along with these classic games, Sonic Mega Collection has some extras up its sleeve. Remember the lovely Sonic CD anime intro? Well you probably would, if that game was on this disc. On the Sega CD the frame rate was poor, the video size was tiny, and the colors were nasty. But, it was a stunning intro. The PC version of Sonic CD let fans see the intro in it's proper colors. Squashed into a tiny window and badly resized (read: pixelly!) Sonic Jam came closer, but Sonic Mega Collection finally lets us see the intro (and ending sequence) in broadcast quality, full screen, full speed. The sequence was animated by Toei Animation, who I believe are also to blame for "Digimon", and is stunning. This version has the American music "Sonic, you can do anything" dubbed over the original Japanese rap song, but in all honesty I prefer the American version.

The Bad
A graphical smoothing option on the emulator would have been nice, like is available on PC emulators.

The rest of the movies are cop-outs. Rather than giving us the selection of TV commercials on Sonic Jam, Sega have decided to give us advertisements for current and upcoming games. Oh, and a really bad "History of Sonic" video, nowhere near as good as Sonic Jam's museum section. There are also lots of comic cover scans, some of which are nice, but because these are the American Archie comics, some are painful also.

The Bottom Line
Sonic Mega Collection is worth picking up, considering how many titles you're getting on one disc. The fact that Sonic CD isn't included is a huge kick in the stones, but considering Ristar is here (albeit in a nearly impossible to unlock form), as well as other classic Sonic games, movies and illustrations, it's hard not to recommend.