Alex plays (almost) every Sonic the Hedgehog game - #7: Sonic Spinball (SEGA Mega Drive, Master System & Game Gear, 1993)

[Integrity]

he's got me as a hype man he could never run out of steam

[AlexArtsHere]

Actually I'm powered by the small animals trapped inside my metal shell against their will.

Edited February 15 by AlexArtsHere

[Integrity]

what the fuck

 

now i gotta jump on you to free the animals

[AlexArtsHere]

Previous instalment: Sonic CD (SEGA Mega CD, 1993)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: In November 1993, a new Sonic game hit store shelves – one that represented something of a departure from the previous two entries, but would go on to be largely overlooked in the eyes of wider audiences compared to its earlier and later brethren. No, this isn’t a repeat of the Sonic CD writeup – this time, we’re looking at Sonic Chaos.

When Sonic CD first released on 23 November 1993 (at least in North America – and coincidentally the 30^th anniversary of my other hyperfixation, Doctor Who), it didn’t do so alone. It, along with Sonic Chaos and the next, as yet undisclosed, game in this series dropped simultaneously to form a marketing push that was branded “Sonic Mania Day” (which is giving me the oddest sense of premonition…), clearly an attempt to strike once more with the lightning that was Sonic 2sday the previous year. Sonic was now a proven cash cow in the west, so it’s unsurprising that serialisation quickly turned to franchise expansion, with several titles releasing per year from 1993 onwards (with a couple of exceptions here and there). Such a trend isn’t slowing down anytime soon, and could be argued to have caused ripples that are still felt in Sonic games today, but that’s getting way ahead of things.

Developed by Aspect, the studio behind 8-bit Sonic 2, Sonic Chaos (released as Sonic & Tails in Japan) is our third Sonic title for the SEGA Master System and Game Gear. Beyond that, I find it difficult to really ascribe an identity to the game. Within the Sonic community, 8-bit Sonic 1 is viewed as the companion piece with a handful of alternate level settings, 8-bit Sonic 2 is pretty much universally known as “the really difficult one” and the fourth 8-bit Sonic platformer seems to have garnered the reputation of being where these games came into their own (an assessment that I’ll put under the microscope in due time), as well as debuting its own cult classic character to the franchise. So where does that leave Sonic Chaos?

During my research on the game’s development via the Sonic Retro wiki, I saw the game referred to as being the 8-bit games’ answer to Sonic 2, given that the actual 8-bit Sonic 2, certainly in aesthetics and mechanics, continued very much in the vein of its predecessor. I think such a statement on Sonic Chaos is somewhat valid – not only is this the first 8-bit game to feature Sonic’s now-iconic spindash (as well as a version of his peelout from Sonic CD with startup invincibility, here named as the Strike Dash, a move so devoid of use case within the game that I had completely forgotten it exists until the realisation that led to this post-publishing edit), it has the understated distinction of being the first game ever to feature Tails’ ability to fly in a playable form, where the Mega Drive version of Sonic 2 had only deigned to use it as a means to contextualise Tails respawning after getting lost offscreen or taking too many hits. Otherwise, I can’t really credit Sonic Chaos with anything near as weighty as 16-bit Sonic 2’s revolutionary legacy.

To start with, the gameplay. Where 16-bit Sonic 2 honed in on the strengths of the series’ venerable first entry, emphasising and expanding upon them to create an altogether sleeker and more refined package that I credit with cementing a platonic ideal for Sonic games, Sonic Chaos, in spite of its headline additions, largely feels like more of the same to me as far as the 8-bit games go. Game feel is still considerably clunky, with the same rudimentary facsimile of physics that pales in comparison to the Mega Drive hits. Levels, designed by the enigmatic M. Shimamura, pseudonymous Ray and Tadashi Ihoroi (originally credited as 500ZO), are still broadly flat and mostly empty affairs, albeit with a commendable effort made to incorporate a wider variety of level gimmicks, such as speed boosters and springy shoes that allow Sonic to scale heights that would be insurmountable with his basic jump. Further, these levels make a notably more concerted effort to emulate the level design of Sonic 2’s multiple tiers of branching pathways, with Turquoise Hill Act 1 in particular doing its best impression of a Happy Meal version of Emerald Hill Act 1. Even so, they’re mostly over in a minute or less, with little threat from the game’s decidedly passive cast of enemies. Or at least they are if you aren’t hoping to visit the game’s special stages.

That’s right, the Sonic series’ variety act is back once again. Unlike the previous two 8-bit games, where the Chaos Emeralds were located in the regular levels and only needed to be found in order to be acquired (a task often easier said than done, admittedly), Sonic Chaos opts to follow suit of its console big brothers and place the gemstones in another dimension, kept out of Sonic’s reach until he’s able to overcome the challenges he encounters there. Well, five of them are, anyway. Doctor Eggman is keeping a hold of the sixth emerald, serving as the impetus for the game’s gratuitous backstory, and the dev team evidently weren’t informed that we now live in a post-Sonic 2 world, with a whole seven emeralds and a super form to go with the complete set.

This time, accessing a special stage requires that 100 rings be collected within any level, turning the game’s pacing into a decidedly Sonic CD-like affair, with the gameplay loop now focusing on the exploration of the levels in order accumulate the necessary rings, extending playtime by about 60 – 90 seconds a piece. Upon collection of the 100^th ring, that level ends and Sonic is warped to the special stage, regardless of progress within the level. There’s little to complain about here – rings are pretty plentiful in most levels and the docility of the game’s enemies means that there’s little danger of losing them to a stray potshot. Ending the level to enter the special stage is an unconventional choice in theory, but ends up having little real impact outside of being the slightest of conveniences, given that levels are neither interesting enough for me to protest at being whisked away prematurely (as I would if this were 16-bit Sonic 2), nor brutal enough for skipping whatever’s left to feel like any kind of reprieve or reward (as I would if this were 8-bit Sonic 2).

The stages themselves are less of a format change compared to the Mega Drive games, instead taking a form best described as bonus levels, five obstacle courses to be completed within a time limit, each having a specific theme. The first one focuses on the free-flying rocket boots powerup, which effectively amounts to staying in the middle of the screen and holding right until you come into contact with the emerald (rings can be grabbed along the way, with 50 granting a continue, but this is entirely optional and offers no progress towards the emerald itself); the second one requires Sonic use the spring shoes to climb a series of floating platforms; the third one is a series of tubes that just requires you hold right until the gotcha moment where you have to instead hold up, all while you’re inexplicably being peppered with invincibility monitors; the fourth one is most like a standard level, with the “difficulty” coming from navigating a stairwell of springs aiming to send you careening back the way you came at around the three-quarter mark of the level; and the fifth one is another series of tubes, this one more labyrinthine in nature.

These stages are entirely unremarkable. They’re barely interesting and don’t even begin to explore their mechanics to the fullest degree, even within the limited depth of an 8-bit Sonic game. If not for their grab bag nature, the only memorable thing about them would be their difficulty curve. The first three stages put up all the fight of a sedate kitten with next to no requirement for engagement on the player’s part, but the fourth stage represents a sharp spike in difficulty due to the precision and speed with which it must be navigated (with the aforementioned spring stairway being a particular hassle), and the fifth stage pretty much can’t be beaten without some combination of several attempts, a guide and a copious amount of luck. Even if you manage to correctly navigate the tubes, you’d better be ready to jump as soon as you enter the room containing the Chaos Emerald, lest you hit the cruelly placed spring that would you bounce back into that tube, forcing you back to the start of the level with a 20-second penalty, all but killing that attempt at the emerald.

And it’s in this we find the throughline of Sonic Chaos, ugly as it may be. As with the special stages, the game’s standard levels start out laughably easy before a jarring difficulty spike kicks in. The first three levels provide next to no challenge whatsoever, before the fourth zone starts peppering in bottomless pits and slanted walkways above those pits that’ll send you careening downwards if you lose too much speed on them, while the sixth zone features invincible enemies rooted into the ground along Song’s path, just waiting to be run into (which happens frustratingly often, given the Game Gear’s screen crunch – frankly, I couldn’t imagine trying to play this on real hardware with the screen ghosting that entails). It’s still no 8-bit Sonic 2 in this regard, especially with the Chaos Emeralds moved to special stages rather than being left in difficult to reach spots within the levels themselves, but at least Sonic 2 was enough of a pain in the neck to be memorable for it.

This approach to difficulty permeates the bosses also. The first boss doesn’t even directly attack Sonic, instead just trundling back and forth ineffectually, the only way to lose a life being to run into the poor thing without curling into a ball first. However, the third boss begins to up the ante with a downward arc of fire that makes rebounding off of it after a hit a potentially lethal proposition, while the fifth boss even gets a second phase involving a barrage of tough to dodge missiles. Even the addition of rings to boss stages (though only on one path, making it entirely feasible to end up fighting the boss without them – I don’t even know how to reach the rings in the fifth zone’s boss act without using Tails) only takes the edge off somewhat, but I find it hard to muster any real ire for this. By the time the bosses start presenting a challenge, they can all be cheesed by jumping in such a way that Sonic lands directly on top of them and can continue to score hits with consecutive bounces until the boss folds. The developers must have known about this, as the fifth boss leaves from the top of the screen once its second phase begins, but even this can be abused, as the boss will carry a bouncing Sonic with it, making its normally difficult missile attack a complete non-issue. Even the final boss, a laser-firing bipedal mech piloted by Eggman, is cursed with the inability to turn around. To the doctor’s credit, he does fire a fast-moving energy shot that covers the area above and behind him by careening off the screen’s boundaries, making the usual cheese strat infeasible, but this too is barely an inconvenience, simply requiring players to retreat to the corner of the screen behind Robotnik to wait out the attack before continuing to scramble the Eggman.

If you think that sounds disappointing, then wait until you hear about Tails. Up until now, I’ve been framing gameplay pretty much exclusively as a Sonic affair, and that’s not by accident. Upon starting Sonic Chaos, you’re presented with the option to play the game as Sonic or Tails, with no chance to switch once the journey has begun. Given that he’s the template from which all other playstyles stem in the 2D space, I of course picked Sonic for my first playthrough. I subsequently got the bad ending due to figuring out how to access special stages only halfway through the game. “No biggie,” I thought “this seems like the perfect reason to go back through the game and play as Tails, using his flight to make accessing special stages much quicker and easier”. My first experience with Tails was that I couldn’t even figure out how to make him fly, to the point that I thought I’d tricked myself into believing that this was the debut of his ability to fly.

In more or less every other 2D appearance, Tails’ flight is activated by additional, consistent presses of the jump button after an initial jump, evoking the same tactile game feel as revving up Sonic’s spindash. In Sonic Chaos, Tails’ flight is activated by pressing up and jump simultaneously, but only when on the ground and standing still. It feels a little unfair to hold it against the devs of this game for not hitting up on the now-accepted solution for Tails’ flight before the mechanic became mainstream, but the whole affair is just weird and clunky, given that intuition dictates that you’d want as much height as possible before beginning to fly to extend your air time, making the choice to only have it be activated while grounded and motionless a little jarring and rather a pace-killer. Even once he’s in the air, Tails’ control is unimpressive, being unable to move with anywhere near the grace and fluidity of his console self, his rigidity instead evoking something you’d expect to see on the Atari of the early 80s rather than a full colour display a decade later.

All of this, however, is secondary to Tails’ biggest shortcoming in Sonic Chaos, that of being entirely unable to enter the special stages and collect the Chaos Emeralds. This, in some part, makes sense, given that two of the special stages feature the Sonic-exclusive rocket boots power-up (almost certainly conceived as a way to allow the blue blur to match his fennec friend by taking to air himself for a limited time), but concessions could certainly have been made to rectify this issue, especially given that the stage which outright requires the use of the power-up is the least interesting in a set of terribly boring special stages. Granted, perhaps I’m overstating things, as the inability to collect emeralds has absolutely no bearing on gameplay, with their collection simply changing the game’s ending (in the bad ending, Sonic stacks it and face plants in his attempt to chase down Eggman for the sixth, red emerald, the idiot), but it’s just not a good look to have a co-titling character be unable to participate in the game’s full breadth of content, however banal that content may be. In point of fact, the only screenshot of Tails I bothered taking was the one above, before promptly resetting the game at the realisation that there was no worth in this playthrough – the game is easy enough already, and the areas of difficulty that do exist wouldn’t be alleviated by the ability to fly anyway.

At least the presentation values are good, right? Well, they’re fine, I guess. Indeed, perhaps the most memorable aspect of Sonic Chaos is its introduction of a new art style. Gone are 8-bit Sonic 1 and 2’s flat-coloured sprites and uniform outlines in favour of something a little more evocative of the Mega Drive stylings, with an emphasis on detail and shading, courtesy of Hisato Fukumoto, Gen Adachi, Nobuhiko Honda and Shinichi Higashi. Credit where it’s due, the game does project an appearance of something technically superior to the previous Master System/Game Gear outings, and character sprites in particular, heroes and villains alike, all benefit from a sense of depth and volume that was lacking in those games but, on balance, I’m still inclined to say it’s a downgrade. In the 8-bit Sonic 1 review, I was really rather impressed with the strength of the art style, highlighting the clever use of system colour limitations to sell the illusion of deep and intricate backgrounds that really help level aesthetics pop.

In Sonic Chaos, colour and detail is frontloaded into the elements within the playable area, reducing backgrounds to being single-colour fills with sparse tiling of mostly indistinct decorations of little permutation, failing to really suggest a wider locale in the distance and leaving stages looking as though they exist in barren voids, with the level aesthetics themselves failing to evoke anything so fanciful as their names would suggest (someone please tell me what the hell Sleeping Egg Zone is meant to be). I think things do look a little better on the Master System, given its more pastel palette compared to the Game Gear’s darker hues, but choice of system is no factor in the content of Sonic Chaos’ art style. In the console wars arms race of the 90s, it would seem that SEGA and Aspect allowed ambition to get the better of them on 8-bit systems and traded in the strengths of a simpler art style for a façade of technical superiority over the NES and Game Boy.

 “But what of the music?” I hear you cry. “This is a Sonic game! For the love of chilli dogs and all that is fast, surely we’ve been treated to a round of 8-bit bangers as only this series can give them!” Sorry to say, its’s another miss here. Scored seemingly entirely by series newcomer Kojiro Mikusa (I say “seemingly” as Masayuki Nagao, also credited for the game’s sound, looks to be more involved with sound effect production, judging by their body of work listed on Moby Games), Sonic Chaos gives us, by some margin, the single most forgettable soundtrack yet heard in this series. It’s not particularly bad, mind, but doesn’t aspire to be anything greater than wholly standard video game fare, which is a bit of a damning statement within the context of the Sonic series, so revered for its tunes as it is. While I’m usually in the habit of queuing up each game’s soundtrack in order to evoke mood and memories of my time with it as I write these posts, this time I took one or two listens as a formality before switching over to other Sonic soundtracks. About the only track I’m left with any affection for is the Game Gear rendition of Aqua Planet Zone, though even this isn’t something I’d be able to listen to on loop the same way I can 8-bit Sonic 1’s tunes.

All in all, I think it’s pretty evident why Sonic Chaos doesn’t have much renown or identity, even within the deepest depths of the Sonic fan community. It’s a wholly uninspired experience that seems to be going through the motions, neither good enough to be fun nor bad enough to be memorable. Even its jerky difficulty curve seems to be more of an accident of sloppy design rather than some planned sucker punch to wall out inexperienced players and light the fire of spite to goad them into seeing the thing through for their own satisfaction. Truth be told, the most profound thing that Sonic Chaos does is lend further validation to something I’ve been feeling since reviewing 8-bit Sonic 1: Sonic games just don’t work on 8-bit systems that aren’t computationally powerful to simulate the physics that made the series fun in the first place. Already I find myself forgetting much of my time with a game I beat within just a couple of hours three days ago. Go, girl, give us nothing!

Next instalment: Sonic Spinball (SEGA Mega Drive, Master System & Game Gear, 1993)

Edited Wednesday at 08:24 PM by AlexArtsHere

[Integrity]

3 hours ago, AlexArtsHere said:

(in the bad ending, Sonic stacks it and face plants in his attempt to chase down Eggman for the sixth, red emerald, the idiot)

genuine lol at this. incredible

[Darros]

Interesting read for a game I've virtually never heard of. You encapsulate exactly why I've never heard of it, and tbh I have no impression to make myself more familiar beyond what you wrote LOL. That's just something about early-gen games where like. Some of them are really interesting historically, especially when it comes to putting down roots (ask me about FE1 any time) but like. There are so many that are just "eh" where the series didn't take off until later. Tbf at least this game has some decent predecessors to it.

 

One thing I do notice as we're 6 games in, is that the "Sonic Games Identity Crisis", for lack of a better phrase to describe how the gameplay loop changes frequently and wildly in the series, seems to establish itself early. Like, sure, not to the point where some of the later games really diverge, but fundamental aspects of level design and gameplay seem to be morphing from game to game outside of things like "quality of life" or strict upgrades. It's fascinating to me.

[AlexArtsHere]

6 hours ago, Darros said:

One thing I do notice as we're 6 games in, is that the "Sonic Games Identity Crisis", for lack of a better phrase to describe how the gameplay loop changes frequently and wildly in the series, seems to establish itself early. Like, sure, not to the point where some of the later games really diverge, but fundamental aspects of level design and gameplay seem to be morphing from game to game outside of things like "quality of life" or strict upgrades. It's fascinating to me.

I don't think it's so much that as it is that Aspect is trying to iterate on their previous work with 8-bit Sonic 2 to try and bring their releases closer to the console versions, despite the Master System and Game Gear not being able to achieve that. That might seem like splitting hairs a bit, but I think it's very different in character compared to attempts to reinvent the wheel in games like Heroes, Unleashed, Lost World and Frontiers.

[AlexArtsHere]

Previous instalment: Sonic Chaos (SEGA Master System & Game Gear, 1993)

And so we come to the third and final game of 1993’s Sonic Mania Day. To recap, the centrepiece of the show was Sonic CD, the gaiden-esque sequel to the original game that was headed by the half of the Sonic the Hedgehog duo that hasn’t been convicted of insider trading, while Sonic Chaos offered yet another middling attempt to bring the Sonic formula to SEGA’s 8-bit systems (and the second outing developed by Aspect). So, what of the third game? With the 16- and 8-bit systems each receiving a fully-featured platformer of their own, surely SEGA wouldn’t cannibalise their own market by doubling up with another Naka-headed entry to the franchise? Well, no. Yuji Naka and co. were, at this time, beavering away on their own project, so this third entry would logically have to be something new by someone new. Or not quite someone new, as the case may be. In a two-fer for firsts, November 1993 brings us SEGA Technical Institute’s Sonic Spinball, the first game in the series developed by a Western team, and its first spinoff. I mean, if you want to really get into the weeds, this game is predated by Sonic Eraser, SegaSonic Waku Waku Patrol Car and SegaSonic Cosmo Fighter Galaxy Patrol, but the former of these is Puyo Puyo clone released to a long defunct, Japan-exclusive download service, while the latter two are mall rides and hardly count as games in the first place. So yeah, Sonic’s first spin-off.

“Hey, what gives?!” I hear you specifically, dear reader, exclaim, “I thought the first American to work on Sonic was that one guy from MTV Cribs, and that game only came out in 2010!” Despite what certain characters would have you believe, the American side of SEGA has had a hand in Sonic almost since the nascency of the Naka and Ohshima’s brainchild. In particular, three names stand out as instrumental in shaping not just Sonic’s international image, but Sonic’s image, period. The first of these, Madeline Schroeder, then product manager at SEGA of America, made crucial tweaks to Sonic’s very world and cast, reportedly pushing for the removal of Sonic’s human girlfriend Madonna, along with a band comprised of other animal friends that would have featured in the original game’s sound test feature – both changes made allegedly to make Sonic better appeal to American audiences as well as those in Japan. Second is Al Nilsen, whose approach of a guerilla marketing campaign for Sonic and the SEGA Genesis undoubtedly had an indelible effect in defining the particulars of Sonic’s 90s edge and “get-it-done attitude” (which, in the words of Ohshima, was in fact inspired by presidential sex pest Bill Clinton – as far as we know, Sonic most definitely did not have sexual relations with that woman). Finally, there’s Greg Martin, the member of this trio least in need of introduction. The odds are you’ve seen his art long before you started reading this thread, famous for its depiction of Sonic with a three-quill mohawk and a prominent crease in the middle of his brow (colloquially referred to as assface Sonic – whether that’s affectionate depends on who you ask). While I’ve little love for this particular design, Martin’s work is nevertheless iconic, and among the greater galleries of video game box art for its vibrant details and lovingly rendered shading, particularly on the metallic surfaces of Eggman’s badniks.

When Sonic was introduced to the world and instantly became a cultural icon, the western influence reverberated and was amplified in the franchise’s early extended media in the west. The most prominent examples of such extended media from this team are the two 1993 animated series produced by DiC. The first of these, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, skewed towards a younger demographic and arguably represented a relatively more faithful depiction of the source material, presenting the, well, adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog in a stylised world alongside his buddy Tails as they thwart the bumbling Doctor Ivo Robotnik’s many schemes-of-the-week in a zany episodic format. I’d argue this series has had less of an impact on the canon of Sonic (other than originating his love of chilli dogs), but it is nevertheless fondly remembered, thanks in large part to Long John Baldry’s iconic performance as Robotnik, which inspired an entire genre of YTP in the infancy of YouTube that remains strong to this day. As an aside, this cartoon would inspire its own spin-off game, Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, but I won’t be covering that in this series, given that it’s just another Puyo Puyo reskin, a la Sonic Eraser.

The second series, simply titled Sonic the Hedgehog (but better known as Sonic SatAM, in reference to its original Saturday morning air slot), ended up having much more of an impact on the Sonic mythos. Although it retained Adventures of’s casting of Jaleel White as Sonic (still considered the definitive voice of the character by a not-insignificant portion of the community), pretty much everything else about this series was about as far away from AoStH as you could get. Instead of focusing on the light-hearted mishaps of Sonic and Tails as they terrorised a largely incompetent and childish Robotnik, SatAM placed Sonic within a group of freedom fighters broadly based on the small animal friends from the first game, alongside a few original characters, fighting to restore the deposed monarchy of the Kingdom of Acorn in an industrial dystopia against the regime that overthrew it, led by a far more cunning and ruthless Doctor Julian Robotnik, portrayed here by the equally brilliant Jim Cummings. While the specific elements that this series codified haven’t exactly stuck around in the main Sonic canon (such as roboticization, a much darker take on the game’s process of sticking animals inside robots as batteries, here instead comprising the physical conversion of flesh and blood into steel and oil), it is very much an encapsulation of everything Sonic was in the west of the 90s and can be credited with expanding the world and characters of the franchise far beyond what was present in the games, as well as arguably being the first piece of media to offer a truly menacing depiction of the Eggman.

And all of this very much comes through within Sonic Spinball. While not strictly set within the world of the cartoon, this game does borrow many elements from it, the plot tasking Sonic with travelling through Robotnik’s Veg-O-Fortress, built atop Mount Mobius, in order to trigger a volcanic eruption that will obliterate the massive roboticizer built into the heart of the fortress. However, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill Sonic platformer. As the title has already made apparent, Sonic Spinball is a pinball spin-off (try saying that five times fast). Gameplay occurs across four themed pinball tables – Toxic Caves, Lava Powerhouse, The Machine and Showdown. The objective in each of these is to activate various features of the table in order to make accessible and collect the Chaos Emeralds within the stage (between three and five in each – please do not ponder how this squares with the established lore of there being seven emeralds), thereby granting access to the level’s boss.

In terms of game feel, Sonic Spinball is generally pretty solid. I should note that I’m not really a pinball connoisseur, so maybe I can’t speak with much authority, but the core physics generally behave as I expected them to, in spite of a feeling of slowdown that was persistent enough to be noticeable but otherwise seems to have been accounted for within the game’s design such that it never became detrimental to my performance, nor grating in its frequency. Sonic (the ball, by the way, in case that wasn’t obvious) can be influenced with the d-pad while airborne, with a satisfying degree of control afforded to this mechanic, so players aren’t reliant solely on their skill with the flippers in order to get Sonic where they want him to go – a much appreciated feature for novices like myself. The only other point of note in game feel is that the game’s various on-foot sections feel fairly sluggish, but this isn’t a huge deal given their brevity and infrequency, as well as the fact that some measure of snappiness can be achieved with Sonic’s spindash, performed as it is in other games, though understandably with nowhere near as much potency.

Unfortunately, such reserved compliments do not extend to Sonic Spinball’s design, credited to Peter Morawiec and Hoyt Ng. To the game’s credit, the levels are all quite creative in concept, featuring characterful table elements that aspire to do more than would be possible were the ball not a living character. Even in just the first stage, Sonic can be seen riding a minecart down a shaft in the middle of the table, or dropping under a set of flippers into what would normally be a dead zone in order to hitch a ride on an oil drum through toxic waste. However, the technical execution of these levels is a complete mess, so much so that it’s difficult to really figure out where to begin in picking them apart. The tables themselves are all huge, and the screen real estate only allows for around a tenth of the table’s height and a sixth of its width to be shown at any given time. Naturally, this radically diminishes the breadth of information that can be gleaned from what’s onscreen compared to traditional pinball games which show much more of the table at once, even when considering the game’s attempt to accommodate such limitations by delineating the playable area into several smaller tables. Despite this limited field of view, the layout of the tables themselves, in conjunction with the tasks to be carried out on each of them, often require a pretty high degree of precision in getting the ball to specific areas of the table, most frequently into narrow tubes or crevices. This is made even more of a hassle by frequent enemy spawns, which often hover just off the top of the screen when the ball is being held in the table’s flippers, so the number of times I fired off what would’ve been a well-placed shot, only to be sent careening back towards the bottom of the table by an enemy I couldn’t have accounted for happened more times than I care to count.

If you’re able to overcome all this and get to the top of the table with all the level’s Chaos Emeralds in tow, you then get to fight its boss. I wouldn’t say the bosses are the best part of the game necessarily, but they’re pretty solid in both concept and execution. As with standard Sonic bosses up to this point, there’s no waiting time involved in these bosses, as there’s always something you can do in service of landing hits on the boss, even if you’re not whaling on the boss itself, which has a much beefier health bar than bosses in the platformers to counterbalance the game’s mechanics and movement allowing for multiple hits to be racked up much more easily. Additionally, every hit you score is remembered even upon falling out of the boss area so, while having to make your way back up the table to the boss (usually from the very bottom), that’s your only punishment for failure in this instance.

Unfortunately, these bosses are also quite negatively impacted by the screen crunch that afflicts the rest of the game. Each boss has specific defences that must be navigated in order to score hits, but the trouble is that you most often won’t see these until you’ve already committed to launching the ball, and being ejected from the boss arena as a result of failing to bypass such defences isn’t an infrequent occurrence. This is particularly egregious on the game’s final table, where Sonic can only land hits on Eggman by first repeatedly hitting a button on the underside of his capsule in order to remove his defences, a grabbing claw and windsock on each side of the capsule, both very capable of sending Sonic back to the main table. Since the button and the defences generally aren’t onscreen simultaneously, feedback on when it’s safe to make an effort to hit Eggman is virtually non-existent, made even worse by the fact that hitting the button too much will subsequently reinstate his defences.

As bad as all these design issues seem, they’re ultimately secondary to a much more fundamental problem, that being the format of the game itself. While the marriage of platformer and pinball games is a novel one, the resulting hybrid ends up being the worst of each genre. With four stages to trek through in a linear order, each offering only a smattering of objectives relative to actual pinball tables, the game doesn’t have a wealth of content to speak of, yet the linear nature of the game is one that keeps pushing the player forward. This, combined with the narrow field of view and relatively sparse (though unfortunately nonetheless convoluted) table layouts, really discourages score attacking. Even worse is how this format affects progression and difficulty. While the game is constructed as a linear experience, difficulty seems to be balanced around the moment-to-moment pinball gameplay. What I mean by this is that you start each play session with three lives and, with no saving functionality to speak of (at least within the game itself, I allowed myself savestates between each level in the Steam release, as well as in specific points in each level depending on how fed up I was with the game’s shenanigans), success entails a straight shot through the four levels right to the final boss with no game overs, your only reprieve being that a new live is granted every 20 million cumulative points (score is persistent through all levels rather than being reset between each). As a result, Sonic Spinball is a markedly punishing game to newcomers, with several of my runs dying at the first and second levels as I became acquainted with the game’s controls and design.

The best place to try and recoup lost lives or gain extra is the game’s bonus levels. These take the form of small and more traditional pinball tables, with everything playing out on a single screen. The goal in each of this mini game’s three variants is to hit some form of table element a certain number of times. The first of these takes the form of several capsules which contain Tails and cameo appearances from Sonic SatAM’s freedom fighters, who must be freed while also contending with a miniature Robotnik drives back and forth in the foreground region of the table; the second is a moving dome modelled after Eggman’s head, the teeth of which must all be knocked out to win; while the last is an egg prison (the large animal container at the end of Sonic 1 and 2’s boss acts) surrounded by a ring of clucks (themselves modelled after Scratch from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog). These tables are largely inoffensive but for two things: First, the table is shown in a perspective view, stretching away from the player, rather than orthographic one, making aiming a lot harder than it needs to be. Second, the gap between the table’s flippers is just big enough that the ball will sometimes come back down the table in such a way that there’s absolutely no way to stop it from just falling into the dead zone. So while these sections of the game are supposed to ease the pressure of the game’s stinginess with lives, they really just end up introducing their own frustrations.

While I think there’s perhaps a valid debate to be had on the value that lives and game overs bring to games, I don’t think Sonic Spinball is a good advocate for their existence - frankly, this is the most I’ve wanted to give up on a game so far in this series (though I did use savestates much more liberally in the 8-bit platformers, which likely wouldn’t have been so easy to swallow otherwise). Thing is, even mastery has brought me little joy. A week or so after starting the game, I put it down again as I travelled abroad for two weeks, during which time I didn’t play it at all. Upon my return, I had apparently internalised the learning from all my early failures and blew through the first two levels with speed and ease. And yet the gratification rewarded for this proficiency was minimal. And perhaps this is unfair – maybe I just don’t gel with pinball games, but it was nevertheless my gameplay experience, and at the end of the day that’s all I can speak to in these writeups.

Still, if there’s one thing I’ve hoped to impress upon the audience of this thread, it’s that there’s value in Sonic games well beyond the technical gameplay experience, and Sonic Spinball certainly presents an interesting case in this regard. The reason why I spent three paragraphs near the top of the post on the American perspective of Sonic’s development is because the presentation of Sonic Spinball very much epitomises that vision of the property. Environmental aesthetics have much more of an edge to them, with a focus on grungy industrial areas, evoking the same kind of vibes as the environmental paintings of Sonic SatAM. Meanwhile, Sonic and his enemies sport designs that are very much in line with Greg Martin’s cover artworks. This time around, art duties have been handled by Tom Payne, Craig Stitt, Brenda Ross, Katsuhiko Sato and Kurt Peterson – if those first three names are stirring memories, that’s because they constitute the STI artists that worked alongside Yuji Naka’s team on Sonic 2. Of note in this regard are various level terrain tiles in Toxic Caves and Lava Powerhouse which display Stitt’s triangular shading style, most prolific in Sonic 2’s scrapped Hidden Palace Zone, as well as tiles for The Machine, which were repurposed from Tom Payne’s unused art for Sonic 2’s scrapped Cyber City level – this video, released by The Video Game History Foundation while I was writing the Sonic CD post, goes into detail on this topic and more.

Cards on the table, I’ve never had much love for this conception of Sonic and his world. Although I did grow up with the entirety of Sonic SatAM available to me on a 2-DVD collection, this was during the early-mid 00s, about a decade after that series was first running and a few years removed from the watershed year of 1998, which was responsible for a lot of consolidation of the two canons of Sonic into something that was more cohesive. As such, my perception of the Sonic setting has always largely been that presented by the Japanese side of the franchise, otherwise known as SegaSonic, so I’m already a little bit predisposed to some negativity towards the presentation of Sonic Spinball. With that said, I think the game’s art puts up a pretty good showing in a lot of ways. The environments of the Veg-O Fortress are intricately detailed, and every bit as stylised as the locales of the Mega Drive platformers developed by Sonic Team, though the increased use of tiling and asset flipping in comparison to those games does leave Spinball’s levels feeling more video game-y, as opposed to the living yet fantastical locations of South Island and Westside Island, which boast a large variety of terrain shapes to break up such repetition. I also feel that Lava Powerhouse and The Machine suffer from oversaturation in their foreground colours, which makes them a little much for the eyes, especially when also adorned by various eclectic pinball lights and signage, but the technicals of Sonic Spinball’s environment art are otherwise pretty solid, even if that art doesn’t quite fit alongside what we’ve seen up until now.

Character art perhaps comes off a little worse for wear. Sonic himself, while very expressive and fairly fluidly animated, is drawn in such a way that his head is rendered as a ball with thin, noodly spines protruding from it, rather than the spines organically flowing out of the head to create a single, cohesive shape. It’s a small change on paper (and admittedly a decision that is present within some very specific sprites in Sonic 2), but nevertheless one that inhibits the appeal of Sonic’s design and looks rather amateurish when animations call for the back of his head to be visible. Likewise, the enemy designs here are all fairly bland and unappealing compared to the altogether cuter badniks of Sonic Team’s games, while also not benefitting Sonic’s abundance of animation frames. Of this cast of ne’er-do-wells, I’d say the lowlights are Ferron, a nondescript rotund hazmat suit carrying what seems to be some kind of hook, and Buster, a monkey in a spacesuit with a propellor attached to his helmet. These, along with most other enemies, I think display a lack of understanding of the design philosophy that produced great badniks to begin with, specifically in how to keep the shapes simple, and when it’s most appropriate to substitute an organic feature with a robotic approximation (such as the six legs of a ladybug being replaced by a singular tyre in the design of the Motobug). At any rate, all the art here is still technically competent, and even the weak points fail to offend my eyes in any meaningful way.

As with the art, the music of Sonic Spinball, composed by series newcomer Howard Drossin evokes a rough and oppressive atmosphere. Within the wider Genesis pantheon, Drossin is a bit of a rockstar. While Spinball marks his SEGA debut, he’s perhaps best known for his work on Comix Zone, another STI production. That game is scored by compositions reminiscent of 90s rock artists such as Nirvana, and, while I wouldn’t say I hear the beginnings of such a style in Spinball, there’s undeniably an edge to things. Gone are Sonic 2’s approximations of acoustic instruments, swapped out for compositions which much more heavily feature synths and heavy, booming percussion. On the one hand, I think the music feels very much like an extension of the levels themselves in a way that even Masato Nakamura’s scores don’t for Sonic 1 and 2. If the music of those games sounds as if Sonic is being followed by a band, the music in Spinball sounds as if it’s being played by the levels themselves in a way that’s a little indescribable. On the other hand, the instrumentation is largely quite rough.

It seems that Drossin composed this project with the aid of GEMS, a tool created by Jon Miller to make the Genesis music production pipeline as smooth as possible for composers who, for various reasons, weren’t making their music by coding it in hex, nor had members of the team dedicated to make those compositions shine on the YM2612 sound chip. You can get a fuller explanation of the tool from this video, but the relevance to my critique of Sonic Spinball’s music is that it seems that Drossin didn’t make a whole lot of changes to GEMS’ default soundbank patches, so the end product is very much undeveloped compared to his later works, not to mention very harsh on the ears. This is best heard in the game’s options and scoreboard music, its sawtooth lead emulating charge running through a tesla coil that drowns out the surrounding instruments to a comedic degree as it deafens the listener. Even looking past the instrumentation, I can only remember around half of the game’s compositions, only two of which I actually enjoy, being the aforementioned options music (yes, I’m deranged) and the theme for Lava Powerhouse. Still a better batting average than Sonic Chaos, at least.

Otherwise, general sound design is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the game does have some really kickass pinball table noises, my favourite being low-pitched boops of the warp tunnels that transport you between areas of the table. On the other, many sounds, like the game’s music, are just way too harsh on the ears. By far the worst offender here is the sound effect for hitting a boss – a piercing, static-filled shriek that assaults the ears. It’s a thematically cool choice, but it’s just downright unpleasant. Even outside the most extreme examples, the problem with Sonic Spinball’s sound direction writ large is that it’s trying too hard to be distinct. While the traditional Sonic platformers indeed benefit from their iconic sound effects and catchy music, Spinball is a game that has you repeating a lot of actions in succession, which means repeating a lot of sound effects, and the harsh synths that score your gameplay generally don’t last more than two minutes before looping. Meanwhile, you’ll likely be spending somewhere in the region of 10-20 minutes on each table on a successful run – plenty of time for things to get stale. I wonder if the auditory experience of the game might be improved by replacing the soundtrack with that of Sonic CD’s US score, which can definitely provide the appropriate level of edge and gravitas, but is much more subtle and atmospheric, and thus less prone to noticeable repetition.

Despite everything, I find it difficult to resent Sonic Spinball. Don’t get me wrong, I very much did not enjoy my time with the game, and placing it at any higher than a low-C tier would be overly charitable of me, but it was also made under conditions that were far from ideal, for reasons that will be explained in a future instalment of this thread. According to Peter Morawiec in an interview with Sega-16, the team only had a paltry nine months to bring the game to fruition, with drastic changes being visible between each of Spinball’s pre-release tradeshow demos. Even the addition of talented contractor programmers like Denis Kobel and Lee Actor, who coded the game in C at a time when assembly was the norm, did little in the face of the reality that Spinball needed more time to cook. With that in mind, a lot of Spinball’s flaws and lack of polish become a lot more understandable – the team had to commit to a vision and they needed to do so very early on. And with that in mind, it’s a miracle that this game exists at all - just temper your expectations if you plan to give it a spin…ball.

 

 

But what about the 8-bit version?

 

 

Yes, it’s a two-fer this instalment! Like Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 before it, Sonic Spinball also got an 8-bit companion piece for the Master System and Game Gear. Thankfully this wasn’t developed by STI on top of the 16-bit version’s tight production deadline, but by the catchily-named SEGA Interactive Development Division, releasing a few months after the main event in…well, nobody cared enough to make record of the release, apparently. Sonic Retro, the most accurate source for information surrounding these games, places the Game Gear version as a September 1994 release, with the Master System version following a little after that in January 1995, but even searching for magazine ads for this version to glean a proper release date from doesn’t turn up anything conclusive. Apparently 8-bit Sonic Spinball just showed up on store shelves one day and nobody thought to question it. Still, it’s more of a presence than this version got in Japan, which only ever received the 16-bit version of the game.

So I’m fudging the numbers on this, up until now, chronological retrospective, but it’s with good reason that I’m doing so. Unlike with Sonic 1 and 2, the 8-bit rendition this time around is very much an imitation of its console big brother, recreating the level design and graphics of the original game to a lower spec. Granted, it’s not a perfect translation – the more intricate table elements of the original are nowhere to be seen, and the game’s music is almost entirely different, along with a suite of new bonus stages to replace the traditional pinball tables of the Mega Drive version, but the intent is clearly there. And ultimately there’s not enough that is new to justify me giving this version of the game its own distinct writeup.

So far as I can recall, I’ve heard more in fan communities over the years about this version of the game than the “true” version (though not much of either, admittedly), and not for the right reasons. I can’t really remember specific complaints, I think outside from the physics being off, but there was certainly trepidation going into this one, not helped by my experiences with the 8-bit Sonics thus far. Imagine my surprise, then, when I breezed through this game within the space of an hour, and devoid of any of the feelings of frustration that 16-bit Sonic Spinball worked up in me.

First thing’s first: Yes, the physics are absolutely off. The game is extremely floaty and there’s noticeably less nuance and variance in the directions Sonic will travel when hit by any given object one way or another. There’s not really much justifying this, given that Hal Laboratory released the much more sophisticated Revenge of the Gator for the less capable Game Boy a full five years before this game, not to mention there’s even a dedicated physics consultant listed in the game’s credits – one Dr Scott Gould! Besides the specific pinball physics, 8-bit Sonic Spinball is generally pretty sluggish, seeming to chug along in the same kind of way that the 16-bit version does, with Sonic’s on-foot movement being particularly lethargic, although he’s only in this state for about the same amount of time as in the Mega Drive version, give or take, so this isn’t a huge deal.

Level designs are about as 1:1 with their original counterparts as can reasonably expected, even considering the adjustments. In particular, Toxic Pools removes the minecart section found in Toxic Caves and replaces it with a more traditional pinball table in the upper middle section of the level, Lava Powerhouse is almost a perfect recreation but for the fact that clucks don’t spawn in the steam vent area, The Machine is lacking the elevator gimmick that could be activated by performing a flipper hold on a couple of specific flippers, and The Final Showdown no longer features pulleys that need to be engaged to bring out additional flippers. Otherwise, the core shapes of each table are captured, with all emeralds being found in the same locations as on Mega Drive and the processes needed to acquire each being more or less identical.

However, there is one specific point of difference that makes the 8-bit versions of these tables a far more pleasant time, that being that the field of view is greatly expanded. Being able to see so much more of the playfield at once allows for shots to be much better planned here and it’s frankly an embarrassment to the Mega Drive iteration of Spinball that it fumbled this aspect of gameplay while the Master System and Game Gear didn’t. As a bonus, the weaker hardware considerably inhibits the rate and quantity at which enemies can spawn, so there’s much less to get in your way, keeping the random elements persistent rather than intermittent.

This kind of consideration by concession extends to 8-bit Spinball’s bosses too, in that the intricacies that make the 16-bit bosses as tricky as they are just can’t be replicated here. While Lava Powerhouse and The Machine retain the Roboiler and Veg-O Machine respectively, the latter is ridiculously easy in the Mega Drive game to begin with (hell, it might be slightly harder here, since it’s difficult to rack up consecutive hits inside the machine before falling out of the bottom) and the former’s upper platforms don’t seem to collapse at any point, making it much easier to wait for the best time to hop into Roboiler’s urn to attack. Furthermore, Roboiler’s only got two faces rather than the four of 16-bit Spinball, and the remaining face doesn’t become intangible when the first one is destroyed, making this a trivial boss to single-cycle. In Toxic Pools and The Final Showdown, different bosses do appear, seemingly due to sprite limitations, but both are extremely ineffectual. The first, an unnamed, flying mechanical Robotnik head…does nothing that I can remember. I honestly think all it can do is fly around. The final boss against Robotnik doesn’t fare any better, with the boss’ most effective defences being the grating sound effect of the electric coils on either side of the arena that indicate that the Eggman is inaccessible until you jump on four valves, and the aggressive sprite flickering that Robotnik exhibits while flying around upon being robbed of his barriers. The biggest obstacle here is flubbing a jump and falling out of the boss area, but this is entirely avoidable, given that there is ample space in the valve areas at the side of the arena for Sonic to remain in, stationary and on-foot, waiting for Robotnik to come to him.

There is one aspect in which 8-bit Sonic Spinball is more miserly than the original, namely that the bosses do not retain scored hits if Sonic falls out of the boss arena. This is likely due to hardware restrictions, much like the fact that each boss exists on a separate screen to the rest of their table, but it’s more than accommodated for by the fact that falling out of the arena places Sonic in a position that’s practically right at the boss room’s entrance, rather than dropping him to the bottom of the table. It characterises this set of bosses perfectly – completely toothless, with any potential for threat or upset being completely filed away due to a combination of a wider field of view, more predictable ball movement, and perhaps necessary concessions on the game’s part that render any attempt at punishment for poor play basically inconsequential. Given the character of 8-bit Sonic so far, not to mention the reputation of 8-bit games in general, it’s all a bit bizarre.

Also a bit bizarre are the game’s bonus stages. Rather than taking the form of miniature, traditional tables, these are instead a set of three rooms each, filled with rings and breakable containers, themselves containing more rings in addition to points and additional time. The goal here seems to be to grab as much as possible and getting out before the 90-second timer hits zero. I say “seems to be”, because the only real feedback I got from these was the one time I failed to reach the exit (more through lack of effort than anything else), upon which the game told me I had earned no score. Otherwise, there seems to be no minimum passing grade here. As long as you can unlock each room’s door by breaking just one container and get out before time’s up, whatever you grabbed in the stage gets added to your overall score tally, just as it does in the Mega Drive version.

Truth be told, I didn’t make any effort to master these bonus stages because there was absolutely no need to. On top of everything else that makes playing this game like sliding a hot knife through butter, Sonic Spinball on the Master System and Game Gear is shockingly generous with its lives, very much unlike its console brethren. By default, you start with five lives and five continues, for a total of thirty lives from the off. Those five continues were completely unnecessary as it turns out – not once did I see the game over screen. Having had something of an ordeal with 16-bit Spinball, I really shouldn’t be complaining about the companion piece taking only a fraction of that amount of time to beat, but it’s all just so devoid of friction, and thus feeling. Every step the demake takes to make Sonic Spinball a more pleasant experience also robs the game of anything to make it stand out. It’s a poor pinball sim wearing Sonic Spinball’s clothing, a pale imitation with next to nothing of its own to offer.

This is further evidenced in the game’s presentation. The graphics, produced by Sandy Christensen, Larry Flores, Kevin Lee and Michael Tamura, under the direction of Michael Chung and Maureen Kringen, are extremely faithful translations of the original 16-bit art. The reduced palette here forces economisation of colour usage in a way that does make everything a little more pleasant on the eyes, particularly in Lava Powerhouse, but it’s still just a lower grade version of something already seen. Likewise, the music, while original and distinct, stirs nothing in the cockles of my heart. Brought to us by Paul Gadbois, Dave Delia and Brad Scott Gish in addition to Howard Drossin, it sounds much less grating than the Mega Drives’ hard, scratchy synths, and the loops aren’t nearly as noticeable, but it’s even less memorable than the original sound track and, unlike that score, there’s no variety in the mood of each piece. Everything is the same genre of upbeat, arpeggiating square waves, with nothing interesting done using the available hardware at all, despite plenty of 8-bit games before this one showing that such mystique is absolutely possible on these systems, even within Sonic’s own catalogue.

And that’s the Sonic Spinballs two. One, a game that belies a profound microcosm of Sonic’s western brand image of the time, but marred by frustrating design choices that are likely the marks of a poor development environment; the other, an attempt to cram the original vision onto systems that were perhaps not apt to handle it, removing all the claws but also all the character in the process. Despite the 8-bit version being far less aggravating to play, I do recommend that you opt for the 16-bit version if you’re interested in either, as the Mega Drive iteration at least warrants that interest, besides being a much more refined approximation of pinball physics. All that said, next time I’ll be looking at the final Sonic game for 1993 – hopefully the blue blur can end the year on a high.

Edited Wednesday at 08:23 PM by AlexArtsHere

[Integrity]

21 minutes ago, AlexArtsHere said:

Madeline Schroeder, then product manager at SEGA of America, made crucial tweaks to Sonic’s very world and cast, reportedly pushing for the removal of Sonic’s human girlfriend Madonna,

society owes madeline a debt greater than can ever be repaid

[Ironthunder]

32 minutes ago, AlexArtsHere said:

collect the Chaos Emeralds within the stage (between three and five in each – please do not ponder how this squares with the established lore of there being seven emeralds)

I mean, does it look like the guy has any pockets? He probably just keeps collecting the same few over and over again as he keeps dropping them.

[AlexArtsHere]

They're all blue, Mr Thunder.