Happy Birthday Sonic the Hedgehog! + Sonic Generations Demo Impressions

The Sonic the Hedgehog series turns 20 today, and while he's had a lot of rough patches, I still like him. He's that friend you've known for years that you don't really like anymore, but you still feel obligated to at least talk to him now and then because you used to be close. So celebrate by reading my Sonic Retrospective, playing the good, old games, or by playing the new Sonic Generations demo out today. Impressions of the demo after the jump.

Well, the Sonic Generations demo plays it very safe, you can play a frankensteined version of Green Hill zone as classic sonic. That's it. It's... not very good.

I've been playing a lot of Sonic recently, so believe me when I say the physics are off. Sonic sinks like a stone compared to the older games the classic version of sonic is supposed to recreate. This makes the platforming much more difficult to pull off, in a frustrating way. Not that there is much platforming in the demo.

The level faithfully recreates pieces of green hill zone, but without the interesting bits. I played through it three times and the alternate paths don't flow as well as they did in the old sonic games, you can really tell you're on an alternate path, unlike the original green hill zone where you could just accidentally go down an alternate one each time you played.

The level has several sections where holding right is literally the only thing you can do. In the beginning and towards the end there is some platforming, but a lot of the middle is "hold right" set-pieces. Sonic got stuck on the environment on these twice, and the controls to get him running again were finicky because they were simply expecting you to be holding one direction and not be stopped by the environment.

Also the spin-dash goes WAY too fast.

However, the demo wasn't all bad, the graphics for one are really nice. One of my big problems with Sonic 4 was how ugly it looked and mismatched the artstyle was. Sonic Generations is a nice, consistent artstyle. The music is basically Sonic the Hedgehog 1's, so no complaints there.

Also, unlike Sonic 4, the demo didn't convince me not to buy the game. No, that was handled by this video from E3:

I didn't go into the demo expecting much, and that's what I got. It was more competent than expected (I only got stuck on the environment twice) but it wasn't all that interesting. If it weren't for that video there I would say maybe some of the other levels could be better, but that video and my complete lack of trust in anything Sonic along with past experience tells me the game will turn out decent at best.

It's just frustrating that another game that's supposed to take the series back to its roots (just like Sonic 4 was supposed to last year) feels so unlike its roots, the level design feels off, the physics are wrong, and it's just more of the same: SEGA trying to recapture former glory and failing.