Sonic Retrospective Part VI - Sonic Chaos
Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 02:43PM | By: Kyle in Features, Retro, Sonic Retrospective, Video Games 
Click here to read more in the Sonic Retrospective
Sonic Chaos is another Game Gear/Master System Sonic game that isn't as well remembered as its 16-bit brothers. However, tt's an interesting game that introduced some new things to the Sonic series and is fairly fun.
This is the very first game that you can control a flying Tails. The game is built around the ability to play the game as Sonic or Tails and the differences in how they play. Because of this, the Japanese title, Sonic & Tails, is a much better name.
Sonic plays much like he always does, but with the addition of the Super Peel-out from Sonic CD. This is the only game besides CD and Triple Trouble to implement this feature. The more interesting thing is how he collects Chaos Emeralds. Instead of finding them like in the other 8-bit games, you now have to collect 100 rings and then beat a special stage. This makes playing as Sonic much harder, as Tails gets the good ending by default. More interesting thing is how this affects the level design. The levels are built with the necessity of 100 ring in mind, which is interesting, but it makes the game a lot easier as there are more rings to collect.
When playing as Tails there is obviously the ability to fly, but there are some other differences. Tails cannot do the super-peel-out because his flying is tied to up+jump which is much clumsier than future iterations of his flight. He also has more lives and continues at the beginning as compared to Sonic. Tails is essentially the easy mode of this game, with his only real drawback being his slower speed.
The spring item in Sleeping Egg Zone
Sonic Chaos is an okay game, the levels are fine, but only a few are more than just good. There are a few weird new items, such as a rocket skateboard, but they ultimately don't have that big of an effect on the game. The levels are very short, almost all of them are very easily completed in under a minute, meaning you should be done with the whole game in about half an hour. The game rates how fast you beat a level at the end in km/h, making the game feel more geared towards speedruns.
It's fun, but not great. If you like Sonic games, give it a shot, but I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to play it.
Next time: Sonic 3 & Knuckles
Reader Comments (2)
I miss the in depth Zone analysis...
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