Hello and welcome back to another episode of Before You Buy the Show, where we give you some straight up gameplay and first impressions on the latest games releasing today, Sonic Origins and Hello Folks, I’m Falcon. For the most part, this is a good collection, but let’s start with the basics.Sonic Origins contains remastered versions of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic the CD, Sonic 3, and Knuckles, which are technically two games, but one used a lock-on cartridge and you could connect them together.
They were originally planned to be Sonic 3, but they split the development so a) they would have two products to sell and b) they could work on two deadlines instead of one deadline, but none of that really matters. All these games have been remastered with the retro engine, meaning that this is not emulation. There are new versions of classic games running on an engine created by Christian Whitehead that was used to make Sonic Mania and because of that the basic gameplay is pretty much at its absolute best. It’s unaltered. If you played the games way back in the day, you’re not going to be shocked or surprised by any moment. Everything runs exactly like it did back then except better. You’re still mostly running fast, you’re still hopping and bopping on enemies, collecting power-ups, fighting bosses.
Classic platformer stuff. I’ll give a short review of each game later because there are minor differences between them, but let’s just focus on the widescreen aspect for now. It probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, but with Sonic games it makes a huge difference. It’s by far the most significant improvement, and it’s what makes the Sonic Origins Collection the definitive way to play these games. collection gives you a few different ways to play, and this is where the strange choices make their appearance. You can either go through all the games in a row with story mode Play them individually in anniversary mode or go back and play them the way they originally appeared with a 4×3 aspect ratio in classic mode. At the same time, the anniversary and story modes modernize by removing lives in favor of coins, which can be used to unlock items in the museum or to try again if you fail in a bonus stage, making these games a lot more user-friendly.
For example, special stages in Sonic 1 were difficult to access in order to earn a chaos emerald, but now, assuming you have coins, you can restart these if you fail. everything plays exactly how you remember it. I know these games like the back of my hand. I know what you need to do to get certain results and all of that stuff still happens exactly the same. But if you are new to these games, there is a very heavy emphasis on momentum and it can take a little getting used to. But all in all, these games are great to play. One cool feature that they added is the ability to spin dash and sonic 1, which was something they’ve added to it in previous re-releases, but even better, the drop dash from sonic mania has been added to all of the games so you can jump into a spin dash whenever you want. Before we get into the games themselves, I’d like to discuss the overall presentation.
It’s fantastic, the 3D islands on the menus are charming, and the new animated intros from Tyson Hess are beyond fantastic, looking very much like the old Sonic CD intro but way way better looking. But, on top of the classic story anniversary modes, you get a couple of other options on the main menu. There’s a boss rush, and there’s blue spheres, where you can play the bonus game that boots up when you put any non-sonic games into Sonic and Knuck And for games that are nearly 30 years old, they mostly hold up. There’s obviously still a lot to like about them, but the first game has the roughest level design and boss design. It’s all a little more archaic than everything else in the collection. There are a few things that will remind you very much of how a dungeon works in Mario, especially in the marble zone. 2 is an instant classic. The level design really leans into the speed aspect of the game.
It’s all very good and they kind of figured out what was fun about a sonic game here. There’s all these exhilarating sections where you can really go all out and feel the speed. Now they do constantly sort of greek view with speed traps like spiked enemies and bumpers that bounce you backwards, but that’s kind of part of the challenge. The level design in general is way better than the first sonic cd. It was released after Sonic 2 but in terms of development, it was developed in between Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 and it shows. It’s kind of more convoluted and it makes itself kind of more of a love it or hate it type game with these time travel mechanics that show up only in this game. It’s sonic 2 and sonic 2 and sonic 2 and sonic 3 and Knuckles. It’s sonic 3 and arguably ever.
The level design is better than ever. Everything’s really polished. The only downside is that a few tracks had to be removed because of potential legal issues. Yuji Naka on twitter actually confirmed that it’s because they were written by Michael Jackson and it seems like Sega doesn’t really hold the rights to that, which really sucks because the prototype music that they remastered into this game isn’t as good except for Carnival Knight. I think I kind of like Carnival Knight better but the Ice Cap Zone not so much. The loss of that song stinks. It’s obviously a matter of taste, and only a few tracks have been replaced. The majority of it is still intact and sounds exactly like it should. That’s not to say the experience is perfect, but most of the bugs or weird issues were things that the original games had, like the very unforgiving moving hitboxes and chemical plant zone. They’re death traps. They still are.
Nothing about that has changed. fans will recognize it immediately. It’s really cool that they brought back this famously dummied out location. It wasn’t made specifically for this game; they actually added it back in 2013, but it’s nice to see it in a full console version of the game. The new mission mode’s a nice addition as well. From the descriptions, it sounds pretty basic, but each mission ends up being a pretty fun little challenge and there’s a pretty good selection of them for each game. None of this is groundbreaking. It’s obviously all reused assets from the old games, but they managed to do some creative things that are fun to play and better than what you would think they are from the mission descriptions. It’s not necessary, but it’s fun to mess around in.
It’s a solid collection all around, and the biggest issue with it is the price. The base price is $40, which is kind of steep for what amounts to a bunch of games that have been re-released on phones many times at this point. Yeah, Sonic 3 Knuckles isn’t one that’s ever gotten the widescreed treatment, which is great, but all these other games presentation is really appealing, the new cutscenes are charming and everything about anniversary mode is great, but at the end of the day you’re still paying 40 bucks for some 30 year old games here, so making the collection almost full price is a little bit pushing it. There is some utterly pointless dlc on top of that, but I don’t know. The 399 premium fun pack is kind of ridiculous and leaves a bit of a sour taste in people’s mouths who have seen nonsense things added to games for money for a long time now. 10 additional letterbox designs for classic mode.
Oh, character display on the main menu screen, ah main menu island camera zoom, I’m not even going to sarcastically acknowledge that they’re literally charging you a premium for some extra characters displayed on the main menu and you can move the camera around a little bit like it seems like the developers were just forced to yank features and sell them as dlc by sega. The good thing about that is that if you don’t spend the extra four bucks, you’re not even going to notice that you didn’t spend the extra four bucks. The only thing that’s potentially worthwhile about the fun pack is some additional harder missions, but the rest of it just adds nothing really.
Those are the only two issues we had with the collection. If you enjoy classic Sonic games and look for any excuse to play them, the new widescreen versions are probably enough to repurchase the collection; it’s just that the current price is a little too high for what you’re actually getting. That’s all for now. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think. If you like this video, click like. If you’re not subscribed, now’s a great time to do so. ‘t forget to enable notifications and, as always, thank you very much for watching this video.
