A Million Things I Hate

I Hate That I Was Defeated by Three Eight Bit Sonics

For reasons of peer pressure, I found myself replaying some 8-bit Sonic games last weekend. Sonic 1 was the first video game I ever saw and played so it is responsible for the ignition of my 25 year long gaming hobby. Sonic 2 and Sonic Chaos were my favourite games on the Master System when I was a kid and I played them countless times. After I upgraded to a Mega Drive I also received a Game Gear one Christmas and I played them again there in micro-blurry-vision.

These games were hard as nails for kid me. I think I possibly completed Sonic 1 on the Game Gear once or twice. I'm not sure I ever completed Sonic 2 or even got to the final stages. I could reliably get to the final boss of Sonic Chaos but he'd take me out on his final fly-by often, but I think I completed it once or twice.

When thinking back to these games and my experience of them as a child it is easy to blame my inability to complete them on my inexperience as a 'gamer' and my lack of skills. I've played them briefly a couple of times as an adult on nostalgic re-visits but I never sat down and aimed to complete them, that is, until last weekend. And I Game Overed on each one long before the final stages, despite being now well-versed in video games, having honed by skills for thirty years. I can blast through most platformers without breaking a sweat but these games kicked my arse.

Sonic 1

I flew through Sonic 1 with little hassle until the Jungle Zone. The second act sees you ascending a waterfall using floating log platforms. This isn't particularly difficult but the game does not allow you to descend past the bottom border of the screen, even when you know there is ground there. Instinctively I go to get some rings and then die as the screen doesn't let me hit the platform a few pixels off screen. The Game Gear version does let you drop past the screen boundary, a necessary concession to balance out the additional difficultly imposed by the restrictive screen resolution on that platform.

With this lesson learnt though I progressed to Act 3 which is where I got Game Over. The Robotnik boss gives you very little room to manoeuvre so I was bouncing off his bum straight into his cannonballs rolling along the ground. I've read reviews of these 8-bit Sonics before where they are critical of the wonky physics, and I dismissed these complaints until now – but they’re totally right. Sonic doesn’t have the same precise fluid movement as the 16-bit games which means you never feel totally in control or confident in your movements.

Jungle Boss

Of course on the Game Gear the screen resolution is even lower than the Master System giving you even less space to move and time to react – I must have had the patience of a saint as a child to get past this boss on that system.

Sonic 2

This was a breeze until Sky High Zone Act 2. The hand glider section caused me a lot of issues as a child. I could not comprehend the change in controls scheme. The hand gliders need you to tap left to slow your descent and reduce your forward momentum, which was very difficult when your instinct as a child is to hold right. In fact this caused my first broken controller; I would tap it harder and harder to an effort to get Sonic to listen to my commands and I managed to somehow invert the pressure pad inside the controller resulting in it continuously registering a left press.

I didn’t break it intentionally or even through anger, just through ignorance of the fragile mechanism and lack of mechanical sympathy. My Dad was not happy about this but he did perform the simple fix to get the controller working again, teaching me a valuable lesson on how to treat your belongings and the binary nature of simple on/off switches and buttons.

The section in question that caused child me endless issues and tears, and adult me a single life, was where you must let your handglider drop down into a spike-lined tunnel. I didn’t use my first continue here though, that was against the ostrich boss in Act 3. Once again the janky physics fought against my instincts and I kept bouncing back into the fireballs after striking the bird’s head. I recall as a kid getting killed by the launching chicks in the first boss phase but this time around I was able to kill them all quickly and with ease, thanks to some basic pattern recognition and anticipation skills!

The Game Over came on the Green Hill Act 3 boss. This zone is probably home to the worst level design in any Sonic game before or since as it requires you to take leaps of faith into the void. You are propelled skyward from powerful springs, with only the treetops appearing at the bottom of the screen providing any indication that is safe to land – something easy to overlook as a child.

The first couple of jumps require you to pretty much hold right for the entire fall, but on the last jump you need to drop earlier. If you die on the boss – which I did, thanks once again to janky physics, then you need to repeat the leaps of faith. After three attempts at the boss, and three deaths where I struck him and then died because I didn’t bounce off fully, I received my Game Over.

Again, on the Game Gear these interactions are made a lot more difficult thanks to reduced space and visibility. Green Hills Act 3 would often have me dead before I had even seen the boss. I think I passed it just a single time as kid.

Green Hill Map

(Map of Green Hill Zone Act3 from Sonic Retro. Bear in mind you can only see a tiny square of this map on your screen at once)

Sonic Chaos

I recall this being quite an easy game. I certainly got to the last boss fairly regularly and I’m pretty sure I finished it a couple of times, but my last playthrough had me dead on the boss of the second zone! It’s a big caterkiller that rises from the ground and fires his body segments at you. You – once again – have very little screen space so not much time to react, and their trajectory is quite unnatural. I’m ashamed to say that this is where my run ended. I’m not even sure how you defeat him. I assume you wait until all his segments are gone so you can get a strike on his head, but I didn’t manage more than one hit. I got the image below from Sonic Retro and it says he needs eight hits in the Master System. Eight!

Bead Worm Boss

Following these struggles I have mixed feelings. I never realised until now how unnatural the physics of these games were and how it could result in unfair feeling deaths. I assumed that child-me was just unskilled, but in fact, child me was actually really patient and persistent to even get past these bosses once, much less to keep playing again and again. Each Game Over leaves you to start the from the first zone again, so I’d get very good at early stages, passing them faster and faster just to get a handful of practise attempts on the part that was giving me trouble.

It’s quite easy to blame the difficulty entirely on the physics and limitations of the system but the developers could have offset this with more lives or more continues, but we can all guess why they didn’t. The games are so short that if you were able to keep retrying the troublesome areas without consequence you could probably finish them each within twenty minutes!

I would quite like to sit down and beat these games, conquer them on behalf of my past self, and perhaps one day I will, but with gaming causing me hand and wrist pain it doesn’t seem worth causing myself physical pain to soothe what are really only surface level mental pains.

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#GAMING #RETRO