Sonic Advance
- February 04, 2002 14:45 PM PST
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Sega?s cerulean champion comes a-blazin? onto Nintendo?s handheld like a big?blue?ball of?hedgehog.
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Sonic Regress
Sonic Advance is everything that made the original Sonic such a success in the first place. It?s a lightning-fast, colorful, disturbingly playable game that requires little or no thinking?only fast reflexes?in order to progress. And while Sonic may look 40 percent cartoonier and 30 percent funkier, he handles exactly as he did in his 16-bit days, encountering the same kind of 2D loops, enemies, rings, power-ups, and bosses he did 10 years ago. There?s even a hyper-nostalgic final stage in which Robotnik hops in several extremely familiar machines for some ?greatest hits? boss battles.
But in this age where high speeds and upside-down loops tend to no longer be particularly impressive, a lot of gamers will find Sonic?s gameplay far more super-straightforward than they remember. Stages essentially boil down to ?go right until you stop,? and while there are lots of different paths toward the finish line, there?s not a whole lot of variety to differentiate them. Plus, with only six main zones (with two stages per zone), the game blows by pretty darn quickly.
You?ve Got To Have Friends
Luckily, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy are all playable characters as well?and although the stages remain the same, playing through the game as each of them is a surprisingly different experience. The monster-breeding Tiny Chao Garden mini-game also has its own disturbing, silly, inexplicably addictive appeal, and enables you to play Tiny Chao versions of Memory and Rock, Paper, Scissors with your bulbous Tiny Chao friends.
On the technical front, Sonic Advance is hyper-colorful and moves with great speed, but the game?s graphics feature less detail than those of some other super-lush GBA platformers like Rayman. The sound effects and music are both excellent, though, and the GBA faithfully re-creates all the ring sounds and pseudo-rock-guitar stage music you remember.
Sonic Advance a simple, tried-and-true blast from the past, faithfully recapturing the ?hog?s legacy and reigning in just enough characters and elements from the ?new? to satiate anyone craving more from their marsupials than just movin? to the right at really high speeds.
