Sonic 1, 2, 3 and Knuckles remixed!

User Rating: 9 | Sonic the Hedgehog: Pocket Adventure NGPC
This review has been a long time coming but I finally got to finishing it!

Ask any old school Sonic fan what his favorite game in the series is and the answer will always be one of the first 4 games that were on the Genesis and I am no exception. That is why I was shocked that I had never played this game before but of course I can't be blamed, not many people knew it existed let alone played it!

Short history lesson, back in 1998 when Sega was preparing to launch the Dreamcast in Japan SNK was also preparing to launch their handheld device the Neo Geo Pocket. Apparently since Sega was out of the handheld market, and as we came to know 3 years later were almost out of the hardware business as a whole, didn't want to gamble on a new handheld system and instead decided to team up with SNK to release a handheld or "pocket" Sonic game to boost the NGP as well as promote an on the go companion for its first full fledged 3D Sonic game Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast. Thus, Sonic Pocket Adventure was born!

Now this game is without a doubt a love letter to Sonic fans everywhere since Sonic Team hadn't made a proper Sonic game throughout the Saturn's lifetime.

The basic structure and gameplay in SPA is straight from Sonic 2 in fact most of the levels are straight up remixed versions of Sonic 2!
Sonic is the only playable character in the single player mode. There are 7 zones, a bonus level that is the exact replica of the Sonic tube bonus rounds and some interesting multiplier levels and a puzzle game.

All the levels feel both familiar and new at the same time with the usual loops, cork screws, badniks and the boss at the end of act 2. You even get to fight Metal Sonic (the one from Sonic 2) and Knuckles at different points in the game. The game is fast to the point where the screen tries to catch up with Sonic and the difficulty is just right.

What sets this game apart from the other Sonic games up to that point is that in order to play the previously mentioned puzzle game you need to gather shards from within the zones which will have you returning for multiple play throughs to get all of them since they're scattered all over the zones (I personally can't claim that I found all of them).

The puzzle game is basically jumbled pics of the characters that you need to sort out, since I haven't found all of them yet I can't say which characters or what happens if you do finish it.

The Multiplayer I can't say I tried since I think I'm one of 30 people on earth who still have a functioning NGPC so assuming I can actually find someone else and then hoping we can find the link cable that was used to play Multiplayer I'm afraid I can't say much about it other than what I read on other reviews which is there are two modes: "Sonic Rush" (Dimps was a co-developer on this game so go figuer) which is a race through one of the acts and "Get The Rings" which throws each player in a different part of an act and the one to gather the required number of rings wins.
The person who starts the Multiplayer mode plays as Sonic while the second player plays as Tails.

The graphics have the feel of the Genesis era games but Sonic's sprite in particular reminded me of the Game Gear games more than the Genesis one but a lot smoother and a bit more animated. Unfortunately the NGPC didn't exactly have the best backlight screen so unless you're playing under a desk lamp it's hard to get all the details.
Music is a mix of old tunes from all the series but specifically 3 & Knuckles.

As I said in the review description SPA is an excellent mix of all the Sonic games put together by Sonic Team as a love letter to their fans who missed them during the Saturn era, so if you love the old Sonic games and you don't mind going hunting (read: search eBay) for an NGPC and a copy of SPA than you'll be doing yourself a great favor. It's definitely better than the console Sonic games that came out after the Dreamcast's demise and in some ways even better than the Advance and DS games. It'll also be a good purchase if Sega manage to mess up Sonic the Hedgehog 4 since you'll be getting a new game that doesn't suck :P