![]() One radical addition to Sonic CD is the addition of the “Past" and “Future" system. Sonic CD plays like every other Sonic game in that you run from the start to the finish, collecting rings, and fighting bosses every few levels. Tonight, Sonic CD is released to the world, based on the very same demonstration we saw back in 2009, which I suppose brings us to the actual “review" portion of this review. Sure, the particulars such as release date and other things like that weren’t in the open yet, but it was coming, and that was enough. We quickly confirmed that this was in fact Christian Whitehead’s Sonic CD, and we couldn’t have been happier. Jump ahead another two years, and out of nowhere that Sonic CD was coming to iOS. We assumed the worst, as it seemed reasonable that Sega’s legal hammer came down on the project. The fan-made Sonic CD web site vanished and the above video disappeared from YouTube. Christian built an entire game engine specifically for porting retro classics, and he had aspirations of working with Sega to actually get his version of Sonic CD in gamers’ hands. We quickly got together with Whitehead, and conducted a fascinating interview where one thing started to become crystal clear: This is a project motivated solely by love for the game. Our minds were beyond blown, but like all cool things utilizing IP of a larger company, we didn’t expect this fan-made Sonic CD project to wind up anywhere other than in a cease and desist letter fired off from Sega’s legal department. Then Christian Whitehead comes along with not only a port of the best Sonic game, but also running at 60fps? The emulated Genesis games barely ran at a quarter of that. While that video might not be that entirely impressive now, remember at the time we were busy wagging our finger at Sega for continuing to release emulated Genesis ports that played poorly, performed even worse, and just weren’t any fun. They asked gamers what they’d like to see on the iPhone next, and literally a day later Christian Whitehead revealed his idea. Previously, Sega’s efforts on the App Store were limited to decidedly mediocre games, centralizing almost entirely around emulated Genesis games wrapped in an emulator that really wasn’t that great, and still isn’t that great. It was a particularly great Sega CD game, as it played to the strengths of the Genesis with familiar Sonic-style gameplay enhanced through a few tasteful full motion video scenes and some fantastic CD audio.įast forward nearly 16 years to a curious question that Sega posted to the iOS community. In fact, I’d still say Sonic CD is the best Sonic game ever released. Sonic CD represented a blazing torch of promise that I had hoped was going to give the Sega CD the boost it needed, serving as that ever-important position as “system seller." Again, unfortunately, the relative low popularity of the Sega CD accessory made Sonic CD a commercial failure, even though it was a critical success. (There’s actually a bunch of reasons I could also get into, but I digress.) Unfortunately, both due to the many technical limitations of the system, as well as the games themselves just not being very good, the Sega CD never really took off quite how I imagined Sega wanted it to. ![]() Sega CD had actually come out earlier that year, and many gamers (myself included) couldn’t wait to get their hands on one as the promise of full motion video powered gaming seemed incredible. Sonic CD, or Sonic the Hedgehog CD was originally released in late 1993 for the Sega CD, Sega’s CD-ROM accessory for the Genesis console. Let’s start at the beginning, so everyone can truly appreciate just how wonderful the very existence of this game is. The only way I can start this review is with a little history lesson, both for people who aren’t familiar with Sonic CD, as well as those of you who might not have been reading TouchArcade since the summer of 2009.
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