With the advent of 3D consoles, however, Sonic lost a lot of his former brilliance. But the best thing about Sonic was that it had something for everyone, casual or hardware, and it was busy and exciting enough to steal your attention from the other side of the room. Sonic made it harder to die than Mario, had short, manageable levels that were laden with bonus items and alternative routes, regularly diversified into silly mini-games (remember the coin-grabbing chaos sub-game?) and increasingly bizarre boss encounters, and could be played countless different ways. Looking back though, there were many reasons for it, but most of the Sega crowd just preferred the path of least resistance. We regularly swapped sentiments along these lines.Īt the time, support on my side was very hard to come by, and I naturally assumed this was because everybody else 'had Sega', whereas I was busy poring over Secret of Mana, Zelda III, Donkey Kong and a growing stack of Super Plays all on my lonesome. I preferred the pixel perfect precision, momentary bursts of satisfaction and continually mounting tension of a traditional Mario adventure, whereas he enjoyed the speed, accessibility and replay value of the first two Sonic titles. We were mini-geeks of relatively few long or interesting words, but I can still remember the gist of his argument versus mine. He was actually younger than me, but we hung out a lot of the time because he had a Mega Drive and I had a SNES, and we enjoyed playing, comparing and, naturally, arguing about the relative merits of our favourite games - Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Mario World.

When I was around five or six, I had a friend called Tim who lived just up the road from me.

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