I played SA1 again recently too. here's my results: * General things It looks nice. Really. The music is also top-notch all around. Bosses are mostly okay. All of the in-overworld "boss" fights are hilariously bad though ("OH NO"). I've never liked the Adventure Fields. Not ever. Not in 1999, not today. * Sonic The spindash in this game is perfect. Instant speed, perfect for jumping over everything and skipping large portions of level with. Or for just spindashing up walls and shit. It's great. SA2's toned down spindash and charge time disappoint me after playing this game, playing Classic Sonic in Generations brings back some of the joy of SA1 Sonic spindashing (bit of a charge like SA2, but it goes super fast). The stages are hit/miss, far, far more than SA2's. Red Mountain is very, very good. Lost World and Sky Deck are pretty bad. Not even hard, just unenjoyable. Windy Valley is hilarious. Starts off good, but the spinning, spiraled second half pretty much just has Sonic bumping along the walls and almost dying a lot. Fallen through the ground a lot. Casinopolis would be nice if the pinball was well designed. It's not exciting. At all. Icecap is worse than I remember, I used to love that stage. Sky Chase is dumb. He controls fine enough. There are some dumb issues (jumps that hit a ceiling kind of just float there, like said in the OP, falling through the ground isn't exactly uncommon, the lightdash mechanic in this game is dumb), but overall, Sonic handles nicely. The homing attack is weird at times. * Tails Speed Highway is dumb, but it's fun in a way. Flight controls are silly. Casinopolis is actually a level here, so it's automatically better. His little sandboarding bit is nice too. * Knuckles I like him here more than in SA2, gameplay wise. The radar makes things really easy, but it's actually enjoyable to run around looking for them here. * Gamma This should be better. Too lazy to detail how and why right now. * Amy Not as bad as I remember, but she's still slow and her stages are mostly boring. * Big It's like someone took the fun out of Sega Bass Fishing. Sure, the engine is actually good as an arcade fishing game, but having to find and then get Froggy to actually bite is a pain. SA1 is supremely flawed, but there's fun to be had. this happened to me repeatedly the first time I played SA1, and I wanted to throw something I dunno what I'm doing now that it doesn't happen on DC now. Never happened to me in SADX (but I've died to the whale in SADX, so that's something).
