Sonic anniversaries thread!

Imagine how musty the copies are today

 

According to the Wiki, the Sonic comic strip published in the UK turns 30 today!

 

So is SegaSonic the Hedgehog (in Japan).

 

And it’s still one of my favourite 3d entry to this day! Lost World is seriously fun for me haha

 

Happy 31st, Sonic 2!

 

Happy 30th, Sonic Spinball!
　
　
　
　
　
...May God bless the crew involved with that game.

 

Y'all missed the anniversary of the best 8-bit Sonic game, Sonic Chaos?! Blasphemy I tell you! Anyways Sonic Chaos is 30 years old everywhere as of yesterday.

 

Eh, I didn't enjoy Sonic Chaos that much. The levels were pretty short (likely due to it being so easy to get warped to the special stage), and felt weird. I'd rather replay Sonic 2 (SMS).

 

Chaos is a pretty nice game to zone out to, pun partially intended. It's not as nerve-wrecking as 2 is to me, haha.

 

Its sonic 3s birthday today

 

Yep forget Groundhog Day, it's Hedgehog Day boys! I might get around to live streaming for the first time and playing Sonic 3 tonight. It's still the first half of my favorite Sonic game, let alone favorite platfomer of all time.

 

Sonic 3 was the first Sonic game I played.

Back when I had just a NES, I visited a friend and he showed me his Genesis and Sonic 3. I remember suffering from a culture shock. It was years ahead of anything I had played until then. So many colors! Massive levels! Super speed! Loop-de-loops! Two player characters onscreen at once! Special effects such as heat distortion! Backgrounds that scroll separately from the playable area!

A few years later I got my own Genesis and started my collection of Sonic games. Back then you couldn't just purchase a game digitally and download it. I had to visit my local game store frequently to see what games they currently had, hoping that they had what I wanted and it wasn't sold out. I lived in a small city, so there weren't many stores to choose from. I only knew one, it was small, and wasn't even game-centric. So it took me a while to build up my game library.

The first Sonic game I purchased was Sonic 1. It was pretty cool, but it was no Sonic 3. I kept visiting the game store often but it would never get Sonic 3. It became my holy grail -- the ultimate game ever, which was unattainable. To make matters worse, I had never gotten to play it at my friend's place again, as he tended to lend it to friends, and would never have it again when I visited him. By that point the game only existed in my foggy memories.

Eventually my friend decided to sell his Genesis games in order to buy a PS1, so of course I immediately bought his copy of Sonic 3 the moment the opportunity presented. Finally! The masterpiece of a game that had previously only been privileged to play for a few hours was within my reach!

I booted it and... it wasn't an exact match of my memories. The levels were a bit different from how I remembered them. I was a bit disappointed. I also found myself getting a bit overwhelmed by the zones' length, and hating how they had made the water level the second zone. Ugh.

However, I loved exploring Angel Island. It felt so intricate and rich. And after some tries I managed to beat Hydrocity. Finally, the game's water zone is over! Everything from this point on should be a breeze, right? Little did I know that I had something far worse coming...

It took years for me to beat the barrel of doom. Made worse by my friend claiming that you were supposed to push it up and down by having Tails jump on it. And the funny part? He wasn't trolling me, that's exactly how he beat it. That's the only way of beating CNZ2 he knew. When I figured out the proper method and shared it with him, he facepalmed so hard he left a mark.


That turned out longer than I expected. Anyway, happy birthday to the first half of my favorite 2d Sonic game! Crazy to think it's been three decades since it came out. It still feels like yesterday that I used to scour my local store weekly hoping for it.

 

I hopped on Sonic 3 way later on, I first played it through Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection on PS3. Now while this was the 2010s well into the series life, my family was poor and I had only previously played Sonic 1 on my mom's Genesis. And because I hadn't experienced any other games it was just as magical to me as I imagine it was to people in the 90s, the graphics were insanely detailed. Sure Sonic 1 had some 3D elements with the palmtrees and the Special Stage birds and fish, but those were rare, Sonic 3 looked like a full CG high budget movie in comparison! The speed too, Sonic 1 was fast, but Sonic 3 was too fast, my eyes could barely stay on Sonic when he ran up the tree in Angel Island act 1. But the biggest thing about Sonic 3 that stuck with me, was Super Sonic. I had heard from friends of the myth of Super Sonic, how you had to collect all the Chaos Emeralds to get him, and until then I thought it was fake, a playground rumor, a Mew under the truck. After all, I had only played Sonic 1, beaten it a hundred times collecting all the emeralds, there was no Sonic that was invincible, glowing yellow and could fly! But then Sonic 3 opens with Super Sonic, and I ate my words so hard. Unfortunately for a 7 year old me, the special stages were too well hidden, and even if I did run into one, blue spheres was way too hard for me to grasp, so I never did end up unlocking Super Sonic.

 

Sonic 3 & Knuckles is my favorite game period, but since it's just standalone Sonic 3 that's turning 30 today, I'll just talk about that half.

I grew up with every Genesis Sonic game except for 3 (& Knuckles), funnily enough. I had 1, 2, and CD on iOS and a Wii with Colors, but since I wasn't smart enough to connect my Wii to the internet, I was pretty much stuck there. I was aware that Sonic 3 existed, though, and the fact that there was a Sonic game that was better than Sonic 2 in pretty much every way drove me insane. Unfortunately for me, that was right at the start of the eleven-year period where SEGA didn't touch Sonic 3 at all, so playing it became more and more unlikely until I got a PC.

I got 3 & Knuckles on Steam, and I've been using the ROM from that version for every playthrough since, from AIR to just plain old emulation, even if it's not on my PC. But that's Sonic 3 & Knuckles, not plain-old Sonic 3. Normally, I would be pretty content with that, but since today was the 30th anniversary of Sonic 3, I went and finally beat standalone Sonic 3.

How I did it is pretty simple, and for anyone who wants a legal copy of standalone Sonic 3 (even though SEGA shut down the Steam page in 2022), all you have to do is open up Sonic_Knuckles_wSonic3.bin in a hex editor and delete everything from 0x000000 to 0x1FFFFF. Make sure the file now starts at what used to be 0x200000, and you're all set! For Sonic & Knuckles, just delete everything after 0x200000.

Happy 30th, Sonic 3!