Sonikku za Hejjihoggu

I know I said I was going to talk about Persona 4 and City of Heroes, but indulge me for a moment if you would. I’m going to talk about Sonic again, since I’ve been playing the Mega Drive/Genesis Ultimate Collection thing some more. Specifically, I’ve been playing a lot of Sonic 1.

Replaying Sonic 1 a number of years after I last “seriously” played it (in my case, when it first came out on the Mega Drive) was an eye-opening experience. Firstly, you forget how difficult old platform games are when compared to the hand-holding that modern games offer. Secondly, you forget quite how many swear words are actually in your vocabulary.

I have a confession to make here – Sonic used to scare me a bit when I was a kid. Not “jump out of your skin” scared a la Resident Evil, but “edge of the seat, worried, frantic” kind of scared. I could never really pin down why this was when I was a kid – I just knew that, although I enjoyed playing it, it freaked me out a bit too.

Now, I have one word to say why: traps. Or more specifically, spikes. One thing I don’t remember having seen in many games I’ve played recently on next-gen consoles is a good old-fashioned pit of spikes. Or a big heavy thing with spikes on it that drops on your head. Or a wall that suddenly shoots out spikes and impales you on them.

Sonic is full of spikes. And their simple presence makes the whole experience of running, jumping and collecting things that much more tense, because you know that they’re one of the things that can lead to premature death, even if you have shields and rings in place. Plus, when you think about it, impaling something on spikes, or dropping spikes on it, is a pretty unpleasant way to die, isn’t it?

Thinking about it, an awful lot of these old games featured incredibly unpleasant ways to meet one’s demise, usually involving spikes, being crushed, falling down a big pit or, in extreme circumstances, a combination of all of these things. Sonic isn’t by any means the only one to feature painful-looking death-makers. Mario also had plenty of spikes and crushy things to contend with, as indeed did pretty much any 2D platform hero of the time. And even though these games aren’t gory at all, having a spike penetrating a place that is not supposed to be penetrated by sharp things looks painful!

Enough about my spike phobia (and Jane’s, incidentally – she actually can’t watch me play Sonic for fear of the spikes) – I had another point. Sonic’s design understands player psychology perfectly. Each level is crafted to play with your expectations and make you want to slap yourself in the face when you fuck up the same bit for the fifth time.

A particular case I have in mind occurs in the Labyrinth Zone, which is full of spikes and long underwater stretches where you can drown, along with swinging ball-and-chain things and bottomless pits. It’s one of the least “friendly-looking” zones in Sonic, and (for me at least) one of the more challenging ones. The bit I’m thinking of sees you tempted by an invincibility powerup… only to clonk you on the head with a big spiky ball and chain if you mistime your approach – i.e. if you charge straight in without pausing to see if it’s safe! Later in the same level, there’s another invincibility powerup closely followed by a nasty bottomless pit. Naturally, when you grab the invincibility powerup, you feel invincible, so you take rather less care than you would normally, leaving you highly likely to go barging straight into the pit. It’s frustrating and results in some colourful language but the key thing is, each time you mess up, you know it’s your fault for falling into the psychological traps left by the level designers.

Coming at this from a modern, more experienced and world-weary perspective, it’s been a real pleasure to re-experience the whole game and understand a little better what they were doing when they put them together. Good level design makes the difference between a game that is “cheap” and a game that is “challenging”. When I first started replaying Sonic, I was all for screaming “cheap!” at it – but now, having put a bit of time in, I know what they’re doing. I still make mistakes, but I know they’re my fault now, not the game’s.

This is in direct contrast to the recent Sonic games, where deaths are just as (if not more) likely to be caused by poor game mechanics than by player error or design psychology. It’s been sad to see Sonic lose his way over the years, but it does make me feel a little bit better to go back to the Mega Drive originals and find that they really are timeless.