Giving Sonic CD a second chance

Seems like I've been in a Sonic the Hedgehog kick when it comes to gaming. After finally finishing Sonic 3 and Knuckles and Shadow the Hedgehog a few weeks ago, I've suddenly got the urge to turn into a spinning ball.

Needing a fresh challenge, I decided to give Sonic CD another try (yes, I still have a Sega CD hooked up to the Genesis 1, and I don't hate it). I can't tell you how many posts I've seen online where people proclaim that it's the greatest Sonic title out there. Yet when I tried it out for the first time a few years ago, I didn't like it at all.

What's wrong with it? The time travel aspect is frustrating. In a perfect world, you'd pass by the posts that send you into the past or future, gain enough speed and warp to your destination. I don't mind the 3-5 second load time that time travel entails, but the problem is, you can never gain enough speed: the level simply doesn't have enough free running space. I always get caught up by some obstacle and lose the chance to warp.

For a feature that is such an integral part of the experience, I found it much too difficult to pull off at ease. And talk about horrible level design: the game feels like an amateur hacker used a level edit program to put the stages together.

However, I thought the game deserved a second chance. So I played through it again, deciding to focus less on my ability to warp to the past and more on just playing through it like a normal Sonic game.

And I gotta say, giving it that second chance ended up paying off. I wasn't blown away by it: Sonic 2 is still my favorite of the series, but I did enjoy it more than Sonic Spinball at the end of the day. I would definitely love to see an updated version of this game: Sonic 4 really brought the series back to it's 16-bit roots a few months ago, so why not revisit the time-travel aspect of the game?

Sometimes second changes pay off.