There is much excitement over the recent announcement of a new Sonic the Hedgehog game that goes back to the old Mega Drive (Genesis if you are in the US!) format of fast, 2d platform games. The simple but very fun gameplay ended up the defining series of games of a whole generation of gamers and became legendary among people of all age groups.
The first place Sonic popped up was on the Master System, which was the first major Sega gaming system, and the Mega Drive followed on from this. Sonic became the mascot for all of Sega’s operations, with a huge merchandising campaign behind him. The games improved greatly each time, with the Mega Drive ones being a massive step up. Sonic 1 and 2 set the benchmark, and the second one especially was brilliant. Then they set themselves new high standards on Sonic 3, with some amazing gameplay and graphics with lots of extra features. The lock on technology introduced with Sonic and Knuckles bought even more value from the older Sonic games as it bought in new characters and levels for these games. However when the Mega Drive met its end Sonic games started to lose their quality.
