Ugh. I'm sorry for this one, guys.

This is a port of Sonic The Hedgehog for the Atari 2600. Now, you know me. I like it when people try porting newer games to older consoles. It makes an interesting challenge for any homebrew developers out there in the crowd. The problem is that Sonic The Hedgehog is most well-known for fast and high-flying gameplay, and you know just as well as I do that there's no way the Atari is going to manage to emulate that.

I'm going to break formula a little bit and talk about the graphics first. The graphics are okay, but the main problem is that the developer tried too hard to make everything look like original Sonic. Sonic himself is lovingly rendered in about as good detail as you could manage on the 2600, and most of the enemies actually look pretty good, but the consequence is that the sprites are huge and disproportionate. A little more restraint is necessary to do this game right.

The sound is actually really good, and mostly faithful to Sonic The Hedgehog. Naturally, it suffers from compression onto the Atari's sound card, but it actually ends up sounding surprisingly good. I have to give kudos to the developer for that one.

The final dagger in Sonic's heart, however, is the gameplay. Like in Sonic, you run around, and you can curl up into a ball and start rolling to attack enemies by jumping. However, you can not crouch to gain speed or curl into a ball; the only way to curl up is by jumping. You can not go on a loop-de-loop while curled up in a ball, even though you curl up while going on the loop anyway. You will frequently find yourself backing up to pick up speed to make simple jumps or go on loops.

Everything is clunky right down to basic game function. Enemies and powerups disappear as they go off to the left, but if you backtrack until their spawn point goes off to the right, they respawn instantly. This has a two-pronged effect on gameplay: It is criminally easy to exploit the game for rings by walking back and forth, and you will frequently be accosted by the same enemies time and time again while trying to adjust yourself to make a jump.

The levels are super-compressed into a tiny layout by the combination of poor graphics and ridiculous player size, meaning that the platforming suffers and enemies and powerups are more difficult to get to than they need to be. You will frequently miss jumps and be forced to go back to try them again, leading to the problem I mentioned before of enemies constantly respawning. You will also find yourself stuck in a position where you can't return to the path because you've fallen into something or gotten stuck in a wall, and you will get stuck in a wall a lot because the collision detection is simply broken.

The scrolling effect is pretty smooth for the Atari 2600, but that doesn't change the fact that the platforming is awful, the conversion just doesn't work, and the game is impossible to enjoy because the enemies keep respawning. On top of that, there's really only one level split into two halves that just repeats over and over. I don't care if this is a demo, because the demo makes me not want to play the finished product, if the finished product ever has the gall to be released.

For a clunky conversion that insults not just Sonic but the Atari, 1 out of 10.

Summary

Graphics: 3/10

Lovely graphics on the character sprites, but unfortunately they get in the way of the game.

Sound: 8/10

Beautifully rendered sound very faithful to the original game right down to the music.

Addictiveness: 1/10

Only a masochist like me would play this more than once.

Story: No rating

This may be Sonic, but it's still on the Atari.

Depth: 1/10

Depth? What depth? There's one level and it's super easy.

Difficulty: 5/10

Five out of ten only because the controls are so bad you're guaranteed to fall into an unfair number of pits and enemies.

Overall - 1? Come on. I know it's bad, but you've got to give it credit for being Sonic on the Atari. Then again, it could be better.

RetroGameNinja : It's not Sonic on the Atari. It's a bad video game. I don't give the Atari a handicap for being an old system. I give it credit where credit is due. I gave Sonic 2600 credit for having smooth side-scrolling, but that was its only strength.

Wow such an amazing review, so detailed, so instructional, but yet straight to the point, I was very delighted to read your review. Ah the classic Sonic, on the classic Sega, so many memories with this game. I laughed, I cried, I threw the controller at the television in pure rage. The game is legendary, that spawned an iconic series, that will always be remembered. You can still hear children whistling the tune every now and then, heck I used to as a child, and still every now and then I find myself whistling it. This game created such a cult fan base it ain't even funny. And Dr. Robotnik no....Eggman is an iconic final boss, villian, and antagonist. The game for it's time had amazing graphics. The music as I said is an instant classic. The characters and character developement are so weird, random, and wild that you just have to love them. The plot is the same way, one of the most unique, and bizarre stories ever told. A blue life size hedgehog rescuing little animals from an evil genious. Classic! All in all such a fun, and solid game. Sonic and Knuckles was an amazing game to I wonder if they could make a ROM for that on this system? It brought back many memories, at the time it was the in game to have, like the newest coolest thing to get. I remember knuckles was the coolest ever, knuckles had his own cult fan base as much as Sonic the Hedgehog, it truly was a great add on to an already great and wonderful game, This game does really bring back so many memories, I laughed, I cried, I got mad that knuckles did crazy things, and flew through the air, or I should specifically say he glided through the air, that was another questionable thing, never really understood why, and how he did that, but I never asked, and neither did no one else I knew, it was just knuckles a cool and awesome, amazing character, that did insane magical things, I mean if you honestly peel back the original concept of it though it's crazy an echidna that can glide, and well its crazy that a two tail fox can fly as well, and a hedgehog that is blue can run as fast as a car. But it's an amazing game that craziness just has to take a back seat, but it is what makes the game so much fun!

Never really played this game heard of this game or passed by it, but to me it sounds like this is a really bad game. I will give it a try just to see how the game play is for myself and wont take it from anyone else but still. It sounds like this game is bad. Anyways overall that criticism I want compliment you on writing a great long review of the game. It gave detail and plenty background information on it. You explained it to the very core about how it works and how the editor tried to make it as much as sonic as possible. Great review and I would wish to see you reviewing some more for this piece of criticism .