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Sonic Advance: quite literally a blue blur

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I love the 2D Sonic games. The best is still Sonic 2, as in the Mega Drive game, but Sonic Mania runs it close. It probably helps that I’ve never played Sonic 4, which I know is almost universally derided – I know of only one person who liked it. Still, the Sonic Advance games are generally thought of as ‘good’ to ‘great’, and I’ve never played those either, and it’s time to rectify that – particularly because I’ve just bought a GBX Cart so can do things like back up saves and so on. I dug out my copy of Sonic Advance, my GBA SP, ordered a new USB charging cable, promptly found my old charging cable, and settled down to play.

How did we ever manage to actually use this?

The screen is incredibly hard to see, washed out colours, blurry, and it seems to have a refresh rate that doesn’t match the game. The picture above was taken in bright sunshine, and you can see that in order to get anything resembling a good picture you have to content with overly-reflective front glass. I was constantly having to contort myself to angle the screen just right, and whenever the sun went behind a cloud I had to squint to work out what was happening at all. Playing in the evening was even worse, with the house lights leading to a strong blue tint to the screen.

The game itself is actually really good. There’s not quite enough of a forward view to be able to run fast through the levels, so it feels a bit more exploratory than other Sonic games. I’ve not found out how to get to any sort of chaos emeralds or special stages yet, but the limitations of the physical hardware means that I’m very tempted to try playing this through emulation instead, once I’ve finished the first run through – so I won’t look up any other details until I try that.

Dordogne: why am I here?

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A charming adventure game, with a really unique art style and setting. The story is a little confusing at first, without an explanation for why you are in a car with your dad asking where you are, but it quickly starts to piece together: you are on the way to visit your nan’s house, after her death, to find stuff that she left for you – and your dad doesn’t want you to go there. When you arrive and start to explore, you trigger memories of what happened in the house one summer when you were sent to live there (I’m guessing when you were around 10 years old), and you have to explore each day to see how the summer went.

It is very slow paced, quite simple, but utterly charming. The little girl who you control, Mimi, has such a defined expression throughout, with uncertainty but stubbornness as an adult, and – at least initially – petulance and sadness as a child. She misses her friends, her family, and her home in Paris, but gradually the beauty of the location and the kindness of her grandmother change her perception.

The game is stunning to look at, even more so in motion as the environments pan around as you move. Some of the locations are very atmospheric indeed. I have played four days so far and am starting to see links between the young Mimi’s actions and the the older Mimi’s visit. I’m looking forward to finding out all about the secrets that have been kept.

Road Rash: I’ve been on a diet

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Road Rash was one of my favourite games during the Mega Drive’s heyday – Colin had the first game, which we played in turns for hours at his house, and when the second game came along with split-screen multiplayer it was a day-one purchase. I still have that cartridge, and last played it back in May 2023 – it still works. I have written about the third game on this blog, which felt like a downgrade from the second.

Talking about downgrades, I suppose it’s a wonder that they got Road Rash working on the Master System at all. It barely runs; the framerate is in the single digits, the graphics are messy and disproportioned (the cars in particular look horrendously narrow), the controls are imprecise. It’s almost impossible to avoid oncoming obstacles since they only appear 10 metres up the road. Thankfully, given the difficulty in steering, the opponents tend to leave you alone – I saw no evidence here of certain opponents catching up with me after I’d overtaken them, just so they could lash out at me.

I’m sure that if I’d had only a Master System back in 1992, I’d have been delighted with this. But I didn’t, and now I have access to 32,616,381 different consoles, of which 33% of them have a better version of Road Rash on. One where the main character sprite doesn’t look as if the aspect ratio’s gone wonky.

Kolibri: eaten by a frog

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Kolibri is certainly colourful, fast, and with plenty of sprites flying around the screen. Flying being a key word – as a hummingbird, everything takes place in the air, with very occasional ground-based enemies. Frustratingly the development team have obviously seen nature videos where the hummingbirds move around slightly in the air, because they’ve implemented that here – my bird was shifting around a little when I really wanted it to just stay still and let a projective pass.

It is a bit of a frustrating game in places. In order for the game to look as natural as possible, they have dispensed with an on-screen display. You can’t see how much health you have left unless you get hit or collect an energy ball, at which point one, two, three or four little hummingbirds appear around you to show you how many hits you can absorb. You also can’t easily see what weapon you are holding, though of course that can be fixed by firing it. I think that your bird colour changes depending on the weapon as well, but I’m not entirely sure.

I’ve played through the first five or six levels now, and there’s a bit of variety there. In Aero the Acro-Bat, you were given some instructions when you started each level on what the goal was – jump on certain platforms, or defeat a certain number of specific enemies – but here you just need to work out what’s going on before you die. Not always possible, but at least there appear to be infinite lives; you just start again at the beginning of the level you died on.

[A side note: screenshots taken on this emulator often come out a bit odd, I think because of the way the Mega Drive and 32X outputs are being combined. The third screenshot here, for example, only has the background on the upper half the screen, whereas actually there was a hill there.]

The other issue is that the powerups are a bit too similar to each other and easy to pick up. Normally ease of collection would be a good thing, but here there are about six or seven weapons and you can collect the powerup for the one you want. I am particularly fond of the homing energy balls, or the lasers, but often find that I’m accidentally collecting other weapons instead. Homing weapons are useful because enemies can come from both sides, and the controls are a bit picky in terms of turning around.

It’s a breath of fresh air for horizontal shooters – look, no spaceships! – but it’s a little frustrating to control, which ruins it somewhat.

Aero the Acro-Bat: completed!

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The museum turned out to be the last level, and it was indeed significantly more difficult than the rest of the game. Much of this difficulty came in the narrowing of platforms, which would ordinarily be easy to land on but required the awful diagonal jumps to get high enough. It reminded me of the Dizzy games, where you had to work out which pixel to jump off in order to land in the right place, except more frantic and (often) with death awaiting if you fell.

Despite the setting and the increased difficulty, there were few innovations which set apart the last levels. There was an annoying obstacle which saw a laser shooting around a frame which you had to avoid, and flames shooting out of gargoyles at seemingly random intervals, and circular saws embedded in many platforms. Some of the enemies were immune to my diagonal attacks, or rather were sometimes immune (but at other times they popped, for no discernible reason). It was getting a bit frustrating and boring.

I quickly realised that it was pointless spending hours waiting for appropriate windows in obstacle attacks, since there were normally multiple life pickups – the As in the bottom-right corner – following any difficult section. As a result I often just barrelled straight through and dealt with healing afterwards. This wasn’t always the case, but due to the beauty of regular save states I had sixty-odd lives available anyway.

And then I got to the final level. The boss came in three stages, and before each battle there was a frantic vertical platforming section, with an ever-rising laser beam ready to cut the climb short. This took a fair while to do, even with saving, because of the awkward placement of platforms and the inaccuracy of Aero’s jumping. In the third section there were countless spikes and other enemies to avoid while also trying to land on minute platforms. Whenever I caught up with the boss, there was fight where he put out floating clowns to get in the way, and also streams of water coming from his giant clown face flying vehicle; while I tried to know his jaw off.

At the end of the second fight, the lower jaw came off, but that didn’t stop him from spawning clowns and generally being a pain the posterior. Instead of the jaw I had to hit his red nose, and after doing that 32,977,421 times he admitted defeat.

This wasn’t a great game. It was tolerable, and there was a nice fluidity to it – but there was perhaps just a bit too much inertia to allow for accurate jumping and platforming. Whoever designed the diagonal attacks should never have worked in the industry again. The jankiness with the controls may well have been an emulator problem, but I did see at least one review mention it.

Will I replay it, or play the sequel? I’ve got quite a lot of other stuff to do first.