It's new to me: Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble

The Game Gear's Sonic entries were plentiful, but a worthwhile one was harder to find. Triple Trouble is one of the better ones.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Sonic’s Game Gear outings don’t get nearly the love as the 16-bit games, which, if you’re familiar with both, makes plenty of sense. The Game Gear ones, for the most part, simply aren’t as good. There are a couple of them, though, that are worth playing and succeed, and do so both because they seem to realize the limitations of the 8-bit platform they’re on, and work within that framework to produce something worthwhile. I wouldn’t argue that Triple Trouble is must play or what have you, but it’s good enough that it’s a shame that it’s about to not be available anywhere once the Nintendo 3DS eShop shuts down: that’s the only place Sega has put it since 2005’s Sonic Gems Collection, which, just to emphasize how long ago 2005 was in video game terms, came out on the GameCube and Playstation 2.

Triple Trouble was included in Sonic Gems Collection, per then-Sonic Team Director, Yojiri Ogawa, because it was considered one of “the best and highest quality of Game Gear titles.” That’s how each of the six Game Gear games in the collection were described by Ogawa, and while I’ve got quibbles with that description considering some of what was included, Triple Trouble is not one of the ones I’m raising an eyebrow at.

Triple Trouble, developed by Aspect — which handled the vast majority of Sonic’s Game Gear outings — is named thus because Sonic and Tails are facing off against a trio of antagonists. They aren’t working together so much as they’re all just standing in the way of Sonic and Tails, so you’ll have to deal with all of them to make it through. Dr. Robotnik, of course, is at the center of things, but Knuckles, for whatever reason, believed Dr. Robotnik when he was told that Sonic and Tails were up to some unsavory business regarding the Chaos Emeralds, so he’s attempting to stop you, and then there’s Fang the Sniper, who was known as Nack the Weasel in the North American localization. Fang/Nack was meant to appear in a mainline Sonic game eventually, Sonic Xtreme, but that Saturn game never ended up being completed: the Sniper/Weasel did show up on a poster in Sonic Generations, and as an illusion during a boss fight in Sonic Mania, but the actual character has gone unused since 1996’s arcade title Sonic the Fighters.

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Fang/Nack is a thief intent on stealing the Chaos Emeralds, so in the special stages, you’ll be facing off against and chasing him in order to recover them. Knuckles shows up sometimes at the end of stages to torpedo your efforts to progress, which mostly just means, in practice, that he’s the segue between Act 1 and Act 2 in a given stage, but you’ll have occasional tussles with him, too. Robotnik’s creations are the bosses you’ll take on the most often, and you’ll of course have a multipart boss battle with the good doctor himself at the game’s end. None of these battles are particularly taxing: the boss fights are kind of overly simple once you’ve figured out what you need to avoid and what you need to hit. Getting to them is fun, at least, even if that, too, is pretty easy.

The only real challenge in Triple Trouble comes from finding the Chaos Emeralds: if you don’t collect them all, your post-game scene will be a brief one telling you to try again before it hits you with the Game Over screen. Triple Trouble makes a point of emphasizing that you want those Chaos Emeralds, at least: you lose 30 rings at a time instead of all of them when you take damage (though, you lose 50 for touching spikes), to increase the chances you’ll have enough rings for a special stage that leads to a Chaos Emerald when you happen upon a portal to one, and as said, one of the three antagonists of the game is specifically for those special stages. Skipping out on searching for Chaos Emeralds means skipping out on one-third of the game implied by its name. The ending won’t be much longer if you do manage to find them, but at least it won’t make you feel like you failed.

As for getting to those Chaos Emeralds, you’ll find an emerald represented on an item box (a monitor, in Sonic parlance) in an out-of-the-way location: only step on it if you’ve got the 50 rings necessary to make it do something, because if you don’t, all you’ve done is remove access to a special stage. If you do have 50, a portal will open above it that you can jump into, transporting you to the stage. The first, third, and fifth special stages are 2D ones where you’re up against the clock: you must navigate platforming challenges and some maze elements to reach a boss fight against Fang/Nack, which itself is not timed. These are pretty enjoyable, and stressful in the right way: that timer is going to loom large as you try to figure out just how to make it through.

The second and fourth special stages take place in a pseudo 3D realm, with Sonic or Tails piloting the Tornado, Tails’ plane. These are less enjoyable: you’re just trying to collect rings without crashing into obstacles, and making sure you have enough rings to proceed, but they lack the creativity and (welcome) stress of the rest of the special stages. They just kind of are, but at least there are just the two of them. The sixth Chaos Emerald, by the way, is held by Robotnik, which is why you’re just grabbing five here.

The thing you’ll notice right away about Triple Trouble is that the physics are a bit… off. Not wrong, not unusable, just… off. You’ll adjust in a hurry, but when you see just how high and slow Sonic and Tails jump, how long they linger in the air, you’ll realize something is different. Luckily, the game opens amid a sea of springs, so sproing around a bunch and you’ll get a feel for how the movement in this game works, and be ready to deploy your newfound knowledge elsewhere. Well, only within Triple Trouble, but since that’s the game you’re playing, that’s fine.

Tails gets a real chance to star here in a Sonic game not entirely focused on speed: his ability to fly lets you explore further and backtrack a little more easily, to make your way to other paths in a way Sonic couldn’t easily do just by backtracking. Which is very helpful with finding your way to special stages and the Chaos Emeralds within. You choose to use either Sonic or Tails at the game’s outset, and since they traverse the levels a bit differently — Tails, in addition to flying, gets a submarine to use in the underwater stage —and there’s the need to find the Chaos Emeralds to get the more satisfying conclusion to the game, means you’ve got some replayability here.

The pacing of Triple Trouble is much more like the original Sonic the Hedgehog than its sequels — you’re meant to explore to find secrets, without feeling rushed into playing an adrenaline-pumping version of the game. Some of those elements certainly remain, as this is a Sonic game — rocket shoes! — but it’s all more thoughtfully balanced here than in the more overt attempts at recreating 16-bit Sonic on 8-bit hardware, which too often served to reinforce how good the former was while simultaneously reminding how limiting the latter could be. A great 8-bit Sonic was certainly possible — there were plenty of excellent 8-bit platformers before Sonic started appearing in the format — but the insistence on trying to copy what made Sonic work on more powerful hardware work was a problem, which is a significant reason why the original Sonic the Hedgehog on the Game Gear, which was very much its own thing, worked so well while its sequels and successors faltered a bit more.

As I hinted at earlier, the idea that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Game Gear represents a superior Game Gear title when the original was there and was instead left off of Sonic Gems Collection has got me going “hmm.” The first one knew the system’s limitations and was a successful, slower-paced platformer, which is not an inherently bad thing for a Sonic game to be! Its sequel went looking for speed over everything else, and didn’t find nearly the success in that transition that its console counterpart did (nor that of a later take on Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the Neo Geo Pocket Color’s Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure).

Look no further than Aspect’s follow-up to this game, even: Sonic Blast, which decided it, too, could do the Donkey Kong Country pre-rendered thing, but made a bunch of mistakes in design and then didn’t even pull off the graphics portion of things so well. More of a focus on making sure that the level design was thoughtful and top notch for the 8-bit platform it was on was basically always needed with Sonic’s Game Gear outings, but Triple Trouble, at least, managed to find a balance between ambition and realistic expectations of what was possible, in a way that made for an enjoyable, albeit not must-play, outing.

There’s slowdown, and some of the animation is a bit wonky — the way Sonic’s limbs move as he speeds up before you get that classic tornado of legs looks oddly stiff and unnatural — but overall things look solid here, with a variety of colors and designs to both the levels and the enemies within. (For what it’s worth, the 3DS edition of Triple Trouble lets you improve the game’s performance to remove the slowdown, and you can also edit the game’s resolution and screen size, from “Normal” to “Full” to “Dot by Dot.”) The sprites themselves look excellent, with size and significant detail to them, and plenty of expressions for the various motions you’ll see, whether from movement or reacting to taking damage or just standing there.

It’s not quite the looker that Sonic’s 16-bit adventures were, but you knew that would be the case, considering the platform differences. The key with these games, just like with Game Boy titles compared to SNES ones, is whether they were built with the handheld’s strengths in mind, while also limiting the exposure of the platform’s weaknesses. Triple Trouble does a solid job of both, which is why, in spite of the aforementioned animation weirdness and the slowdown and a difficulty you can basically breeze through, it holds up better than so many other Sonic Game Gear titles.

Now, I said Triple Trouble isn’t “must play,” but it’s significantly better than its predecessor, Sonic Chaos, and its successor, Sonic Blast, and it’s all because it created large levels you’d enjoy exploring, with focus on what the Game Gear could do well instead of what it could not do well. That being said, the most enjoyable version of the game to play is its unofficial 16-bit remake, helpfully titled Sonic Triple Trouble 16-Bit. This game was is a reimagining developed over five years by Noah N. Copeland, and the idea was to set it after Sonic & Knuckles, not just in canon, but in gameplay style and look, too. The game itself is free and available through Game Jolt for Windows users, with an Android version in the works. It looks great, plays just as good, and manages to build on the strengths of what made Triple Trouble work on the Game Gear by exploring it all a bit more with the added horsepower of a 16-bit, Genesis-style Sonic. Maybe most interesting to it all is the ability to switch between Sonic and Tails whenever you want, but the more obviously laid out story elements, enhanced graphics and sound, and the fact it’s setup to accommodate basically everything from screen resolution to various game pad supports to languages is great, too.

Like with Sonic Mania being pitched and developed by prominent Sonic fan game developers and modders, Triple Trouble 16-bit will hopefully get some attention from Sega itself at some point. Sure, it’d then cost money to play, but hey, this is some great work that deserves the spotlight and a check. Plus, maybe the original Triple Trouble could be packaged along with it, so that it is no longer vanished from existence for those who didn’t already buy Sonic Gems Collection or its 3DS Virtual Console release.

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