Re-release this: Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure
Re-release this: Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure
We're once again getting a re-release of the Sega Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog games, but what about Sonic's post-Genesis 2D adventures?
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Sonic Origins will release in June, and will represent roughly the 400th re-release of the original Sonic the Hedgehog Sega Genesis games. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — re-release all the old games all the time so they’re always available, perfect, keep at it, Sega — but it is worth pointing out that there are other quality 2D Sonic platformers than the ones Sega themselves developed in the early-to-mid 90s. If it feels like there is a giant hole in between the original slate of classics and Sonic’s more modern “return to form” between Sonic Colors and Sonic Mania, well, it’s because Sega tends to ignore the great Sonic games that did come out during that seeming dark age.
Dimps, founded in 2000 (with some funding from Sega, even) is responsible for a significant portion of the best of Sonic released in the post-Dreamcast and pre-Mania era of the blue hedgehog. All three games in the Sonic Advance Trilogy were courtesy Dimps, as were both Sonic Rush titles, and the superior version of Sonic Colors, which released on the Nintendo DS using the same engine as the Rush titles. Sure, they also developed the Wii and Playstation 2 versions of Sonic Unleashed, as well as the aborted Sonic the Hedgehog 4 trilogy, but at least the former was just port work we can’t fault them for. They aren’t batting 1.000, no, but they’re hitting far more impressively than anyone else handling Sonic over the last couple of decades. In the handheld space, at least, they clearly understand what made the 2D Sonic titles work, and how to iterate those concepts and progress the series.
Dimps was formed by former SNK and Capcom developers, right around the time that the two studios were collaborating on games like SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash. While the experience of these developers meant Dimps would produce a whole bunch of fighting games — Capcom leaned on Dimps for both Street Fighter IV and V, which should not be a shock considering developers of both previous Street Fighter games as well as multiple SNK fighting series like The King of Fighters founded the developer, but the studio also produced Dragon Ball fighters for Bandai et al — they also had an affinity for Sonic the Hedgehog. And even experience making a Sonic game: a few of Dimps’ ex-SNK employees were on the development team for 1999’s Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure.
Before there was Sonic Advance, before Sega had given up on producing their own platforms, there was the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Sega didn’t have a true successor to the 8-bit Game Gear — the Nomad was designed to play Genesis cartridges, was marketed as a portable version of that system, and didn’t receive a full worldwide release. As Nintendo was still Sega’s competitor in 1999 — the Dreamcast had released in North America just a months before Sonic Pocket Adventure — they weren’t about to collaborate on the Game Boy Color. Enter SNK and the Neo Geo Pocket Color, which, unlike Bandai’s WonderSwan, was available worldwide instead of just in Japan. SNK had their own series of Neo Geo home consoles, yes, but Sega was really only their competitor in the arcade space itself: the two could join forces against Nintendo by partnering up for a Neo Geo Pocket Color title, in the same way that you’ve occasionally seen Nintendo and Microsoft play nice because ha ha, Sony will hate this. The relationship went beyond just a game, too, as link cables exist to allow you to connect a Neo Geo Pocket Color to a Dreamcast, courtesy SNK.
While the Pocket really only briefly competed with the juggernaut that was the Game Boy family of systems, Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure was a significant get for the first holiday season where the Pocket Color was available. And while it’s not quite as impressive as the Sonic Advance games in a number of ways, it still showed that there were other developers out there besides Sega’s that understood what could make a 2D Sonic game work. Pocket Adventure is heavily based on Sonic the Hedgehog 2: the worlds are taken from that game, which means the enemies and environmental traps and general understanding of how the world works are also lifted from Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The stage layout, though, as well as the bosses, are all new, which kind of makes this like the kind of variant port Sega would have developed (or had developed) for the Game Gear at the time of Sonic the Hedgehog 2’s original release.
The Pocket Color was a 16-bit system, though, and while it couldn’t fully reproduce the Genesis experience and very clearly had different sound hardware within it, too, it was able to create a more faithful and enjoyable conversion of Sonic 2 than the Game Gear’s actual Sonic 2. Of course, the original Game Gear version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 famously wasn’t a conversion of the Genesis game: the two did not share levels, but unlike with the first Sonic game on the Game Gear, the developer, Aspect, did attempt to focus more on speed instead of platforming just like its Genesis cousin had. So, Pocket Adventure feels kind of like what would have been attempted had Sega decided against making a fully unique Sonic experience for the second Game Gear title in the franchise, except on hardware more capable of replicating that Sonic experience.
Pocket Adventure isn’t as good as the original Sonic the Hedgehog 2, no, but it didn’t have to be. It just had to be a quality portable version of the same kind of game, and it is! It retains much of the speed of the original, with the downgrades mostly being in the number of foes you’ll face and the detail in the various stages’ backgrounds, but Sonic himself is still detailed and animated well, and the game is very much designed around what the Pocket Color is capable of: while there are certainly games I like to see pushing the hardware to its limit through sheer ambition, something that requires the smoothness and precision of a Sonic game isn’t really it. Sure, I’ll play the slowed-down-to-hell Sonic the Hedgehog 2 multiplayer, but if the single-player experience played like that, too, I’d have a much different opinion of the classic.
Anyway, a working concept of Sonic 2, but portable, that was the idea. A Sega Nomad that would let you play portable Sonic 2, Genesis edition, cost $180 at launch: the Neo Geo Pocket Color cost $70. If the goal was to create a Sonic experience for handhelds that more closely mirrored the gameplay of the console games, then, success. If the goal was also to partner up by having Sonic reemerge into the handheld space in order to combat Nintendo’s dominance there, well… less successful, but not because of anything Pocket Adventure or Sega did.
The Pocket Color had a promising start — they had two percent of the handheld market share in North America a couple of months after launch, which was enough for the system to be profitable for SNK — but just couldn’t gain enough traction in North America or Europe against the Game Boy Color; when SNK was purchased in 2000 by American Pachinko, the Pocket Color was no longer produced for those two markets. While the system lasted until 2001 in Japan, Sonic Advance, released the same year, went to Nintendo’s 32-bit Game Boy Advance, the Game Boy Color’s successor.
The Advance games were possible because of Pocket Adventure, though. That was, to that point, the greatest combination of smooth and fast Sonic gameplay on a handheld, and it was also the first time that Sonic appeared on a non-Sega platform, which ended up being good practice for all involved considering what was coming. Sonic had a bit of a redesign compared to his Genesis look, with his Pocket Adventure design being a 2D version of 3D Sonic, and working on an adaptation of an existing Sonic game helped prepare what would become Dimps for carrying over and iterating on concepts while focusing on creating something entirely new.
And all of them have basically vanished from existence. There are a number of Neo Geo Pocket Color titles on the Nintendo Switch these days thanks to Neo Geo Pocket Color Selection Vol. 1 as well as a couple of scattered individual releases, but none of them is Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure. The Sonic Advance trilogy was not part of the slate of Wii U Virtual Console re-releases of Game Boy Advance games, and the pair of Rush games didn’t make their way onto the Wii U’s Virtual Console for DS games, either. Put the dual-screen Rush games on the Switch with a Flip Grip-style, vertically oriented peripheral, Sega! Release the Sonic Advance trilogy as a package or individually, like Konami has done for their Castlevania Advance games! It doesn’t always have to be just the Genesis titles put on the market again and again: there are so many other quality Sonic games out there, either to be experienced for the first time or revisited, and Sonic Pocket Adventure numbers among those.
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