The symbol of Sega

Sonic is to Sega what Mario is to Nintendo. A character Sega relies on when releasing new consoles and other products. Sonic’s career in video games started long ago, when Sega released its 16-bit Mega Drive (Genesis in USA) console, about 10 years ago. The world had never seen as fast game as Sonic the Hedgehog was and the game became world wide success. Afterwards Sega released sequels Sonic 2 & 3 for Mega Drive in addition to some other games featuring Sonic.

When Sega released its Saturn console, there was no Sonic game for it. And it had one, expect one translation from a Mega Drive one. Some people even speculated that it was one of the reasons why Saturn never was a big success. It’s like having a Nintendo console without a Mario game and Saturn never had the opportunity to boost its sales with a new game starring one of the most popular video game characters ever, Sonic.

When Sega released the Dreamcast, this was no longer the case. Sonic returned in his fastest adventure yet. With Dreamcast’s superb graphical technology, this is also the most beautiful one and perhaps the looking platformer so far. You can’t see the quality of Sonic Adventure’s graphics by just looking at pictures, you have to see it yourself as Sonic runs through beautifully detailed 3D fields with incredible speed.

When game is fast-paced, it always rises one question: how’s the playability? If it sucks and controlling character is frustratingly difficult, game becomes annoying and isn’t fun to play. Fortunately enough, Sonic Adventure doesn’t fall in this category. It’s surprisingly easy to control Sonic and the other characters even though sometimes speed is overwhelming. Of course, there are some annoying situations which require instant timing and precisely controlled jumps, but fortunately there aren’t too much of these.

Drunken cameramen

One area where Sonic Adventure doesn’t impress is voulume control. The songs are played too damn LOUD! This successfully spoils some moments that feature speech. Oh well, at least the subtitles are there. The voice acting isn’t the best one around, though, so it’s probably entirely a bad thing that the music is played loud..
Another flaw in SA is common to many 3D games with overhead perspective: camera angles. Some times the camera just gets jiggy with it and wanders wildly sometimes pointing to the wall while Sonic is somewhere else and makes it pain in the ass to play. However, this doesn’t happen too often, which is good.

Sonic Adventure’s good sides exceed its bad ones and the result is an excellent platform game. Despite some flaws, it’s the best DC platform game so far and one of the best ones for any console system. If you are a Dreamcast owner, this is one of THE games to get.
Recently Sonic Adventure was released for GameCube as well, as Sonic Adventure DX. Unfortunately the game’s almost a straight port, no mentionable upgrades visually and the game retains the same camera problems as the Dreamcast version does. Sega added some bonus features to the package though, so the game’s not a carbon copy of its DC predecessor.