Well, would you look at that. I bought yet another copy of Sonic the Hedgehog. I now have it three times on my Switch, in various guises. This time, it’s because I bought Sonic Origins, that remastered collection of Mega Drive (and Mega CD) Sonic games where they are reworked to fit into widescreen properly and a few things have been tweaked.
The original, unmodified, versions are on here too, but I’ve played them before so I went for the Anniversary Mode. For the first Sonic at least, that just added the widescreen aspect already mentioned, does away with lives (you have unlimited, with what would be lives now added to a coin pot to unlock things in a gallery), lets you do a drop-dash (although I only realised that by accident late in the game) and you can spend coins/lives to retry special stages should you fail them.
The only one that really makes a difference, is the special stage retries, although the special stages are pretty easy in the first game so it’s a bit unnecessary. The widescreen is nice, but it has the knock-on effect of changing some of the bosses a bit. For example, the one at the end of Spring Yard Zone relies on the left and right of the screen acting as walls. With the left and right now, er, more left and right, extra fake walls had to be implemented. Regardez:
It seems a handful of bugs have been fixed (there’s a few places where it used to be possible to get squashed, even though you’re not in a get-squashed place), but I did bump into this new one:
Minor stuff aside, it’s still 16-bit Sonic, so it’s still great. And yes, I got all the chaos emeralds.
