Theories Of Sonic

More often than not, I browse the infinity of the internets for inspiration for this blog.

Hence this:

Snack Dash Snack dash, which plays like sonic the hedgehog, is all about not getting fat.

Play this game for free, now!

So it doesn’t play much like Sonic then, does it?

I’ve played a couple of levels of this frankly anaemic conversion, and if you’ve succumbed to temptation before pushing the ‘more’ button then so have you. It’s sort of… Diet Sonic. In that it tastes almost like the real thing, but it doesn’t have the buzz and it leaves a nasty aftertaste lingering in the mouth. And it probably gives you cancer.

It’s almost Sonic, but not quite. How come? What is it missing? Apart from roughly 20 or 30 levels?

Well, Sonic was all about speed – undreamed-of speed. It was certainly the fastest thing I’d ever come across, and I’m sure Jonic’s stressed that point adequately enough himself. It was probably the first game where speed wasn’t represented by a number but actually visible, a quality to be experienced directly by the player. It’s telling that Test Drive, a game which allegedly put you behind the wheel of the fastest cars in the world, operated at a snail’s pace in comparison to Sonic.

Salad Dash or whatever it’s called, on the other hand, is all about stoppage. There are big warning signs dotted around, with skulls on them, to make you STOP AND THINK before you run into a hazard. Worse, there are little junk food mines around to stop you dead in mid-run, turning you into a fat bastard immediately with a single sweet. I ate a Werther’s Original on Tuesday. Now I know what happened to my once-svelte figure. Thank you, eBee dBee – WAIT WHAT THE CHRIST EBEE DBEE ARE YOU SERIOUS IS THAT HIS REAL ACTUAL NAME

Anyway, if you eat one sweet you turn into a fatty. Because everybody knows you can scoff a billion apples and carrots and you won’t put on a pound. (Plus every time dooBee dooBee doo smacks into a spike it looks like he’s staying thin by the binge and purge method.) Once you’ve got fat, you can lose the weight as quick as you gained it by some quick ‘exercise’ ie hammering two keys, which means that you can’t just burn through it, by, um, running, which apparently doesn’t count as exercise. It does to me, I can tell you, especially since I ate that sweet. This brilliantly-conceived game mechanic turns Rabbit Food Sprint into a zombie-like stop-start-stop-start jerkathon, where you barely manage to get up a decent head of speed before crashing to a halt and having to hammer buttons again.

And it’s not even as fast as Flash Sonic, never mind Actual Sonic.

What else, while I’m sticking the boot in? Sonic’s persona was, of course, crafted painstakingly by a massive corporate behemoth to be down with the kids, so naturally he embodied rebellion – even if it was that curious nineties sort of rebellion that was the dim memory of a board member’s adolescence coupled with last year’s buzzword. Sod it – he didn’t need clothes and he didn’t need to speak, and his very existence was a slap in the face to gaming convention, so Sonic faked it a lot better than most. eBee dBee (cringe) devotes his whole existence to lecturing you.

Sonic lives in the Green Hill Zone. eBee dBee lives in school. Sonic evokes a place to escape to – Snack Dash is set in the place you spend your childhood trying to escape from.

And as a final indignity, they missed the chance to have you try and collect a Chaos Radish or something.

No stars.