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Introduction To Sonic The Hedgehog

By: Gen Wright Click author's name for more of his/her articles

Sonic the Hedgehog is a lovable video game character that was created by the studio/company now known as Sega. Sonic The Hedgehog was originally conceived by the company to rival the popularity of the Mario platformers. Platformers are those games where you are constantly moving on terrains that you can only see in cross section or from a side. There is no real three-dimensional movement in traditional platformers although the characters themselves may be 3D. Originally, platformers were developed due to the limitations of original 8bit game consoles, which could, in no way, represent anything 3 dimensional and were capable of a small palette of colors and graphics.

Game systems have evolved since then and modern games are absolutely visually stunning and the original 8bit and 16bits do not compare with them in any way, except for the fact that the gameplay concepts from those 8bit days are still the most addictive gameplays ever invented. Coming back to platformers, Mario and then the Sonic The Hedgehog series are perfect examples of platformers. Although meant to compete with the Mario games, the original Sonic The Hedgehog game was very innovative and was the first to introduce an element of speed in to the game.

Sonic is named such because of his supersonic speed, meaning he can run faster than sound itself. This helps him get top places at amazing speeds and save his world from the main villain character Dr. Egghead (also called Dr. Ivo Robotnik in the US). Robotnik is bent on ruling the planet that Sonic and he live on - Mobius. Sonic of course will never let that happen and he goes through elaborate traps and dangerous areas to get to Robotnik on time and foil his evil plans.

Sonic's popularity lies in the many innovations that we made by the developers, especially the idea of varied speed and time. Sonic The Hedgehog was divided in to t he usual levels and each level was divided in to acts. The player had a fixed time, usually 10 minutes to complete the entire mission. If the player ran out of time, the act would fail and the player would have to start over. This made the game very challenging and addictive, while the superior colors and graphics of the game (taking advantage of the 16bit system) gave the game its popularity. Sonic has to collect rings by jumping through them all through the game and this has become a signature feature in the series.

This is somewhat like Mario collecting coins, but the rings in Sonic The Hedgehog serve more purposes than just adding to the score and giving a bonus life. The rings also protect Sonic from hits and there are also other features like the Golden ring at the end of a level if Sonic has 50 or more rings by that time.

All in all, anybody who plays Sonic the Hedgehog games is bound fall in love with them. They are visually rich, compare to the contemporary games of each release and they are also very simple and hence very addictive.

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