Platformer Update

DEVELOPER/PUBLISHER: SNK
YEAR: 1999

With no handheld of their own to support, SEGA licensed their Sonic property out to SNK for their NeoGeo Pocket in the late 1990s.  The resulting game is interesting for two main reasons: 1) it was the first step toward the Sonic Advance/Rush series and 2) it’s a face-off between old and new gaming values without a clear winner being decided.

Read the rest of the review:

Pocket Adventure was released shortly before SNK went belly up and was eaten alive by Playmore.  Durng this restructuring phase a large chunk of SNK’s developers formed a new company called Dimps, now famous for developing the Sonic Advance and Rush games on Nintendo handhelds.  Pocket Adventure essentially plays like a Sonic Advance Zero.  As with the Sonic Advance games, you are allowed to save between levels and can revisit defeated levels at any time.  This makes the prospect of actually earning all of the Chaos Emeralds and playing as Hyper Magical Duper Sonic more attractive (not that I’ve actually done it). 

As much as Pocket Adventure plays like the later Game Boy Advance games, it shares many other qualities with the original Genesis games.  Most of the levels in the game are obviously inspired by certain levels in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 but they’ve been dummied up a bit.  In some cases they’re just less cheap than in the original but other situations are just altered to be quite a bit easier.  This flies in the face of the whole file saving feature.  If the player can save after every level and needn’t fear having to start the game over from scratch then there’s no reason to make the levels easier than they would have been on the Genesis.

There are also fewer levels than there were in STH2.  There are 7 zones but the final zone is just a short boss fight so you really have six zones with 2 not-so-long levels each.  So, is it worth tracking down?  I’d say yes, provided you are a big fan of Sonic or, more specifically, Sonic Advance.  The game and the NeoGeo Pocket Color system can be found rather cheaply.  The gameplay is great in spite of its short length and there are always those pesky Chaos Emeralds to track down.

Grade: B
Conclusion: a decent transitory effort

-Matt