[This post is part of a collaborative Sonic retrospective based around the games on Sonic Mega Collection Plus. To read more, please head over to the central post!]
What makes a proper Sonic game? It’s something that Sonic Mega Collection Plus offers plenty of chances to consider, though it’s a wider question than even the vast collection can answer alone. One might consider it as a question of gameplay and characters, represented graphically like this:
On this model, Sonic Blast is firmly in the top left. It has Sonic and Knuckles as its characters. It has 2D platforming in a series of different landscapes which feel of a kind with the original Mega Drive Sonic the Hedgehog, though they extend more directly from the naming logic of the opening Green Hill Zone: Yellow Desert Zone, Red Volcano Zone, Blue Marine Zone, Silver Castle Zone (this is a complete list; I saw almost all of the game’s levels within my first go at it).
It has the same rings mechanic, the same kind of power-ups, some of the same kind of enemies. It even manages 3D special stages and some of the mechanical setpieces of later Mega Drive Sonic games, with lifts you have to rev in to get them to work. You end zones with fights against Dr. Robotnik in various Baikinman-style robot contraptions. Looked at through the lens of those features, Sonic Blast is a reasonable go at a minimal viable Sonic for portables. There are two major issues which meant that it was not generally looked at in that positive light.
One is a matter of timing. Released at the end of 1996, Sonic Blast was the final game Sega published for the Game Gear, and one of the final games on Sonic Mega Collection Plus to be released. The other one released the same month was Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island, or, more confusingly elsewhere, Sonic 3D Blast. That was an unflattering comparison for Sonic Blast. More to the point, though, it was almost five years after the Game Gear got its own 8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog, which had already provided a minimum viable portable Sonic, and done so with a lot of charm. It was far too late to impress anyone with that.
The bigger issue still was how Sonic Blast looks. It uses pre-rendered graphics, turning 3D models into 2D sprites, in a similar approach to that which Donkey Kong Country had wowed many with. In Sonic Blast’s case it looks, to use a technical term, bloody awful. The resolution is dire and screenshots look ugly, but the animations are even worse. Seeing Sonic go round a loop-the-loop in the Green Hill Zone immediately demonstrates the issue, with so few different sprites that his progress is a matter of repeatedly hanging at an awkward angle from the surface before flicking into a different position.
The choices also magnify the issue with having a very close up view in a limited screen area, which already causes its own gameplay limitations. And when extra bad choices are added to that — like the infuriating maze of invisible currents that makes up part of the Blue Marine Zone — it leads to an unhappy experience all around. The end result is that Sonic Blast is a proper Sonic game, just a very bad one.