[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!
As writer of this one I welcome for the first time Richard Moss, creator of the documentary podcast The Life & Times of Video Games, who you can also find on Twitter as @MossRC]
With mascot-packed kart racers having been de rigueur since the late ’90s, it’s easy to forget now just how transformative 1992’s Super Nintendo kart-racing masterpiece Super Mario Kart was. Putting Mario and his pals (and a few of their enemies) behind the wheels of some low-powered go-karts was a weird, bold move by Nintendo, but it paid off handsomely — the Mario Kart series is still collecting coins and powering round corners nearly 30 years later.
If only we could say the same for Sonic Drift, the handheld kart racer that time forgot. It lives on in a sense through the popular Sonic & All-Stars Racing games, a belated second attempt to get into Mario Kart’s slipstream, but that’s a very different game to Sonic Drift. It’s bombastic, silly, fast, even borderline-innovative.
Sonic Drift is odd. I can kind of understand why most reviewers panned it — both in ’94 when it first came out and again a decade later when it was re-released. It wasn’t Mario Kart, redone or reimagined with Sonic. Thus it failed to match expectations (notwithstanding the fact that those expectations were unfair, given the power differential between Super Nintendo and Sega Game Gear).
And this is all the more an issue if you were coming to it fresh in 2005 for the Sonic Mega Collection Plus compilation, which indeed most non-Japanese players would have been, where it had the dubious honour of making up the numbers as one of the included extras that barely anybody played.
If you however chanced a go at it and had conveniently missed out on Mario Kart’s existence altogether, perhaps reading a description and thinking you’d get a game in the vein of OutRun, but Sonic-ified, then you were very much in luck. Because that’s what we got here — OutRun with powerups and mascot racers.
It’s got that racing vibe — alternating shades of blue to mark out the track, which in typical fashion for pseudo-3D racers rotates and warps around you to provide the illusion that you’re traversing a space at speed, with the narrow track flanked by racing red-and-white kerbstones, and you can always see where you are relative to your rivals on the mini-map at the top of the screen.
Tracks lack any sort of hazards, too, other than the occasional signpost off the right or left edge that’ll make you spin out if you hit it, so for the most part Sonic Drift feels like a generic drifting-heavy racer with Sonic and friends slapped on. But you do get touches of personality in the design. Each racer has a special ability they can use whenever they collect two rings on their way round. Sonic gets a speed boost, Tails does a spin hop (great for overtaking), Eggman drops a mine (okay, so you can get one hazard to avoid), and Amy slows everybody else down. You can also collect a speed boost powerup, a spin-hop, or temporary invincibility as you make your way round.
If it sounds bad, it’s really not. Sonic Drift is fun and fast, and the drifting mechanic feels great once you get the hang of it. The four characters each take time to master, as do all 18 tracks (which are divided across three cups).
Of course, the Super Mario Kart comparisons are inescapable when there are nods to the Super Nintendo classic everywhere you look. And this is where Sonic Drift struggles to hold its own — especially in an era where you could just as easily fire up a SNES emulator as hop into Sonic Drift in your PS2 Sonic compilation (or indeed grab a ROM to play in a Game Gear emulator).
Anyone who’s played a great kart racer — which back in 1994 meant only one game, but now could be any of dozens of titles — can tell you that variety is critical. And Sonic Drift has some variety. All four racers have unique strengths and weaknesses — Sonic is fast, for instance, but he’s hard to control around bends — while the tracks vary widely in theme and shape. But this theming is only at a surface level. It’s mere aesthetics. Looks, not gameplay. In Mario Kart you get a drastically-different racing experience from a Bowser’s Castle track versus a Ghost Valley track or Vanilla Lake or Koopa Beach. Every track type is unlike every other, in both look and feel (not to mention obstacles).
Sonic Drift, by contrast, has the exact same on-road handling no matter what the course — no matter which part of the Sonic universe it’s themed after — and the exact same off-road doldrums should you edge just a smidge too wide on a bend.
And that, I think, is why it drifted into obscurity and stayed there — why nobody was talking about how this Sonic Mega Collection Plus release in 2005 resurrected a forgotten gem that previously only got playtime in Japan, why you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who’s played a Sonic & All-Stars game who could tell you about its hidden roots as a nearly-good Game Gear game developed within Sega’s famous AM2 studio.