pickhut's Sonic the Hedgehog 2 review

Good review and you make some good points. I think only having two levels per zone contributed to that under-developed feeling you were talking about. This was one of the few Genesis games I owned as a kid, so I played it a lot, and I got very familiar with the first half of the game--not so much the second because I'd lose interest. (This might also be the lack of an easily accessible level-select feature -- I could never remember the numbers to enter in the options screen to activate it).

One things that always annoyed me is how the bonus stages are harder if you have both Sonic and Tails. You have to collect more rings if you have both, and Tails lags behind and is always lose his stuff, the dumb nuts.

That really irritated me beyond belief when playing the game the first few times. I would get a decent amount of rings, enough to make it to the next segment, then Tails would run into a bomb and lose just the right amount... Eventually, I just gave up on the bonus stages altogether, since getting Super Sonic isn't all that great, especially since transforming into him takes but a simple jump.

I kinda wanted to mention the bonus stages, but I ultimately left that out, since it would feel like I was really laying into the game, which wasn't what I was aiming for with this review. Heh, in the first draft of my upcoming Sonic 3 review, I actually spent an entire paragraph comparing that game's special stages to the ones in Sonic 2. I currently have that paragraph taken out, since I feel it disrupts the overall flow of the review.

And thanks for reading! Yeah, the second half of the game feels a bit more bumpy compared to the first half.

Edit: Er... actually the special stage comparisons are still in there. I was actually thinking about the paragraph where I moaned about the differences in transforming into Super Sonic in both games.