Insert Coin: Sonic the Hedgehog

“Sonic the Hedgehog is a blue hedgehog who lives on South Island with his animal friends. He encounters an evil scientist named Doctor Ivo Robotnik. Dr. Robotnik seeks to obtain the powerful Chaos Emeralds so that he can take over the world, and sets about transforming animals into robots to serve his ends. Realizing Dr. Robotnik evil ambitions, Sonic pursues him through several of the world's ‘Zones’ before eventually defeating him in Scrap Brain Zone.”

I shit you not. This is the only cartoon character in the world that I can draw from memory. Sonic The Hedgehog was Sega’s version of Mario for Nintendo. Games seemed so much slower after playing Sonic. This tweaked out woodland creature (they do live in the woods, right?) was so fast that he made other games seem ridiculously slow by comparison. He had only one setting: Shit Ya Draws. What else can you do when a level looks like this?

FML.

The villain, Dr. Robotnik, was lame. I mean, he would make all these elaborate ass creations to stop a blue hedgehog. I imagine a rock would work faster and be cheaper. He has these robots, that all look like him in some way, and created them so that if this 40 pound tiny thing with an attitude problem jumped on it about eight times it would break. No, it wouldn’t break, it would fucking fall to pieces. Then little animals would be saved and bounce around you.

The hundredth time's the charm...

Speaking of Sonic’s attitude problem, if you let the game just sit there for a minute he would get impatient. He’d tap his feet and look at a watch that didn’t exist. Wait too long and the bastard would run off screen and you’d lose a man. What the hell?!

"Ain't got time for your bullshit!"

The final level was stupid hard and the boss was just a bigger version of the fat ass Robotnik. His legs could never support that big ass body. Bump him a few times and that was the end of him. This game, once beaten, was kinda dull. You can only run fast and have it be fun for so long. And then one day something happened. I have photographic proof of this event as when it occurred me nor my classmates believed it existed.

"Let me hold five dollars!"

So one day in school we were playing video games (I know, I know…) and this kid who lied about everything said there was a Super Sonic. No, not JJ Fad. Mind you, at this point many of us had this game or had played it for over a year and never saw or heard of this bullshit this kid was trying to sell. So he says to enter some code and then collect some coins and jump in the air and magic will happen. We still didn’t believe him until…it fucking happened! The screen flashed white and Sonic turned yellow. He ran so fast he flew and could run right through enemies. Suddenly this game felt brand spanking damn hell ass new! I ran home (metaphorically since I was fat and running was next to getting kissed on the list of things I hoped to accomplish someday) and did this and it worked. Sonic rules.