Reader Reviews

Sonic Advance 2 (GBA)

by Killerbee

I, for one, am grateful for Nintendo. Having recently returned from a week away from home - and therefore away from my usual gaming life-support systems - I was delighted to be able to indulge my gaming needs whilst abroad with Nintendo's diminutive silver square of joy: a Gameboy Advance SP. And undoubtedly some of the finest gaming treasures available on the GBA are its numerous 2D platformers. So, whilst packing my bags and fearing long delays spent confined within the bleak nihilism of airport departure lounges, I excitedly selected Sega's Sonic Advance 2 to take with me.

Once arrived at my holiday destination and huddled onto a hard plastic sun bed, my knees tucked up against my chest, lest the sun's burning rays peek around my parasol and turn my pallid complexion to something that could stunt-double as a baboon's backside after a night on the lash drinking vindaloo sauce, it was time to see what Sonic had to offer me. And Sonic begins well. After a 3-2-1 countdown, you're off, zooming through the Leaf Forest zone at breakneck speed, pausing only occasionally to jab the jump button in between flying round loop-de-loops and spirals in a perfectly designed level. But in a minute or two, it's over. You're at the end. Oh well, on to Act 2 - ostensibly just more of the same, but the grin was still there. Boss fight duly completed, it was on to world two.

Zip - whizz - swing - finish. No, that's not me going for a toilet break, that's literally what the first four worlds of Sonic Advance 2 feel like. They're over in a blur - very, very quickly. Then the Sky Canyon zone appears. This introduces something far more sinister to the game - the "bottomless pit" and it's significantly more evil cousin, the "leap of faith". The problem with Sonic is that he's actually, well, a bit crap. He can't run up slopes without first building up momentum. As a result there's no way you can progress through this game slowly, taking time to consider the consequences of your moves before you make them. And Sky Canyon contains so many nasty moments where a jump too far here or a jump not-quite-far-enough there will send you plummeting to instant death. If anything, it was crying out for a Prince of Persia style "rewind" function, but no. Sky Canyon forces you to learn the layout of the level by frustrating trial and error until you can instinctively race through it at the pace the game requires. And later levels don't get much better. Some people will probably love this "old-skool" game mechanic - but personally I hated it and it totally spoiled my enjoyment of the game, particularly after comparing the genius of Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, which uses the same traps but gives you a fair chance to see where you should and shouldn't be going, before you commit to going there.

Longevity is also an issue since the collection of levels on offer are not that numerous (again compared to the 90 levels of Mario) - the game rewards you by unlocking new characters to play as you progress through the game with Sonic. The usual Sonic suspects such as Tails and Knuckles appear and each one has its own particular set of moves which in theory allow you to tackle the levels in new ways. But the early levels can still be polished off in no time at all with a minimum of player input, and the harder later levels hardly go out of their way to provide an incentive to play them any differently to the way you did with Sonic. Exploration of levels is supposedly encouraged by telling you to collect seven special rings which are tucked away in hard to reach places. But again, the sheer difficulty of exploring the expansive levels with a character that doesn't want to move slowly or run uphill [/screams] means any desire to try this out quickly wanes.

I did collect all seven special rings from Leaf Forest Act 1 but the same mechanic of learning where each ring is located by trial and error before collecting them all up seemed to be the only approach (outside of a trip to GameFAQs) and the reward of a timed 3D ring collect-a-thon to win... a gem (oh wow) in no way inspired me to begin the same laborious process with the next zone.