The teaching potential of Sonic The Hedgehog was finally realised with Sonic’s Schoolhouse, presenting a suite of edutainment so wretched that your kids will be begging you to let them do long division within minutes. It’s a game for people who aren’t in a hurry, which is a little antithetical to the Sonic ethos. All totally optional of course, because that’s Sonic CD. There’s also the option to head to the future so you can see the fruits of your labour, or explore a much more hostile “Bad Future” if you haven't destroyed the generator. Desroy the generator and you guarantee a “Good Future” and can leave the zone. This means finding a “Past” signpost, then locating a spot where you can accelerate uninterrupted until you burst back in time, emerging in a more peaceful zone where Robotnik’s plan has yet to be realised. It’s a game about exploration for the simple joy of finding cool stuff, one where you’ve got to travel back in time to find a generator placed by the evil Doctor Robotnik. It was still brilliant, of course Sonic CD is one of the very greatest Sonic games and quite certainly the most misunderstood. Finally, though, it had a new home – one where it ran in a rather small desktop window, so Sonic could finally meet your Bonzi Buddy. This, however, was a cheaper, more sensible way to play a somewhat “lost” Sonic game, orphaned by consumer apathy towards the Mega CD add-on. Surprisingly, though, it remained fundamentally the same exact game as it was back when it first released on Mega CD in late 1993. Sonic The Hedgehog CD was the first game to hit our Windows 95 486’s in September 1996, a perfect fit for CD-ROM technology with its multiple soundtracks for each possible timeline.

It used to be pretty slim pickings for us Sonicsters, and I’m here to tell you what we fought through to get to the promised land of ports we bask in today. We’re a little spoiled on PC for Sonic content these days, with every recent game of note having its own PC port that’s immediately been modded from bottom to breakfast. And every single Sonic fan has bought every single one of them, such is our sheer madness. Let’s face facts: the old Sonic games have been re-released more times than I’ve had hot dinners.

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