Sonic 1 switch quick review

Sonic 1 for the Switch is a mixed bag, I have played from start to end with the japanese rom, tested out the international rom and checked out the bonus features, here is my mini review:

The first thing you will notice is that this is the original sonic 1, a speed cap is in place, the spike bug is both present and fixed depending on which rom you play, there is no widescreen tricks, it's all vanilla apart from adding the spindash and dropdash moves. The game plays just as you would expect however I feel like there is slowdown more then normal in many places, sometimes it feels like a frame or two skipping but other times the game runs as a snails pace especially the water levels, another thing to notice is that the music is played back at 100% speed but the gameplay itself can slow down, this can mess up the pace of the underwater drowning music countdown to the point where the music stops seconds before you actually drown.

If this slowdown was in the original japanese release I honestly do not remember it, I feel like it was not unless you dropped 20 rings in a busy area.

The megaplay version of the game is the arcade version which strips away some of the slower zones, makes the timer count down from a low-ish time and you only get one life, this mode has a score leaderboard which is very nice however the other bonus mode is just ghz 1 time attacks, that's it, just ghz1, no other stages. This feels really pointless coming from mania and it's time attack mode being every zone and I really can't see why this switch version of sonic 1 is limited to just the very first zone for time attacks.

The optional screen filters are basic at best, you get a very cookie cut scanline filter, some blur, both together or a vintage display mode that curves the screen and gives the image a little softer feel, this annoyingly only has one screen size and that's about 75% of the horizontal display height on my tv, makes this filter rather annoying to use with so much wasted space.

The game also have an optional overlay for ring chain and max ring chain, this is your total ring collection until you die or get hit across multiple zones, if you can beat the game without taking damage you'll get a huge ring chain, this is also online leaderboard supported.

One thing to note with the added in spindash and dropdash is that they are not 100% perfect, going into a spindash and revving seems to not give sonic his damage box so sonic will take damage like he is just standing still, if you spindash or dropdash on the pixel next to a monitor sonic will just stop like he hit a wall instead of breaking them, Dropdash rolling into enemies that have hurt boxes on their backs like catakillers and spikes badniks sonic will take damage instead of hurting the enemy, this is clearly a bug because a normal running roll will defeat the enemy without issue.

Overall I feel like this version of sonic 1 on a correct scale of 1 to 10 is a 6, above average with issues.