Pain and Misery: Sonic Jam (Game.com, 1998) Review

NOTE: This review is part 10 in a retrospective of the Sonic franchise. Feel free to read the other Sonic reviews I’ve done here - https://expithecat.blogspot.com/search/label/sonic%20retrospective

Hey.

You guys in the r/Sonic Discord server?

Yeah, you.

Fuck you.

History and Background

In 1997, Sega released Sonic Jam for the Sega Saturn, a compilation of the classic Sonic games ported to the Sega Saturn. Instead of having the games run on an emulator like other Sonic compilations, the classic games were completely ported over and remade to work on the Saturn. But not only was it a compilation, but it also included “Sonic World” - a 3D world where the player controlled Sonic with stuff to interact with - sort of serving as an interactive museum of Sonic’s history up to that point but also having its own mission mode. This basically served as a demo of Sonic in 3D before the first 3D game in the series, Sonic Adventure. Overall, Sonic Jam was a pretty good compilation and is probably the best thing to come out of the post-S3&K and pre-Adventure era when Sega was having a hard time with the Saturn and the Sonic series itself had pretty much gone dormant outside of a few spin off games.

But we’re not talking about that game, are we?

*deep sigh*

In 1997, Tiger Electronics - a company previously known for shitting out LCD-based handheld games based off of every existing property ever - released their first full-on handheld system, the Game.com. And to be completely fair the Game.com did have some good ideas going for it - in particular having a touch screen and internet connectivity long before the DS was released. Unfortunately, good ideas can only take you so far, and well… the Game.com was kind of a piece of shit. The internet connectivity feature in particular was pretty much useless with the main feature of it being the ability to check your e-mail (something you could just do, y’know, on a computer). But also the game library was just not very good, largely having games based off of major console titles of the time on a system that clearly could not handle them so you basically just got very loose adaptations of those games, as well as some arcade games, board games, game show-based games and puzzlers.

But one of those games was a port of Sonic Jam on the Sega Saturn. I use port very loosely here because frankly this is nothing like that compilation or any of the games that were a part of that compilation but I guess let’s just go with it.

Gonna skip over Personal Experiences because I mean… I don’t have anything to say here. On the plus side though I didn’t have to buy a Game.com for this review because there’s an official Game.com emulator out there that was originally used by the development team for debugging. So I guess let’s go on.

Graphics

I mean, I guess I’ll give this game one thing - it does at least use the sprites as well as the environment textures from the original games. The Game.com only supports monochrome black-and-white so ultimately this game is completely colorless but I can’t really blame that on the game itself. I guess I can give the game some credit for porting over the graphics from the original titles, I mean it’s probably the one remotely positive thing I have to say about this game. Although at the same time the backgrounds feel completely empty.

And in addition to all that, there’s screen crunch, which becomes a real problem when playing this game as there’s occasions where a platform will just barely take up the bottom of the screen causing me to make leaps of faith. And the framerate feels extremely choppy and the game often slows down to a crawl.

Also for some reasons the characters are in the ground a lot of the time and that bothers me.

Music

What the fuck is this game’s soundtrack?

The game’s soundtrack is an attempt to remake the tunes from the classic games but to be honest it’s almost impossible to even tell. I wouldn’t even have known if someone hadn’t pointed it out and I had bothered to listen very closely because all it really sounds like to me is bleeps and bloops. I’ve literally heard better music come out of internal computer motherboard speakers. 

The music doesn’t even match the levels they play in - Flying Battery plays in Mushroom Hill Zone and the actual Mushroom Hill Zone theme plays in Emerald Hill Zone in “Sonic 2” - the COMPLETELY WRONG GAME. If this game can’t even get something that simple right I’m kind of scared to talk about the rest of it.

Gameplay

The game sort of serves as a compilation of remade versions of the classic games for the Game.com but to be honest I can’t even tell if that’s what they were going for here. The sprites are carried over from Sonic 3 & Knuckles as I said and the levels do look similar to the ones in their respective games. But the actual levels themselves aren’t actually designed anything like their original counterparts. There are some similar setpieces here and there - the first level of “””Sonic 3””” does have the zip line and the tree you go up but that’s about it. Otherwise, I can’t even tell if this game’s designers even attempted to replicate the original games which is kind of a bad thing when this game is supposed to be a compilation of the original Sonic games remade for the system.

 I will say off the bat that admittedly while I usually beat Sonic games before I review them I didn’t do so with this game or any of the games inside because… well, you can probably guess why. Frankly I can’t stomach playing this game for more than 10 minutes, so I haven’t exactly seen all the content but honestly after playing just the first levels of each “””port””” I think I’ve just about seen enough.

The game consists of variations of Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles - for some reason Sonic 1 is absent but I guess they needed to save the butchering of that game for 2006. Although for some reason this game defaults to Sonic 3 on the selection menu instead of the first one out of the games here but whatever. After starting Sonic 2 I pretty much immediately noticed that the controls and physics are utter garbage. The characters themselves feel extremely slow and clunky to the point where it feels they have a bit of extra weight on them pulling them back and just lacking any of the fluidity of the actual classic games. But then, trying to run up a slope just leads whatever character I choose to slow down to a crawl before I can get to the top. Seriously, I gotta be honest, the characters feel way too slow for there to be slopes in this game and it makes trying to go through this style of level design feel more frustrating. 

Of course, I can use the spin dash but it doesn’t work right. You still don’t get enough speed to run up slopes and I found that the only way to make the spin dash work right was to use it, and then hold right while it’s being used. And I don’t think that was intentional, just feels like a really bad physics engine that doesn’t even come close to imitating the original games. The spin dash in this game just feels extremely weak and for what’s being advertised as a collection of Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles the controls and physics are pretty much entirely wrong.

I mentioned earlier that the levels aren’t actually designed anything like the original games but even judging the levels on their own merits the level design in this game is just straight up bad. Because of the screen crunch issue I mentioned I pretty much always immediately find myself hitting enemies that I couldn’t even see coming. There’s also times where I jump on a spring and it bounces me over to a bottomless pit or another enemy. In Act 2 of what’s supposed to be Emerald Hill Zone there’s a ramp that just leads to a bottomless pit near the start, in Sonic 3 the first level starts with 15 seconds of straight flat line before a single jump and checkpoint and Sonic & Knuckles has a part where you’re on those pole things like in the original game but there’s an enemy right at the top I literally could find no way to dodge without using Tails.

Also while I didn’t beat any of the games here I did search for more information on it and there’s only 4 total stages in each of these games. Not four total zones, four total stages for each game. They’re nowhere near as long as any of their Genesis counterparts which I’d say is a bad thing but to be fair, I mean… why would anyone want to play more of this game in the first place?

Conclusion

Holy shit, this is the worst Sonic game I’ve ever played.

Say what you want about games like 06 or Rise of Lyric or whatever, but I’ll at least give those games that they at least had potential and felt like there was at least effort put into them. This didn’t have any of that. It’s pretty much entirely falsely advertised as a compilation of the Genesis games, but even if they did want to go for something like Colors DS or Unleashed SD in terms of being an entirely different game than their counterparts, the game is just downright terrible due to wonky controls, awful physics and bad level design.

Truth be told I had really low expectations for this game - after all this was a licensed Sonic game on a failed handheld that shares no similarities to it’s Saturn counterpart - but somehow the game turned out to be even worse than that. Honestly, this game straight up feels like a bootleg - the controls and music remind me of something like Sonic Adventure 7 or Sonic 3D Blast 5. But no, this game was officially licensed and is technically an official Sonic game. In fact, thinking about it now, this game was released in 1998 before Sonic Adventure 1 was released and the characters were ultimately redesigned, making this technically the last “classic” Sonic game. Which is… honestly pretty damn sad.

And of course you can bet that I don’t recommend this game. Even when this was released you had better alternatives for Sonic games on the go - you had the Game Gear and all the Sonic games released for that (frankly even Sonic Blast is better than this) and if you really wanted the classics there was also the Sega Nomad. I mean I guess the most I would say here is to play it on an emulator for a few minutes to understand why it’s so bad but then never touch it again.