Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut

Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut Description

Understandably, Sonic Team likes making Sonic the Hedgehog games. However, less easy to understand is its insistence on trying to make the gaming world buy Sonic Adventure, a game first seen on Dreamcast back in 1999. Since superseded by the far superior Sonic Adventure 2, this remake of the original promises enhanced visuals, glitch-fixes and a greatly improved camera system which, in fairness, makes it one of the best 3D platformers of all time. Indeed, Sonic's conversion from the flat old days of 2D into resplendent three-dimensional form is arguably the most faithful leap of polygons, only bettered by Retro Studio's Metroid Prime offering for GameCube. Sonic's trademark red sneakers, power-ups and, most importantly, dazzling speed remains intact, delivering frenetic gameplay across worlds that shimmer with that hard-to-define Dreamcast-coded shine. It's important to underline that this is a serious videogame. As well as enhanced versions of the original 30 levels, 50 new mission levels have been added, all of which are playable with any of the games roster of Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy Rose, Big the Cat, or E102 Gamma. But the best is yet to come. Sonic-a Teeeaaaam-a, eager for a mainstream outing for its key franchise, has added an amazing extra in its latest GameCube exclusive offering, namely the inclusion of all of the 8-Bit version of Sonic Adventure. This includes Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Sonic and Tails, Sonic and Tails 2, Sonic Labyrinth, Sonic Drift, Sonic Drift 2, G-Sonic, Tails Sky Patrol and Tails Adventure; arguably one of the best offers ever made in a videogame release. Understand that Naka-san is expecting you to work hard for your freebies; completing the game a number of times is essential. Then, Sega fuses its ill-fated VMU Chao concept with Nintendo's equally unpopular connectivity mantra to deliver Chao training on the GBA. For the uninitiated, the Chaos are the little fellows who inhabit Sonic's world. The Dreamcast original saw Chaos being carried on VMU. However, seeing as the VMU needed about seven rather costly watch batteries per hour, no one in the whole world ever used this feature. If Sega can convince gamers to link their GameCubes to their Game Boy Advances, Chaos can be selected from the Chao garden, and trained and battled in an odd array of sporting tournaments. This feature, for the Japanese gaming obsessive, is really fantastic and provides welcome relief from the frantic pace of Sonic gaming. As far as value for money in a videogame is concerned, Sonic Adventure Director's Cut is as good as it gets. If you have played the original, you might be questioning whether it's worth shelling out on what essentially is a four year-old release. However, this is so much more than the original Sonic Adventure. All the bad bits are gone, the best bits are enhanced, and there's loads of new content that will provide hours of Sonic joy.