Sonic: The Fighters

One of the few Sonic the Hedgehog video games to be made for the arcades, The Fighters is a virtual clone of Virtua Fighters, and just as easy too. Set across 8 familiar levels you face off against friends and foes (Sonic beating-up Tails feels just wrong) collecting a chaos emerald for every match you win. The emeralds are irrelevant as you never becomes Super Sonic.

I finished this game on my first try after 15 minutes. The fighting is generic and overly simple and each round will last approximately 20 seconds. Sega have made some brilliant fighting games, but AM2 ought to stick to racing.

Graphics B- Sound B- Gameplay B- Lasting Appeal D

Considering Sonic The Fighters was an arcade game, I understand why it's short. I like the concept of the game however, some of the stages are really frustrating, but honestly it's mostly Metal Sonic, it's like they just quadrupled the difficulty for him, despite not even being the final fight.

I liked the game at first but the Metal Sonic fight ruined it for me, the graphics are okay, again it's an arcade game.

I had fun but as the game went on my enjoyment just kept decreasing. At least new characters were introduced into the series in this game, however I don't know if any of them return in future games.

When a franchise is successful it's a common thing for developers to capitalize on it, it's business 101 and makes perfect sense. Sometimes however they damage a franchises credibility, usually through excessive sequels but sometimes with bizarre spinoffs like this.

Sonic of course made his name as being one of the biggest platforming game icons but Sega decided to see if they could put him into other genres with little success. Sure there have been exceptions over the years, for example just look at the Mario Kart series.

Here however we have Sonic and friends in a 3D fighting title and though colorful and simplistic it's the very definition of a cashgrab.

Essentially a simplified Virtua Fighter reskin we have characters with minimal movesets, ugly character models and very little actually going for it. It is in fact one of those fighting games where the button masher will in fact likely walk away with the victory.

Some games simply should never have been and this right here is one of them.

The Good:

Familiar faces

The Bad:

Silly concept

Doesn't play very well

Pretty ugly

Ever since the debut of Mortal Kombat, fighting games on just about every single console became the fad of the arcade....every single F'n TV show, cartoon, even movie, seemed to have one. so, if they were so good, why not give sonic the hedgehog, a 3-d style one to play in the arcade? Yeah, sure, whatever. No. Sonic the fighters (or Sonic Championship in the US) was just as bad as Virtua Fighter for the 32X, but unlike Sonic Championship, Virtua fighter was actually cool in the arcade. and thats why virtua fighter, and series like tekken (Both 3d games, that started the 3d fighting game genre) are still on the market, both in their 5th game in the series.

Sonic Championship is basically a fight and move on game. beat your opponent, move on. fight the next one. move on, all the way up to Metal sonic, and Dr. Robotnic (thats how his name is spelled in the game, which of course is mis-credit, and they didn't fix it for Sonic Gems collection for Gamecube) Quoting Screwattack, "You can beat the game by pressing only one button." genius. they also go on to quote "We can understand trying to cash in on a fad, but this is just ridiculous." Fortunately enough, this game stayed in the arcade for 10 years, until it was ported to the Gamecube console, unfortunately on Gems collection. but it really isn't a gem. Nintendo was basically just trying to cash in on Sega's horrid creations, and port them to Gamecube.

Well, at least Sonic CD was on the Cube.

4/10 - Try it if you want, but it does suck.

Sonic The Fighters is one of the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise's many obscure entries. A fighting game that debut in the arcades, it saw a limited release in America, and would not see a console release until the Sonic Gems Collection for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube.

The story has Dr. Robotnik (Dr. Eggman in the Japanese version, as this was before America adapted the name as a nickname) has built the Death Egg II to conquer the world. Thankfully, Tails has a spaceship, the Lunar Fox ready, but it needs eight chaos emeralds to power (why there is an eighth Chaos Emerald in this game and not the others is beyond me), and shockingly, Sonic and Tails has one emerald, and six others, including Sonic's friends Knuckles and Amy, the bounty hunter Fang, and new characters Bark the Polar Bear and Bean the Duck, also have a Chaos Emerald. With the Lunar Fox being a one-seater, the eight have a fighting competition to decide who gets to go stop Robotnik's latest conquest.

In this fighting game, you choose between eight playable characters. The controls are simple, as you get three buttons: punch, kick, and barrier. Barrier is basically your block button, only instead of blocking, your character activates a barrier that is limited by a meter on the bottom screen. When that meter expires, you can no longer defend yourself the rest of the round, as the barrier will break, meaning you need to be careful not to be on defense too much. Also, the characters have their own combos and special moves (Amy can use her hammer to flatten enemies in cartoony style, Bean is capable of using bombs, Fang has his cork guns, etc.)

However, the game suffers from unstable difficulty spikes, as the game gets hard at some points (Bark is where it got hard for me). Metal Sonic is a pain to try and beat, but the final battle with Dr. Robotnik is bad because if you lose, it's game over. No continuing, you go back to the start if you want to try again. This is an obscure title, but not one of the best.