Special thanks to Typhoon of the GHZ Message Board for finding this info! This is what I get for being late on this… 😛
Ladies and gents – the longlost hidden mystery that is Sonic Arcade (or better known to the our Japanese friends as “SegaSonic The Hedgehog” is now playable as a ROM. Its not that great a ROM, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. ^__^
The game is playable on an Emulator called “Modeler”. What makes SegaSonic The Hedgehog so interesting and flat out _RARE_ is that it was the only Sonic game that was not available to any Sonic fan even via the internet till now. It was never brought to the states at all and it was even more scarce since it was an arcade game. 😛 Its the one that basically NO ONE knew anything about and its the Sonic Game that introduces Ray The Flying Squirrel and Mighty the Armadillo into SegaSonic continuity.
The “Drano Cookie Monster” Green Gibbon (of the GHZ) has played the ROM of the lost game and had this to say about Sonic Arcade on the GHZ Message Board:
Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on Earth!
Okay, it’s not that good. The emulation sucks monkey nuts. You can only see about half the graphics at any given time (the blank spaces being represented by flashing gibberish and pure whiteness), it’s slow as a sloth on Prozac, and the music is choppy. But regardless…this is as close as I’ve yet come to actually playing Sonic Arcade, so I’m not complaining. Too much.
I didn’t actually play as Ray. I couldn’t figure out how, or even if it’s possible, to select the character, so I just used Sonic. I only played about fifteen minutes and got through a couple of areas, but it’s actually pretty cool. The whole object is to escape…there’s something chasing you down every corridor, whether it’s an avalanche, spiky steam-roller thing, or twisted gears, the object is to keep moving. It’s fast and although (or maybe because) it’s simple, it seems like it could be alot of fun.
The control is quite slippery. Think Marble Madness meets Sonic Spinball. The levels are laid out as corridors from a 3/4 perspective like Labyrinth or 3D Blast. Sonic has a power bar and Rings replenish it. What I could make out of the music sounds really good…I’m actually still remembering a piece of what I heard. I bet the graphics were awesome by 1993 standards, especially if I could see them…
Actually, it’s almost like a dumbed-down Sonic Labyrinth. It moves, though. I can imagine playing this thing in an arcade with two other people building up a sweat with the trackballs would have an almost Samba de Amigo-esque quality to it. I’ll sit around and play it some more when I don’t have to get up for an 8:00 A.M. class followed by a day of homework and wrapped up with an evening of work.
And there you have it! I’ll post some more if GG gets wind of it. In the meanwhile you can access the post which can get you to Modeler and the Arcade ROM below: