More retro games should adopt Sonic Origins’ Anniversary Mode

digitaltrends.com:

I’ve been a Sonic the Hedgehog fan since November 2003 after my cousin Nicholas reintroduced me to Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, the GameCube port of the Dreamcast game. Around that time, Sonic Team was gearing up for the release of Sonic Heroes, which excited nine-year-old me despite the fact that I barely played through the story mode for Sonic Adventure 2.

Although I eventually learned the history behind the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise from every gaming magazine I could get my hands on, my strong obsession with the 3D Sonic games — not to mention modern Sonic’s boy band-like charm — was such that I couldn’t find myself getting into the classic Sonic games from the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive to my lovely international readers). Even when my ex-boyfriend gave me his old Genesis along with Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 during my first year of college, I couldn’t play through any of them without my screen fuzzing up simply because my TV wouldn’t cooperate with the aging console, cartridge port and all.

Sonic Mania made me appreciate the classic Sonic games despite it being a compilation of the best levels from that era, but the newly released Sonic Origins collection (which features the original Sonic Sega Genesis trilogy and Sonic CD) has given me a newfound appreciation for them thanks to a gameplay mode called Anniversary Mode. It’s a mode where you don’t lose any lives; you can collect coins to redo the special stages as many times as you want to so you could get the Chaos Emeralds. Most modern games have the option to play through them without getting a single “Game Over” after dying so many times, such as Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, but Anniversary Mode made my experience of playing the classic Sonic games a lot easier