Sonic's Original Bonus Levels Remain Undefeated

thegamer.com:

Sonic Origins has arrived, so of course I've been playing the original Sonic games from start to finish for the 1000th time. Not like this, though. Having them stitched together via new cutscenes has added depth to 30-year-old games I've already played countless times before on just about every console I've ever owned. Like I'm playing one big game rather than a bunch of shorter ones back-to-back. It feels different, I like it, and it has resulted in me comparing elements of the games that I've never really considered before.

I'm talking about bonus levels. Sega could have very easily copied and pasted the original Sonic the Hedgehog's bonus levels into the handful of games that came after it. Yes, the visual quality of the series improved with each entry, but not so much that the rotating maze couldn't have been tweaked slightly and used as a means to hide the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic in his first four or five games. It's a testament to Sega that it didn't do this. That the teams behind those first few games came up with various different concepts. It only makes sense that Dr. Robotnik would feel the need to mix things up after Sonic successfully discovered all the emeralds first time around.

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The thing is, I kind of wish those bonus levels had lasted. When I originally played the very first Sonic games, I was wowed by everything a new installment had to offer. New zones, new characters, and yes, new bonus levels. When I cracked open Sonic 2 for the first time and hit that half pipe, the first game's spinning mazes couldn't have been further from my mind. The same goes for Sonic 3 as I ran faster and faster around a small sphere, desperately trying to find