Although it's by no means a requirement for my big playthrough of the Sonic series, I've been sprinkling in fan games here and there that I've been wanting to check out for a while, like Sonic and the Fallen Star. I generally find what fans are doing with Sonic to be more interesting than anything Sega is cooking up these days, and some fan games are of such high quality that they can exist comfortably next to official releases. Well, now I'm doing straight up ROM hacks, so perhaps there's something else motivating me to take these little detours, like wanting to play around in the "classic era" a little longer and put off getting to crap like Sonic Heroes.

Oh no! Someone got Sonic Heroes in my classic Sonic! AhhhhSHIT, it's all over the place... God damnit. Vector the Crocodile is in Aquatic Ruin now, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?

Sonic Classic Heroes is exactly what it says on the cart. One of the most straight-forward ROM hacks I've ever sat down with, and hardly any more transformative than sticking Shadow the Hedgehog or Princess Sally in Sonic the Hedgehog, something that has been done to death. But sometimes all you need to justify playing a game you've already experienced nearly a hundred thousand times is being able to run up the walls in Marble Zone as Espio and skip the whole damn stage.

That level of focus really is to Classic Heroes' benefit. A lot of the fun comes from having these expanded options for traversal that you can freely swap between, allowing you to break open familiar levels in new ways. There are a sparse number of new alternate routes and an added Sonic 1 style special stage that's a total bastard to clear, but otherwise, it's Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 stitched together with some new characters and Heroes-esque hot-swapping. You could argue that these levels should be more substantially altered to suit a speed/power/flight dynamic like in Sonic Heroes, sure, but I'd argue that this hack is everything it needs to be.

Now, I could have just grabbed the ROM for this and thrown it on my Raspberry Pi (in fact, I might've already done that), but you know me, I'm a strange little Genesis game collecting imp, so I had my guy send me a reproduction copy on cart. The first thing I noticed was how substantial the cartridge feels. It's got heft to it, so much in fact that I had to open that sucker up and see what was going on with the board. These chips really make use of all the real estate available to them. I guess that's necessary when you're essentially smashing two full Genesis games together and adding four new characters, shields, and an extra special stage, but when I look at it bare like this, it doesn't even register to me as a game so much as a device. If any technically-minded reader can identify what the UV-strip looking cells in the center of the lower chip are for, I'd love to know.

Do NOT lie to me about it. I have watched every episode of Lie to Me, I am an expert in body language. I will detect your falsehoods and I will destroy you.

I bring this up because I feel it's important to point out that I played Classic Heroes on real Sega hardware, so these comments about performance and behavior might not be consistent with your experience assuming you played via emulation or even with a different version number. Overall, I found Classic Heroes played surprisingly well, though particularly busy screens did introduce slowdown not present in either of the original games, especially when going super. Both of the water levels - Labyrinth (incredible) and Aquatic Ruin (vomiting) - struggle the most and feature really wonky collision detection on corners and switches, which resulted in me drowning several times as my characters got stuck.

Team Chaotix also introduces a number of pallet issues, often darkening and color-swapping badniks and other elements, but that's pretty minor and will only bother you if you have bugs in your brain like I do. I also noticed a lot of stray flickering pixels, which hasn't helped my growing anxiety about failing capacitors, but which I am pretty sure is just the result of a ROM hack with an excessive amount of characters crammed into games never intended to contain them running off a board that has like, ten pounds of computer chips welded on. I'm over here with a bunch of after-market AC adapters juggling foreign voltages in a single power strip, it's a god damn miracle I haven't burned my entire house down as a consequence of my horrendously jerry-rigged system and library of straight up bootlegs.

"If you paid for this game, you have been SCAMMED!"

Buddy, trust me, I don't know what I'm doing.

[Played as Espio Alone]

I'm not really one for playing this game with the Team mechanic. Instead I prefer to play as one of the individual characters and playthrough Sonic 1 and 2 with their specific moveset.

Originally I didn't think Espio's wall and ceiling running would be that useful but the more I played the more I was proven wrong as it can open up some good shortcuts, especially in the later zones of each game.