I feel like around the release of Sonic Boom, the question of what is the worst Sonic game started to be relitigated. Though 2006's Sonic the Hedgehog has many challengers, it remains undefeated, but this is a dull and easy answer that rarely satisfies anymore. People are sick of hearing about Sonic 2006, there's little left to be wrung from its mummified corpse, yet the desire remains to find something that can be approached with the same animus. People want to hate, and that's why the question even gets posed in the first place - it's a thinly veiled attempt to stoke negative discussion for the sake of it.

Anyway, Sonic Blast is a solid runner-up and I am not above rolling in the muck.

Now you know me, I'm a big fan of Donkey Kong Country. Ape love Silicon Graphics, digitized sprites make ape happy. I will never in a trillion years understand why Aspect thought to apply the same graphical style to a Game Gear game. Sure, it gives it arguably more fidelity than anything else on the system, but the limitations of the Game Gear - its inability to allow for fluid animation or richness of color - causes all that detail to go to waste. This game is hideous, and worse, the massive scale of the sprites results in the worst case of screen crunch out of the entire 8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog catalog. I've said before that this is a problem in all of the Game Gear Sonics, and yet the hedgehog's final outing on the system double downs on this flaw like it's a feature.

Poor level design and lousy controls pile on to ensure there's no redeeming quality to this game. Sonic's behavior with surfaces is inconsistent. Only a modicum of momentum is needed to clear loops, whereas sloped surfaces cause his spin dash to catch. Not for nothing, the first three zones allow you to circumvent any wonkiness by simply jumping and flinging Sonic forward, because they're so open that you don't really need to actually interact with anything like you might in a better designed game. Blue Marine, Sonic Blast's requisite water level, is where the game starts expecting you to play on its terms, which is probably why you'll spend about 1/3 of your playthrough slogging your way through water trying to figure out pipe mazes - something the Game Gear games are weirdly preoccupied with!

Aspect also worked on Sonic Triple Trouble and Sonic Chaos, and while neither of those are spectacular, they might as well be Sonic 3 & Knuckles when stacked up against Blast. It's almost hard to believe the same company had a hand in all three, but they worked on Tails Adventure, too.

At least I had the benefit of not souring my formative Sonic years playing this thing. I don't think I was even aware of it until a friend lent me his Game Gear in high school, and I question what kind of coverage it even got at the time, as the most I could find from English publications was a single blurb in the November 1996 issue of GamePro. Framing the feature as a "Sega comeback" and leading with coverage on Sonic Blast, Sonic 3D Blast, and Sonic X-treme (which they do accurately predict would be further off than 1997) is pretty funny thanks to the gift of hindsight. Knuckles is also referred to here as "the twin-tailed fox." What a blunder! Not very professional of the GamePros, if you ask me.

Sonic Blast was new to me in 2004, in that tight window between Sonic Heroes and Sonic 2006, where I could comfortably say it was "the worst one." What a time to be experiencing some Sonic the damn Hedgehog. Thanks to its rerelease in Sonic Origins, now you can, too. (Author's note: Do not.)

I look at this game from 25 quintrillion years ago and think why can't stealth games have this awesome level design anymore? seriously. As much as I love MGSV's mechanics and openness to different approaches, all the infiltrate-able bases are little camps like Kojima did the modern artist thing of getting a canvas and just flicking random colors onto there, but instead of paint, it's little tents where enemies stand. Thief, in comparison, is like a collaboration between Leonardo da Vinci and the guy who drew the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Rooms, corridors, tunnels, and it's not just so you can navigate it. There's verticality that you can scale with the rope arrow, or torches you can douse with water arrows. The best part is the variety of the areas themselves. Not just castles and mansions, but tombs that are better than any modern tomb raider, jails that you have to break a buddy out of, a house specifically designed to make you go insane, everything. And it's all pure awesome.

Would honestly have been 5 maybe if not for some specific levels being bad—thieves guild. Yeah, I took a full star off for thieves guild. Worst level ever. I don't even want to get into it because this level feels like it was lifted out of another game it's so uncharacteristically bad. If I was a thief and I had a guild, I would not make my guild's base hidden under a casino that is under a password-protected restaurant, connected by sewer tunnels just to hide an ugly stupid vase. But seriously if you even have a passing interest in the concept of video games you have to play this.