Subtitles section Play video
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Triple? Truffle? Shuffle? Trouble. Let’s leave the Elizabethan wordplay out of it for
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a moment and take a look at a Sonic game, a bit closer to that heyday of Sonic 3, that
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managed to push the Game Gear to the breaking point. Put aside the fact that we actually
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saw this game in the states a month before its Japanese release, which was unheard-of
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in ‘94. Disregard the strange history of developer Aspect Digital Entertainment, a
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company primarily concerned with making Sonic games for the 8-bit systems (Master System
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and Game Gear) well into the ‘90s, as well as porting Fatal Fury to the Genesis a couple
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times, producing various Disney and Coca-Cola-flavored licensed games for the Game Gear, and creating
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a Wonderswan version of Makai Toushi SaGa, AKA The Final Fantasy Legend. Forget all that.
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Here’s the important part: This is a Sonic game, on admittedly constrained and unwieldy
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hardware, that manages to be exactly what a Sonic game should be. Just fast enough,
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just complex enough, and able to riff on the very mechanics that typified the series.
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No 3D, no fighters, no racing, none of that. This is just original Sonic the Hedgehog (or
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Tails if you so choose) platforming, with all the innovations up through Sonic 3 (and
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this title’s direct predecessor, Sonic Chaos) intact. There are rocket shoes. There are
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spring power-ups, where you’re effectively just riding a huge bouncy platform. There’s
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huge levels, rivalling what the Genesis had to offer, despite this being a Game Gear title.
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Hit a Chaos Emerald box, and if you’ve got 50 rings, a warp appears to take you to another
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huge platforming section, where you can wrest one of said gems away from series newcomer
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NackFang the Sniperweasel. (Once Sega settles on a name, so will I.) But best of all: There’s
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one button. One lonely button, because that’s all you need for a Sonic game. This is exactly
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the gameplay that made people like the series in the first place, and what would survive
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only in the fantastic Sonic Advance series for the GBA. Case in point: The end of Sunset
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Park zone 2. You hit the sign, as you’ve done a bajillion times before... but then
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you just keep running. No score-tallying screen, no explanation; the game just starts scrolling
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and you’ve gotta keep up, and dodge pits, and knock down weird spike-ball-carrying bat
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things. Then you catch up to the engine, realize you’re at the front of the train, and that
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you’ve already transitioned into Act 3: the boss fight. That’s a well-designed transition.
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I’m completely willing to stomach some slightly less-than-responsive controls for a game with
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that kind of confidence.
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If you don’t feel like buying a Game Gear and eleven thousand batteries, you’ve got
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two options for playing Triple Trouble today: Either on Sonic Gems Collection on the GameCube,
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or on the 3DS Virtual Console. I’d lean toward the latter, as the GameCube version
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might happen to have a problem with this boss right here. I remembered him as taking about
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a dozen hits to enter raining-fiery-death-mode, but today I spent the better part of five
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minutes just mangling him and getting nowhere whatsoever. Still. If you must blow up Game
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Gear games onto your big ol’ plasma telemabob, Sonic Triple Trouble is among your best choices.
