Sonic Jam (Game.com)

Note: This page was copy pasted from the Crappy Games Wiki on Miraheze instead of imported due to the Qualitipedia wikis being deleted.

Sonic Jam (Game.com)
This game feels like Sonic is stuck in Jam
Protagonist(s): Sonic the Hedgehog Miles “Tails” Prower Knuckles the Echidna Genre(s): Platform Rating(s): ESRB: E Platform(s): Game.com Release: July 10, 1998 Developer(s): Tiger Electronics Publisher(s): Tiger Electronics Country: United States Series: Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic Jam is a video game released for the Sega Saturn and Game.com, which is a compilation of the first four Sonic the Hedgehog games that were released on the Sega Genesis. Aside from a Sega Saturn release in 1997, the game also received a Game.com port one year later, in 1998. This version is inferior to the Sega Saturn version of the game, and is the topic of this page.

Why It’s Not Your Jam

1. The Game.com version is horribly stripped-down, consisting of only Sonic 2, Sonic 3, and Sonic & Knuckles. Yep, no Sonic 1 for you! The games themselves were stripped down as well; not all of the games' levels are present.
2. Extremely low framerate that is possibly even lower than in Sonic Genesis. This is possibly a feature to circumvent the console's ghosting problems.
3. The game has also a horrible screen crunch. Most of the time you are unable to see something above you, making you lose rings or a life.
4. Sonic moves very slowly, and the Spin Dash is not very effective, like in Sonic Labyrinth for the Game Gear. This is very surprising, as in nearly all Sonic games, Sonic moves fast.
5. Knuckles is completely screwed in this port. He can’t climb or glide but, confusingly, he’s faster than Sonic, when he isn't supposed to be fast.
6. While Tails retained his ability to fly, his flight ability is incredibly broken, allowing Tails to fly to areas that would normally be inaccessible since the levels are not designed with flight in mind.
7. There are very few pieces of music in the game and they are ear-bleedingly bad, as expected from other Game.com games. They also play at the wrong levels.
8. Terrible sound effects that, just like the music, are also ear-bleeding and very loud.
9. Misleading cover art: instead of showing the Sonic Jam cover, it shows a render from Sonic R. The cover also lies as it promises to provide "high-speed, nonstop fun", and lastly the game's commercial featured sped-up footage of the game.
10. The physics are really heavy, making climbing even a slightly inclined steep difficult. Also, as said previously, the spin dash doesn’t help.
11. Some levels are impossible to complete without Tails. In the second level in Sonic 3, there's a tree where you have to run through it, but the characters hit an invincible ceiling. And in the second level in Sonic & Knuckles, there's a loop after a long hill, but the characters are not fast enough to walk on the hills and get to the loop (even Knuckles cannot reach that loop).
12. Tails is the only playable character.
13. Like all other games on Game.com, the graphics are quite poor, both the models and textures are low resolution which makes them pixelated and also everything is black and white, even most Gameboy games have better graphics than this game.

Reception

The game was despised by critics and Sonic fans alike, with some of them declaring it to be even worse than Sonic '06 or Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, or saying that it makes "Sonic 2006 look like Sonic Adventure".

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