My Sonic Fan-Girl Chronicles: Chapter 3—The Summer of Sonic the Hedgehog 2

June 30^th, 1993.  It was the last day of second grade.  The 2^nd –grade class was having a pizza party at Dearborn Recreational Park.  It was the Bigfoot pizza from Pizza Hut.

You know why I remembered those details?  Because this was the day that, after the last day of school until the summer break, my sister and I came home to find that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was rented along with the SEGA Genesis!!!  A store called the Warehouse used to be near our home, where we could buy VHS cassettes or video games, or rent them as well as video game consoles.   From then on it became the go-to place to rent video games or movies (and eventually buy music CDs when they were popular, until the store closed in the early 2000s.

We had summer homework to do: we had to work on these cursive workbooks over summer break because by 3^rd grade we had to be familiar with cursive handwriting.  We weren’t allowed to start playing Sonic 2 for the first time  until we finished a certain amount of the workbook beforehand (I think I remember now that same summer was a second cartoon series of My Little Pony—no, NOT Friendship is Magic).

“My little pony, my little pony, my little pony tales…”      *shudders (Oh my god we watched that?)

So, yeah…Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was the first console Sonic game I ever played, personally (since my sister played Sonic the Hedgehog for a little while back in 1991).  I think I played it first before my sister, I don’t remember exactly.  But we were ecstatic to be able to play a console Sonic game.   Granted it was rented for three days, but still, our summer break was young and I was out of my second-grade teacher’s sight, and no more homework to turn in, and everything was great (yeah, that’s how I felt).  The first level was similar to the first level of the 1991 Sonic the Hedgehog: blue sky, green grass and trees, water and mountains in the background.  It’s the Sonic-franchise tradition, I’m going to guess.

According to the instruction manual of Sonic Mega Collection Plus (which I refer to for some of the facts like the release dates), the spin-dash move was introduced in Sonic 2—the first game didn’t have that.  Which is why whenever I try to play Sonic 1, I forget he can’t spindash.  Boo.

We had this game rented a few times (at least three times or so)…we only got as far as the Casino Night Zone the first time we rented the game.  Then the second time we got as far as the Hill Top Zone???? But then one night I reached the Mystic Cave Zone …and then I was playing long enough (something like near three hours), and maybe lost all my extra lives.  And back then there were no save points.  O_O

If we were going to beat the game, we were going to have to play the game in one sitting—if it was going to take us three to four hours, we’d have to do it.  By then we became just about pro with handling Sonic’s spin-dashes and spin attacks and the patterns of the badniks.   Not to mention the patterns of Dr. Robotnik’s multiple boss fights throughout the game.