Sonic Gets a Kart Game... And It's Good!

With Super Mario Kart, Nintendo proved that game mascots can still be in great games outside their "regular jobs." Since then, Mario's now-friendly rival, Sonic, has tried to keep up (pun not intended). The bog-standard Sonic Drift series on Game Gear and the well-liked, but still baffling, on-foot racer Sonic R were far from grasping the potential of a great Sonic racing game (and who knows what they were going for with Sonic Riders). How can a character known for speed not properly harness it? Well, in their latest attempt, Sega has decided to throw the blue needlemouse back onto the track with a host of friends from other Sega universes; Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is a racing game that's the best any of its characters have been in yet, but it serves more as a gift to Sega fans than to all-ages kart racing players.

It is quite a gift, though. There's Sonic, of course, and Tails, Knuckles, Amy... and Big the Cat, who's somewhere on the short list of Most Hated Sonic Characters. But outside of that group, there's the other "All-Stars" like Super Monkey Ball's Aiai, Billy Hatcher, Amigo, Jet Set Radio's Beat, and even more relatively obscure characters available for purcahse with earned "Sega Miles": Ulala, Jacky, and Akira from Virtua Fighter; shallow, Shenmue protagonist Ryo Hazuki; Fantasy Zone's sentient ship Opa-Opa; and many more surprising appearances. (Just no anthropomorphic Daytona car.) It's a great, varied roster that pretty much confirms developer Sumo Digital as the best professional Sega fan around.

Click the image above to check out all Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing screens.

However, it's a safe bet that many players (young and old) will probably go straight for Sonic or any of his other immediate friends, and wonder who the hell Billy Hatcher is (which is what happened to every single person that saw me playing the game as him -- hey, he's a good starter character). Sega scholars will love the characters and myriad other references to the company's best games, but a wider audience won't give two shakes.

To its credit, All-Stars Racing couldn't be simpler to play: You have the buttons/triggers for accelerating, braking (more like an instant drift), and just one extra button for activating power-ups. Unsurprisingly, like Mario Kart, drift boosting becomes an integral part of gunning for first place; you just angle your car long enough to activate a secondary boost that pushes you a little farther ahead of the pack. Players who absolutely need to win will be drifting almost the entire time they're on the track, so mastering it is essential, especially if you're competing online. The only weird thing about the mechanic is that it's hard to tell when the boost is active and you can let go of the trigger -- a faint, high-pitched "pew" can be heard and your exhaust turns to a tiny blue flame. But neither are very obvious among the rest of the game's noise and flash, not to mention that some characters get their boost earlier than others.