Sonic & Knuckles: Mushroom Hill Zone REMASTERED

It's fair to say this has become a clear case of Student surpassing the Master. Except in this senario the Master is Sonic Team and the Student are it's fans.

The way I see it, there are four classes of Sonic Fan (Platformer Fan, Racing Fan, Series Fan, and New Fan) and the above video, made by Youtubber BlobVanDam, caters to all four of them.

Platformer Fans are those of us who loved the quick and fluid platforming aspects of the original games, something that has been missing from the current generation Sonic titles yet is in full presentation here; I'm not sure where Sonic Team went wrong on this aspect. Platforming always played a huge role in the original titles, it was probably the only thing keeping everyone from "holding-right-to-win." Though that wouldn't of stopped the Speed Fans

Speed Fans are the players of the older titles that couldn't rest until we beat the clock to the ground. We'd play a level hundreds of times to find the quickest path, which has become easier in modern days because that's all the Sonic games feature now. One of the crutches of this has always been the way the screen moves to match, sometimes it can barely keep up with us. Which is what I like about the above video, it doesn't do that. The older games were slower then their modern day counterparts, but like this video shows; so long as you have nice and smooth motion blurs you don't need to go crazy with the speed.

And I'm not going to say Speeders ruined it for the Platformers, but I would really like to go back to when I didn't have to finish a level by Trial and Error.

Series Fans are fans that weren't pulled by the games as much as they were the concept, usually meaning they'd be fans of the Cartoons as well. For them all I can say is that if this was to happen, if this was a real game, Series Fans would have a reason to celebrate. Sonic has been needing an A+ title for some time now; While graphics are no guarantee of a good game, I think just the fact that this proposed game retains everything that made Sonic & Knuckles good plus a shiny new paint job makes it a title worth playing.

Which leaves us with New Fans, who probably wouldn't be as excited as the older generation but would still exert an audible aww at the glorious, pre-rendered graphics in the above video. It almost makes Sonic 4 look like the Fan Project in comparison.

Personally I'd love to see a nice Hand-Drawn Sonic 2D title in the future, same vein as the tragically underrated Wario Land: Shake It, with proper platforming integrated with a more manageable speed so I'm not careening down a bottomless pit every half second. It's like a game of Dragons Lair at 300mph, there's no hope of winning on your first go. Would be even worse if the lives system was still as important as it was back in the day, but that's a different subject all together.

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One last note, if I may, as a plea to all Sonic fans like myself; please choose your words carefully when Sonic Team is listening, I want to play as other characters besides Sonic. I know the complaints; A new ancillary character every year gets old without an interesting personality to go with it and Giant Mechs schlepping across floating platforms is not what we want from a Sonic game, nor is diverging too far and too staggeringly away from the core gameplay. The last thing you want to do, fans, is to blame the characters themselves and spout "I just want to play as Sonic and Sonic alone."

One of the best things about the old titles was that after one play through as Sonic I could revisit all the levels as Tails or Knuckles, each with their own unique method of transversing the stage. This is what we want! That and likable characters and interesting plots, but I think that's a given in any storytelling medium. Haven't seen much of that though since Sonic Heros.