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.
