When I got my Genesis, it came with a special deal. It came with the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, and I could send off and get one of several games. I chose Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Six weeks later and my padded envelope arrived in the mail.
The game is a whole lot like the first one, but more refined, slightly better looking, and slightly more complicated. One of the biggest additions was a secondary character, Tails. He pretty much just follows you around, but if you have a second player throw a controller in, then he can be controlled.
The other big difference is in the bonus stages. In the old game you just had to navigate a ridiculous maze. In this one, you run down a danger-filled tube and have to collect rings while avoiding dangers. This part was actually pretty good.
That’s not to say that the rest of the game wasn’t good, it was. It was just kind of like a more refined version of the first one, which was pretty good in its own right. But I spent six weeks playing the first one to death while I waited for the second one to arrive, and didn’t get any other games for my Genesis in the meantime. So by the time I finally got my hands on this game, I was kind of burned out on the series for a while. So I found out what the ‘debug mode’ code was, used it to cheat my way through this game, too.
One of these days I should probably go back and test my skills again.