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Hey, here’s an idea. Take a game that moves so fast, you can barely see anything in your
environment and put it on a screen in which you can’t even see the environment. Sounds
like a joke, right? Like, there’s no way anyone with half a brain would ever actually
propose such a thing.
But they did. And this is what it looks like.
Or doesn’t look like. I can’t see a damn thing!
There were about 20 games released for Tiger’s game.com...a very unique portable console
that, while ahead of its time in some ways, was just an absolute nightmare in most. And
its most crippling problem was its screen. You couldn’t even see the menu, let alone
in-game graphics. So that meant the best game.com games were the ones that had less visual detail.
Simple stuff like Lights Out! actually worked well.
Complex platformers like Sonic did not.
Much like its Sega Saturn version, Sonic Jam is a collection of older Sonic games. Specifically
Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles. At least...kind of. I mean, the games claim to
be Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles...but I’m not sure they actually are. They’re
really quite different from the Genesis originals.
I mean, from what I can tell.
And that’s the thing that makes Sonic Jam virtually unplayable on the game.com. It’s
literally impossible to see the game. Sonic moves fast—as he should—and the screen
turns into a blur. On a console like the Genesis, that’s fine. You can still make out your
surroundings. But on the game.com, it’s...it’s just a dot matrix mess. It looks like your
calculator threw up all over itself and Sonic is trying to clean it up.
The gameplay is...okay, I guess. Sonic is clunkier than Chris Redfield after eating
a whole turkey, but whatever. It would at least be acceptable if I could see what he
was actually running toward. You just ram into enemies and lose all your rings, and
it’s an inhuman feat to actually avoid them. You can’t avoid what you can’t see.
That’s not even possible.
In a way, it’s not even fair to review Sonic Jam in this state. I mean, being able to see
a game is sort of a central element to getting a sense of the individual components. And
in this state...all you can see is that Sonic really was in a jam on the game.com. Thanks
to our friend Chip from Alabama for sending this in...and giving me a headache.