Sonic Unleashed

Two versions of this game shipped in 2008, and the one that ended up on PS2 shares a title and a premise with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 release but almost nothing else. Sonic Team built a second game on the Wii's architecture and ported it here, which means no Hedgehog Engine, no globe-trotting vistas rendered in that famous painterly light, and a set of stages laid out from scratch. What it gains is a machine that can actually keep up. The daytime levels hold their frame rate through the boost sections, and on hardware this old that matters more than any lighting model.

The daytime Sonic is the reason to be here. Boost, quick-step between lanes, homing-attack a chain of badniks, and drop into a 2D plane whenever the level decides you should. This version leans much harder on that sidelong perspective than its HD counterpart, and the result is a game that feels closer to a rail than a playground. Reactions matter more than route-finding. It is shallow, but it is clean, and Rooftop Run in Spagonia remains one of the better things Sonic Team produced that decade regardless of which console you played it on.

Then the sun goes down. The Werehog stages hand you a stretched-out, purple, brawling Sonic with extendable arms, an unlockable combo tree and a lot of arena rooms with invisible walls that will not open until everything in them is dead. Individually the punches land fine. Collectively the night levels run long enough to sour the pacing, and the platforming built around swinging and grabbing is imprecise in a way the daytime half never is. The split was meant to give the game variety; mostly it gave it two different tempos that never agreed with each other.

Between stages there are small hub towns full of villagers to talk to, side errands, and Sun and Moon Medals scattered around that gate access to later levels. The collection requirement is lighter here than in the HD build, which spares this version the worst of the criticism that stuck to Sonic Unleashed at launch. It still asks you to wander for trinkets before it lets you run.

What survives is a strange, honest artefact: a full-scale Sonic game rebuilt downward for aging hardware, and rebuilt well enough that its best stretches beat the prettier version on pure playability. The PS2 was two years past its replacement by then and still getting work like this.