Sonic SMS Remake 2 (60 FPS)

Really an immense amount of effort and detail!

A very polished upgrade of Sonic 2 SMS with a ton of options and added content. The title goaded me into believing this would be more of a back-end upgrade to include modern resolutions and reduced slowdown, and so I ended up being completely blown away by the sheer scope of the new additions.

The new levels seem to fit in well with the original game's difficulty progression. Although frankly the new bosses blow the old ones out of the water, making duds like Silver Sonic come off as even more of an anti-climax than they did previously.

The addition of gambling mechanics give the special stages a nice push/pull element now, which goes a ways towards making them feel more engaging to play. I imagine I'd enjoy going through these a second or third time just to see how many extra lives I can squeeze out before the time limit.

NITPICKS:
The original levels are all slightly altered from their original SMS counterparts to justify the new y traversal methods. There's just one glaring instance I happened to notice where the layout has been completely changed for seemingly no reason, and that's the lead up to the mechanized otter boss in Aqua Lake. The original lead up that had you spin skipping over large sections of water was the only good part about that trainwreck, imo, and it's been replaced by a slow and tedious section that sucks to have to replay should one happen to forget how that stupid boss works after so many years.

I was also quite taken aback when I got one shot by an asteroid during the final chase, especially considering how they work in nearly every other example of this stage type in franchise history. I would prefer having asteroid invincibility in exchange for fewer starting rings, or a different object type that better conveys the threat of imminent death.

BUGS:
There was just a small bug I encountered where characters would get stuck in their skid animation following a character tag, which required jumping in the opposite direction to fix. The trigger seems to be tagging at the tail end of certain character specific actions while on a slope, such as Amy's hammer drop. jjssssj