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posted: 2024-12-02

More Like Sonic Wait

I am not a “Professional Hater” by any definition. For one, I don’t make money off of the vitriol I spew online, so how can I be considered a “professional”? And no, this barely-passable excuse of a “media critic website” does not warrant any kind of Patreon. I’m not qualified and you should spend your money on more important business. This shit’s a hobby for me through and through. For two, I really don’t like being a hater! I enjoy being positive about the media with which I engage. I’ll have you know I watched Copola’s Megalopolis (2024) and was stunned at how quickly the whole affair went by, and how sad I was that there wasn’t more. Stuff can be subversive, stuff can be unappealing to most, stuff can be an acquired taste, and generally I’ll look for any opportunity I can get to bring some sort of positive spin to my ultimate discussion of the matter. There are even things I can appreciate in the Saw films even when they’re probably some of the movies I least want to watch, for example 1.

So what can I say about Sonic Rush (2005, Nintendo DS)? Maybe this meme will suffice:

If you get what I mean by this silly little image, then you can honestly stop reading after the end of this sentence’s period. 2 3 4

Thinking About Sonic Rush…

When I think of Sonic Rush I think of two things: Boost Mode, and Hideki Naganuma. Let’s elaborate on this, shall we?

Boost Mode

I was raised on the 2D Sonic games that were more about “holding right to win” than any other of their series’ brethren. That’s right, I was a Sonic Advance 2 kid. And I’ll probably die a Sonic Advance 2 kid too. I love the feeling of holding right with such pressure and watching my little blue hedgehog character blast away with such velocity that he outruns the screen itself. That’s rad as hell. To hell with hedgehogs having swords or guns or whatever, this is a Sonic game: running so fast you leave after images. I made a whole video about this a few years ago, go check it out if you want.

I am a DIMPS (the studio that designed the Sonic Advance and Rush trilogies) apologist only because it was the first kind of Sonic I knew. I could forgive the bottomless pits and the random spike placements, and the pixel-perfect block-crusher deaths, because to me, that was also Sonic. Sonic was about going fast by any means necessary, and you’re going to die from a bottomless pit or two every so often. But you had such a surplus of lives that it didn’t really matter too much in the end. Look, everyone has their tastes, some deranged lunatics consider Fortnite their favorite Sonic game. I’m certainly not the worst Sonic fan on the planet. I enjoy Sonic 3 & Knuckles as much as the next guy! Sonic Mania’s a great time! But neither of them will stand in my brain the way the Advance Trilogy does. Thanks DIMPS. Very cool.

To say that Sonic Rush is effectively Sonic Advance 4 would be a fair assessment. Sonic Rush takes Sonic Advance 2 and 3’s focus on moving wicked fast, and removes the speed governor to create something new and exciting. Sonic Rush introduces the “boost” move; by pressing the ‘X’ button, Sonic can go from 0 to 343.2 m/s in the blink of an eye. Sure, the duration of this “boost” of speed is dependent on Sonic’s boost meter, but this can be filled by mashing the ‘B’ button whenever Sonic is launched in to the air by the level geometry. So there’s really no shortage of opportunities to simply press ‘X’ and hear Sonic reach Mach 1.

And boy is it fun.

I think it needs to be felt more than it can be explained. It’s the rush you get when you’re eight years old and you’ve eaten six Nerds Ropes, and you think that you might as well use your seventh rope to whip at any object in the living room that looks moderately expensive and might be breakable in a fit of sugar-induced mania. It’s an unparalleled feeling, and it’s all condensed in the single press of a button.

Later 2D sonic games added in the drop dash, a move that allows you to accumulate accelerate in the air so that when you land you have an immediate forward spin dash charged up, and that’s great and all. But wow, the boost. That boost, dude. If the dropdash is a slingshot, Boost Mode is a laser gun. And, like, laser guns, dude.

Hideki Naganuma

If you do not know who Hideki Naganuma is, I genuinely pity you. Go listen to his music right now. I’ll wait. I’m just text on a screen representing an abstraction of the author. I’m not your dad. And don’t give me that “I only listen to video game music, I don't care about some random artist's music”. Dude, this guy has made some of the greatest video game soundtracks ever. Ever! 5 Don’t give me that “Oh I listen to Michael Jackson” and it’s just the Sonic 3 soundtrack. Go listen to something besides City Escape, you’ll be better for it.

Naganuma is no stranger to making music that makes you sound cool as fuck as your little video game character moves around really fast and causes general mischief 6 7. Naganuma’s work on Jet Set Radio has received recognition from critics for having one of gaming’s best sound tracks in two literally different decades (citation needed). Think about that for a second. There was a period where it was the best soundtrack for ten years, and then another ten years went by and it wasn’t topped. It was instead emulated and riffed on, as any foundational kind of media should be, until it stood as a grandaddy in the genre (that is the funky, electronic dance type beat for video games specifically 8). If you’ve survived in the wilderness of the pre-2016 internet, you’ve no doubt heard the echoes of Naganuma’s works singing in the night. My first introduction to any kind of Naganuma work was actually from Phoenix Wrong: the Movie (2/7) 9, in case you were at all curious about me.

To set the tone for the Sonic Rush soundtrack, let me begin with this cool factoid: (read with DYKG cadence,) did you know that Naganuma put a Malcolm X sample in a Sonic game?

Sonic has smoked his share of musical genres over the years, so it should come as no surprise that electronic funk ALSO suits the speedy sucker. It’s a forehead-slapper, “how did we not think of this sooner?” moment. The rebellious funky pop-punk sound suits Sonic to a Tee (Lopes). Of course, Rhythm and Blues and New Jack Swing were always obviously good fits, but with the changing times also bring changing counter-cultural influences. In the early-to-mid 2000s, that “cool shit” is hard, pounding drumlines and scratchy guitar riffs. And dude, Sonic runs from the cops! Sonic snowboards down not-San Francisco streets! Sonic sure may mean well but he’s one spray-paint can away from “being a bad influence on children”. It worked in Jet Set Radio, and BOY does it work in Sonic Rush.

From even the first stage, Naganuma’s music leaves an impression. I really like how critic Ava Diaz puts it: “while the nostalgic charms of the original Green Hill Zone theme will never wear off on me, there’s something uniquely thrilling to starting Sonic Rush off to the blaring horns and cascading twangy guitar of “Right There, Ride On.”” 10 I don’t even really like Right There, Ride On, and yet a remix of it sits atop my list of favorite High Quality Rips. I even prefer remixes of the Sonic Rush soundtrack to other remixes.

There is NOTHING like the feeling of dropping into Act 2 of Huge Crisis, with Naganuma’s “Jeh Jeh Rocket” falling right in with you. If you can time your ‘X’ button press just as you’re about to land to hit the speed boost at the perfect moment, brother I’m telling you, you’ve found grandma’s antique lamp on the shelf and that Nerds Rope of yours is only getting shorter. Huge Crisis is actively my favorite stage (in a vacuum!) because of the way its music actively adds to the experience of playing each act. I don’t think there’s a better pairing here: an industrial funk mix on a fucking airship fleet stage. Sonic has had his fair share of “industrial water” levels, but none feel like playing Huge Crisis. In this same vein, this funk is perfect for Huge Crisis in the same way that ska is perfect for Metal Harbor. It just works.


I just found out this past week, sick with COVID, that I actually have had Twilight++ Menu on my 3DS for the last two years and didn’t even know it. So to test it out, I brought a cool rom of Sonic Rush from my PC to my 3DS. It’s kind of the perfect game for testing DS emulation actually. For one, there’s emphasis on both screens at different points, and the spacing is done so precisely to invisibly allow the player to imagine the stage continues between screens. If the distance between the screens is any larger, or any smaller, the level geometry suddenly doesn’t make sense. For two, you can also test the effectiveness of the touch screen by playing the touch screen-only Special Stages. Look, I’m a big believer in MelonDS and I understand emulation will always carry some level of imperfect recreation in the experience. In emulating the game I’m not spending any money, and the ‘I Think You Should Leave’ Tim Robinson Egg game-like carpal tunnel-inducing experience I might get playing Sonic Rush while using my mouse to “touch” the touch screen is how it’s going to be. I ended up making a slight fix to the process by using a pen and drawing tablet, but that only got me so far. In the end, it was easiest to simply play the game on the actual hardware.

Actually Playing Sonic Rush

Sonic Rush? More like Sonic Wait, am I right?

[Metal Scratchin’ starts playing]

Dude, what the hell is the deal with the amount of times you stand quite literally still in this game? There are multiple zones that have auto scrolling sections that dominate the run time of the act. There are multiple zones that have section of the level where you’re locked into a room and have to defeat all the enemies before you can exit. There are multiple zones where you have to actually press a button and WAIT for things to happen before you can progress. Some levels have tolerable, maybe even cool, little sections where you lose control of Sonic and his speed, but that should be the exception, not the rule!

Why do both acts of Mirage Road have autoscrollers that you can’t skip???? At least Chaos Angel Act 3 in Advance 3 can be cheesed! This is just lunacy!

I tolerated the bottomless pits in the Sonic Advance trilogy because the sense of speed was something I earned, and not something I button-bumped every time I decided that it was unacceptable to go any slower than the speed of sound. Should I share the amount of times I boosted in the air only to effectively miss my landing point? I fear that it’s far greater than I would care to admit. That’s not out of rust or inexperience either, I know these levels quite well. Sure they’re not in my muscle memory like how Sonic Advance 2 is, but I can tell you level design gimmicks and choices distinct to each act. Though, I suppose I don’t know them well enough to know when to blast away at the open air, unaware of any nearby bottomless pits, spike traps, and/or laser barriers. Clumsy me. Sorry for being a speed junkie.

Can you fault me here? Yeah, maybe you can. Bottomless pits do force players to consider their movements more carefully, on a platform to platform basis. Omnipresent boosting is how children play Sonic Rush, and I’m an adult who doesn’t eat Nerds Ropes anymore because the last time I did I got multiple canker sores in my cheeks from the grotesque amounts of sugar. I actually need a new lamp for the living room, if you can believe it.

BUT THEN AGAIN, HOW CAN YOU TELL ME THAT SONIC RIDING A LITERAL LOADING BAR OVER A BOTTOMLESS PIT IS AN ACCEPTABLE WAY TO DESIGN A LEVEL? IN A GAME LITERALLY TITLED “SONIC RUSH”, NO LESS. WHAT THE HELL NIGHT CARNIVAL 11?!

This is Sonic Rush’s fault. Not mine >:[

Fuck dude, and Night Carnival’s got such a fascinating character to it too. This old Florence-looking long-lived city aesthetic is supremely interesting to me. Sure helps that I get to see a bunch of the backgrounds as I’m plummeting to my death out of sheer impatience. And I know I just spent almost 1,000 words raving about how much I enjoy Hideki Naganuma’s music, but a person can only listen to Ska Cha Cha’s opening so many times before they close their DS entirely. Honestly, God bless my parents for figuring out ways to deal with this shit whenever my brother or I played our Nintendo DSs at full-volume in the living room and they heard this whole sequence 12.

Aw damn it, Huge Crisis isn’t as fun to play either. It happens to have some of my least favorite level design elements in these DIMPSian Sonics. Beyond the abundance of bottomless pits, Huge Crisis also has an obnoxious amount of moving blocks that will instantly kill Sonic if even a single pixel of his gets squished. The hit boxes on these blocks are weirdly large and I have lost countless lives getting jobbed by these oscillating pistons. There’s a few of them in the other face-scrunchingly annoying level design aspect, the battle rooms. These are rooms that lock Sonic into an enclosed arena where he must defeat all the spawned enemies in order to progress the level. They just don’t mesh well with the idea of boosting, in my opinion. Boosting is an effective way to handle enemies, but the entire concept of these rooms goes against what I would consider to be one of Sonic Rush’s primary verbs: running. Huge Crisis is not alone in this oddity: Mirage Road and Dead Line also feature battle rooms which are equally as exciting across all three zones. It’s just that the ones in Huge Crisis have those stupid crushing blocks in them. So if you just happen to boost underneath one in the process of killing each foe, and then OOPS! Less than half of Sonic’s sprite is beyond the block sprite! Time to die!

Oh and Huge Crisis has the same boss as Leaf Storm

I've only briefly addressed the true “worst part” of Sonic Rush yet. Let’s change that.

I can’t help but chuckle-wince when I think about how the Tool-Assisted Speed Run of Sonic Rush spends almost a quarter of its total time FIGHTING ZONE BOSSES 13 . That is ludicrously stupid! What happened to chasing after bosses like in Sonic Advance 2? Or even in the 3D games like Sonic Adventure 2 Battle? Did they just forget? Did they want to try and show off the capabilities of the DS by having 3D battle arenas? What purpose did that serve? Especially when every boss can only be hit for fractions of a minute at a time, and are otherwise entirely untouchable? And even worse, they all take eight hits to kill! Yes, that’s probably how many times it took us to beat dr. egg in other boss fights in those DIMPSian Sonic games, but here it just drags ON and ON. Maybe it’s because they give us a Boss Health meter that always decrements by one each time which synergizes with the time on the top screen, which forces us to become acutely aware at just how long this is taking. I feel like I could take out the trash in the time between dr. egg’s various attacks, especially because some them take almost two seconds to happen. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when was the last time you held still for two seconds in a Sonic game? Sonic LITERALLY gets impatient if you don’t move for that long 14.

I don’t know how to say it in any plainer terms: I got filtered by the Leaf Storm boss. Yes, that’s right. I Game Over’d MULTIPLE times against the first boss in the game. I would spend a minute and a half slowly whittling down this worm-ass lookin’ robot’s health into pinch mode, only to mistime my jump during its rolling attack, which knocked me into the bottomless pit on the side of the stage. This was how I died against this boss every. single. time. I felt like I was going crazy, dude. I don’t understand what I was doing wrong beyond constantly mistiming my jump. No forgiveness, only instant death and 120 seconds wasted. Fifteen times.

The Takeaways

I only think about Sonic Rush because I’m bewitched by the bonanza it is to blast blistering boosts by b-ressing the X button, and by the bass-bursting beats that bump between it all. Believe it.

No I won’t talk about Blaze, there’s almost entirely no difference here. Blaze faces many of the same movement problems, but also has her own stage themes meaning that Naganuma did double work and we adore him for that. See? Exactly. The same :]

Should you play it? Sure! Will you like it? I don’t know! Do I like it? More in theory than in practice! Should I send you hate mail? No thank you! Should I send you fan mail? Why would you want to do that?

  1. This will be all I discuss of the Saw franchise in this piece. Sorry, I had to name a specific media piece, there’s no foreshadowing here, I promise. Author’s honor. “/srs” even.↩︎

  2. Hey you missed it, go back!↩︎

  3. What the hell even are footnotes these days? Highway Bulletin Boards? What’s gonna be in the next one? Cheese Factory on Exit 65? Sorry, I’m from the American Midwest, I can’t help myself↩︎

  4. Culvers, Exit 69 Mauston! ↩︎

  5. The author considers the implications of sharing their favorite Naganuma soundtrack and realizes that he would really rather not talk about that right now, but would like to state that it’s because he realizes he doesn’t quite have a true favorite yet and would like to refrain from speaking on the matter in a semi-permanent, likely unchanging 5 years from now sort of medium. The author would like to emphasize that having any kind of favorite requires at least some scalably serious critical reflection, and that he hasn’t spent enough time with Naganuma’s discopgrahy to speak definitively. He appreciates your understanding.↩︎

  6. that rascal sonic causing trouble for the nefarious doctor egg and his evil twin blowjob brother dr. negg.↩︎

  7. I’m sorry you had to read that.↩︎

  8. which is, admittedly, a narrow window.↩︎

  9. ↩︎

  10. https://www.polygon.com/24213685/malcolm-x-sonic-game-soundtrack-sample↩︎

  11. not to be confused with Carnival Night , which also warrants a “WHAT THE HELL?!”.↩︎

  12. A hazel “Oh god was this what it was like to raise me?” moment.↩︎

  13. approximately 16 minutes of a 66 minute speedrun↩︎

  14. this is a bit of an exaggeration. It takes 5 seconds in the original sonic the hedgehog for sonic to get impatient with you, while in other games it can take up to 10 or even 30.↩︎