Sonic 3D is the final installment on the Sonic series for the Megadrive, closing the circle of games that feature Sega's "mascot hedgehog", for their 16bits console.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Sonic went on vacation to Flicky Island but he found that the Flickies (the island's natives) were captured by a villain called Dr. Robotnik. Sonic must now use his jumping and super-speed running skills to find and rescue all Flickies, kill the enemies and finally confront Dr. Robotnik, travelling (or should I say...running?) through 7 wide levels full of intense action and numerous...spins!
GRAPHICS / SOUND Though the game holds the "3D" claim in its title, in reality it uses isometric graphics and a quite large palette of bright colors. The action is intense, with fast animation and the cartoon-ish sprites (Sonic included) are nicely designed. The music is particularly amusing (as most music scores are on platform games) and the sound FX are more than adequate to cover Sonic's rescue mission.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Hardware information
Megadrive (EU) / Genesis (Jap)
CPU: Motorola 68000 at 7.16 MHz in PAL, 7.67 MHz in NTSC / Secondary Zilog Z80 at 3.55 MHz in PAL, 3.58 MHz in NTSC MEMORY: Main: 64Kb RAM + 8Kb / Video RAM: 64Kb / Audio RAM 8Kb GRAPHICS: VDP Chip: 256x224, 320x224, 256x240, 320x240 / 512 colors (1536 using shadow-highlight mode),64 x 9-bit words of color RAM, 4 lines of 15 colors plus transparent, allowing 61 on-screen colors / Sprites: Up to 64 on-screen, 16/20 per line, 256/320 pixels per line, per-sprite priority / Interlace Mode 1 (no increase in resolution and Mode 2 (2x vertical resolution) SOUND: Main: Yamaha YM2612 @ 7,16MHz with six FM channels, four operators each / Secondary: TI SN76489 with 4-channel PSG + 3 Sq Wave channels.