As a kid I guess I never got far in this game, but I always loved the little time I spent with it.

Technically this is like a bite-sized Sonic Adventure, except instead of playing as separate individual characters, you play as teams of three. It's a great idea and gives the levels a lot of replayability.

The first two zones were great. Barring a couple of broken mechanics (like pole-grabbing and rail-switching), everything worked well. And whenever something didn't, the game was forgivable enough by giving an alternate path.

But on zone 3, the casino, there's a segment where you have to play a slot machine and, I guess, score 200 rings? The game never really tells you what you have to do, it just says that you get a payout of 200 if you get a good combination in the slot machine. First of all, you gotta fucking play pinball just to get to the machine. And if you fail, the game basically forces you to repeat two platforming sections just to get to the pinball field. Not to mention, it's easy to fall off and die! And that fucking piece of shit slot machine is rigged! I kept getting close to 200 rings and then getting the Eggman faces on the slot machine, which means you lose like 100 rings or something. So I just kept getting money and losing money, never reaching my goal. And I kept falling off and redoing the platforming sections and occasionally dying.

I used save-states because I didn't feel like running out of lives and replaying the whole level. So I decided to save-scum my way through the slot machine. So I jump in and like 3 out of 4 times I kept getting the Eggman face on the first row. Finally I got the Sonic Heroes logo, so I saved, and the situation was repeating on the second row. So basically you get something like a 25% chance of getting a Sonic Heroes logo and 65% of getting Eggman. After getting my second logo, I saved and started doing the third row, and all I was getting was the Eggman faces. I did that shit like 30 times, and every single time I was getting Eggman. My timing didn't matter. So yeah, that's when I decided to give up. I don't like being jerked around.

If I was rating just the first two zones, it would be either an 8 or a 9 out of 10. So I guess it's still a great game if you pretend it's about 50 minutes long. But that fucking casino filtered me.