Under the Man-croscope / Most Memorable Presents Crossover! Sonic the Hedgehog!

Consider the Man-croscope! A highly critical device that trains its phallic lens on that which you held dear as a child and scrutinizes it with the unfulfilled eye of a disenfranchised adult! And seeing as how we're taking a journey into the past anyway, why don't I combine it with our wildly underwhelming Christmas feature: Most Memorable Presents! We're taking a stone and murdering two birds. And one of them is a turkey.

Now, it might be hard to believe, but back in the early nineties Sega mascot Sonic the Hedgehog was an honorable, plucky harbinger of an innovative new generation of videogames; as opposed to the sass-talking, Urkel-voiced poster boy for creepy furry porn that he is now. And in 1992, at sweet sixteen, I received one of the greatest Christmas presents of all...

Join me after the jump and I'll tell all about my sordid history with the world's fastest hedgehog!



I first saw Sonic the Hedgehog running on a fat little TV in a toy store. And seriously - IT BLEW MY FUCKING MIND. What you need to understand is that up until that point I only gamed on a Commodore 64 where everything looked like this:

No, that's not Laser Dicks. It's actually Ghostbusters - assuming you squint and use your imagination. The Commodore 64 had only 16 colours - 12 of which were bullshit - and everything was deliberately ugly, sluggish and infuriating. So when I saw the first Sonic the Hedgehog running on Sega's new Megadrive (Genesis for you bible-loving Americans) I could barely comprehend how beautiful the graphics were and how INCREDIBLY GODDAMN FAST the game played. It was a system seller, and within a couple of months it was mine and Sonic the Hedgehog was all I really played.

So in 1992 when Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was released it was better than a pair of boobs on a loaf of sliced bread. Seriously, it was the modern day equivalent of discovering you had early access to Halo 23 on the Xbox 2160. But here's the problem... You may also find this hard to believe but, even back in 1992, a console game ran around $80 - 100, so I really did have that many of them, it was very much a special occasion thing, and even then not always.

Now, my grandparents got a bad rap in my first Most Memorable Presents article when I called them out for the deceptively named "Rad Cap". But I must give them mad props here, because I was staying with them at Christmas (they live on the other side of the country) and they completely surprised me by gifting me Sonic 2. So if your grandparents give you lame things like socks, then it sucks to be you because my grandparents are awesome!

But it gets even better - my Megadrive was a million miles away, so they HIRED a Megadrive from a video store so that I could play the game. And that was no small feat back in those days. I couldn't even tell you what they must have required as a deposit back then, probably your vehicle.

So merry Christmas, I had Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which starred a (then innocent and not at all yiffy) fox sidekick and looked like this, and was incredibly awesome:

That's pretty slick right there, folks!

OOOOHHH YEEEEEEEAAAAAAH!!!!

And yet, ironically this was my last Sonic game. I never got the third one and by the time all that Knuckles the Pink Echidna bullshit started happening (or WAS that in number 3?) I had moved on. I've never bought any later iteration of the game either, although the current Sonic Generations has me morbidly curious for when the price hits rock bottom. I have downloaded Sonic 2 on my Xbox though, and I find it INCREDIBLY difficult. Seriously I can't get past the chemical plant zone, and in my youth I could complete the entire game with my eyes closed, and my hands cuffed, and my entire body inside a Hessian sack at the bottom of a well at midnight. By comparison, modern games like the aptly named Modern Warfare are as easy as falling off a log. In the eighties we had a falling off a log game called Frogger. And it was bastard hard. In the past, all games were bastards.

I was going to post a work-safe but disturbing piece of furry Sonic fan art for laffos, but doing a Google search left me sick to my stomach. There are BILLIONS of disgusting pieces of Sonic and friends sex art on the Internet and I am completely baffled as to why. How did Sonic the Hedgehog, of all things, inspire the lust of a billion perverts? How is he considered a sexual object at all? It seems so random to me, like wanting to bang a shoe or a hamburger.

What is your sordid relationship with Sonic the Hedgehog? Did you draw some of the fan art I just saw? Would you rather have sex with a Reebok or a Nike? Big Mac or cheeseburger? Tell all in the seldom populated comments section!