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If you loved Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in its original format you'll still enjoy most of it here. Sonic is still fast, the gameplay is still solid, the level design is still engaging, and Tails is still there - none of that has changed, but you may be disappointed in their porting decisions. It doesn't seem like too big of a deal, only those in charge really went out of their way to limit the game so badly that it's much less worth replaying. I have little to say about the gameplay, because the game has always been mah' favorite and anything I write would be redundant: it's a good time! The good part about the menu it's definitely nice being able to save your state for later if you need to turn the game off...more obviously, to save the game before all the hard parts. A welcome feature. The bad part is the game's menu is replaced by the generic Sega Port menu, so gone are the sound tests and level select options. I suppose they did this to keep people from cheating to get achievements, but would it have been too difficult to block achievements if cheats were used? The other bad news is that there's no soft reset: if you beat the the game with all the emeralds, when selecting a new game again you have nothing. I always thought it was a cool "new game plus"-ish feature, and debug mode was another whole experience, but again this port takes away such re-playability. The good thing about the achievements for the most part these are fine - "beat this level in this number of seconds," etc. It got me to try things I hadn't before, namely the speed runs, and getting players to do different things is what I like about achievements. The bad is the biggest achievements involve being able to turn into Super Sonic, and there's nothing there that encourages the use of Tails. Understandable since he was a limited character, but it leads back to the port having little reason to replay it. The versus mode is just the same as it ever was. The port does nothing new, but nothing is lost in this mode, and it's fun. The regular game-mode is largely inconvenient. Don't expect the game to let your friend jump in as Tails unless you thought to start the game in a 2-player mode in the first place. You can't just switch to 2 players in the middle of the game, even if you've had Tails trailing behind you all along! I give Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on Xbox Live Arcade a poor score, but not because I would say the game is bad, but because of the lack of effort by Sega, or rather the effort put in to limit the game's original content.
6/10
