Sonic Rivals

Sonic Rivals is a game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series that was released in late 2006. It is the first Sonic game developed by a Canadian company, Backbone Entertainment exclusively for the PlayStation Portable. The game was also supervised by members of Sega Studio USA including Takashi Iizuka.

A year later, a sequel was developed by the same company for the same platform.

Gameplay

While Sonic Rivals possesses the graphical style of the Sega Dreamcast era of games, the gameplay is actually on a 2D plane, playing much like the games from the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive era of games. Characters race to the finish line while avoiding the level's obstacles. The game contains six zones, each with three respective acts, the third being a boss battle, totaling in 17 stages. (One level,Sky Park, does not feature a boss stage.) Boss battles at the end of levels require the player to defeat the boss before the competing character does. Five different characters are playable; Sonic the Hedgehog, Knuckles the Echidna, Shadow the Hedgehog, Silver the Hedgehog, and Metal Sonic, but gameplay is identical for all characters. The game features power-ups to collect that offer additional offensive and defensive abilities.

Sonic Rivals 2

Sonic Rivals 2 is the sequel to Sonic Rivals. The game was developed by Backbone Entertainment and supervised by Sega Studio USA, exclusively for the PlayStation Portable handheld videogame console. Sonic Rivals 2 was released on November 13, 2007 in North America. Like the original, Sonic Rivals 2 was not released in Japan.

Characters

Sonic Rivals 2 has the same original five characters from the original game and adds three new ones. All characters use Homing Attack and Spin Dash to move through the levels. Each character can also use a "Signature Move" by collecting Rings, or killing enemies to fill the "Signature Meter" (formerly the Star item in the first game) such as Shadow, who has the ability to slow down the other player's movement for a few seconds.

All of these characters are in teams, as well; Sonic is with Tails, Knuckles is with Rouge, Shadow is with Metal Sonic, and Silver is with Espio.

Playable characters