Sonic 3D Blast 5 is an unlicensed game created by a company by the name of Yong Yong. They're known for making numerous poor quality games for various handheld Nintendo consoles. When I first saw an unlicensed Sonic game for the Gameboy I admit, I was actually quite excited. Oh, how wrong I was.
Graphics
As soon as you start the game you're greeted by images stolen straight from Sonic 3D Blast, only in such bad quality that it's painful to look at. The rest of the game is based very loosely on levels from the various Sonic games on the Sega Mega Drive. The graphics actually look quite good for the Gameboy and are fairly detailed. That all changes when you start playing however, since there are bugs and glitches galore.
Controls
As a Sonic game, or at least one that uses the title, the controls should be immediately clear to anyone who has played another game in the series. I mean, they should be clear, but most of the time it's not clear what's going on at all. The controls in this game are so unspeakably bad that it really needs to be played to fully understand.
As you would expect, the directional pad is for moving left or right, but it's so horribly delayed and sluggish that you'll often wonder if the game is even responding to your actions, or if it's just doing it's own thing. Sometimes Sonic will just walk into enemies or off the edge of a cliff, for no apparent reason at all. It's almost as if he's self aware and wants nothing to do with this atrocity he's been forced to take part in. I'd feel that way too.
Both the A and B bottons do the exact same thing. You press the button to jump, while holding down and the button puts Sonic in the charging spin mode. Now, this is interesting because to get the charged spin to actually work you need to release the button before you release down on the directional pad. If you release down before you release the button then Sonic will jump through the air at a 45 degree angle. At first I didn't realise why this was happening but it's clearly a programing error. You see, in any other Sonic game when you do the charge spin you can keep holding the button until you're ready to release, but in this game it still acts as if you're jumping. It's a real problem, especially if you're desperatly trying to get the spin attack to work but you accidentally jump up into an enemy.
Gameplay
The main goal here is to get from the start of the stage to the end without dying. You can collect rings along the way which act as a kind of life insurance. When you get hit while holding the rings, you drop them and then if you get hit again and you lose a life. In any regular Sonic game, once you get hit and drop your rings they scatter all around, giving you the option to collect them again. In this game that doesn't happen. When you get hit the rings are gone, the number simply resets to zero. Sometimes you can walk backwards through the level and some of the rings you have already collected will reappear. Sometimes you can walk right through a ring and it remains in place, until you walk through it a second time.
There are random springs everywhere throughout the level that have no purpose whatsoever. Usually when you see a spring in a Sonic game, it boosts you up to a powerup of some kind, or a bunch of rings. In this game you're constantly trying to avoid the springs because all they do is throw you up in the air at all the wrong moments. It's very irritating and I have no idea why the game was made this way.
The first level is fairly easy to get through once you've gotten used to the controls, but once you get to the second level it's a different story. The first thing that confused me is that the level is called "Green Hill Zone 2", when there are clearly no hills anywhere in sight. It's some kind of internal industrial-like level with lots of spike filled holes. There's a lot of precision jumping involved in this level and you know how problematic that's going to be.
After a while you come to a section with moving platforms. Cleary this wasn't going to end well, but I gave it my best shot. So after very carefully timing the jump I managed to land safely on the platform. Now that I'm on the platform, I try to position myself in the center so that I don't accidentally tap the wrong direction and fall off the edge. Well, that turned out to be a big mistake. Standing in the center is not an option here, you will just fall straight through and die. This wasn't just a one time glitch either, every damn time you land on that platform, you'd better stay on the very edge or you're falling through. Sometimes the platform doesn't even turn up at all!
One time I was making my way through the level as usual and as I approached the area with the platfroms, all the enemies that usually appear were all gone. I tried going backwards through the level and then returning but still nothing appeared. The only option left was to take a running jump at where the platform was supposed to be, but all was futile and I fell to my death. It was quite clear to me at this point that this abomination certainly wasn't play tested before it was put onto this cartridge. Not only is it hard enough to even land on the platform with the horribly broken controls and annoying glitches, that's only the beginning of the problem.
Once you're actually on the platform, you need to wait until another platform comes your way and then jump across, while also trying to avoid an enemy that inconveniently hovers above your head. Even if you try to kill the enemy, there's no way that you'll ever be able to maneuver yourself to land back on the platform again. So the question is, can this part of the game actually be beaten? Well I tried as hard as I could and after many hours of frustration, I turned the game off in disgust. I tried a few more times after that but without some kind of serious luck, I don't think this part of the game can be beaten. Even if it could, I'd only die shortly after and then have to do it all over again. I don't have that kind of patience for something of this quality, so that's where I'll end things.
Sound
It's actually quite common for a really bad game to have a really awesome soundtrack. Fester's Quest on the NES is a fine example of this. This game does not fit in that category. The music is so bad it makes me wish I was deaf.
Final Comments
This game is an absolute disgrace to humanity. I wouldn't even recommend playing it out of curiosity. I guarantee, it will cause you nothing but rage enduced tantrums. I know there will be people who decide to play it anyway, but you have been warned! I'm not sure where you can actually find this game to play. My version is on a "Super 32 in 1" pirate cart, but I think the ROM is available online.
Rating
0 out of 10.
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