I made the mistake of pre-purchasing this before it was released. Usually I wouldn't do such a thing but I thought "its the Christian Whitehead/Stealth Android ports finally brought to the PC, this'll be great". Simply put, I didn't think there was a way to screw this up. Sadly it turns out although it uses some Headcannon content, these ports are mostly made by Sonic Team who haven't got a clue. These ports are full of bugs I've never seen in my 25+ years of playing these games. Last time I played I saw two completely new bugs in Angel Island Act 1 alone.

The UI is also wildly inconsistent, Sonic CD's menu from its previous port is still lurking in there despite the other games having nothing similar.

"Story mode" is a fun concept but really doesn't add anything different to just playing the games sequentially. In fact if you treat the 4 games as a continuous campaign then the difficultly curve is frankly god awful. By my count there are 34 zones to play through if you want to beat "story mode". Of these 34 levels arguably the most difficult, Labyrinth Zone, is the 4th you'll play. I'm not critiquing the games for not working with the story mode format, its not why they were made, I just think that if this is Baby Timmy's first experience playing the classic Sonic games then Story Mode is going to be a bad time.

These games aren't *unplayable* and only the most hardcore of Sonic nerds will notice the discrepancies but the real tipping point is that the collection is comically overpriced. I tried to argue a justification for having pre-ordered Sonic Origins but frankly I feel stupid. Don't make the same mistake I did. Go get one of the fan made ports. Sonic 3 AIR even has a native Linux port and works great on the Steam Deck.