From: JCTHECOBRA
To: Snivelystar
I saw your post on the forum, you wanted to know if anyone had every played Sonic Bound, right? Well, I played it like 4 or 5 years ago, but I still remember it like it was yesterday.
Let me start by saying that I was born too late to experience Sonic's glory days on the Genesis. My childhood was spent with a PS2 I spent thousands upon thousands of hours playing Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog on. Hell, bought a PS3 just to play Sonic 06 of all things.
But of all that time I spent playing the 3D platformers, my most noteworthy memory is with a classic Sonic game. Or rather, with Sonic Bound.
As I said before, I never played a Classic game, so when I got interested in playing them I tried to find a way to play the most important ones without having to buy a Genesis. There were some already preexisting collections for the PS2, but they were sold at an obnoxious price that I wasn't going to pay for a game where you just held right to win.
As I browsed Ebay to find a Sonic Gems collection copy that didn't cost me an arm and a leg, I finally laid my eyes on Sonic Bound.
Despite not being Sonic Gems collection, it offered the same things that game did and at a much cheaper price. 5$ and it had 4 games in one: Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic CD and Sonic 3&K, all of them with four playable characters. Needless to say, I bought the game and patiently waited for the package to come home.
A few days later the game finally arrived. The disc was weird though, since it just had Sonic Bound written on it. Had I been scammed? I couldn't know until I tried playing.
So I inserted the disc into my PC, and opened up the game. As the SEGA and Sonic Team logo appeared on my screen, the title screen shocked me because it was something entirely original. It featured the trio of Sonic, Tails and Knuckles (plus Amy) sharing the title screen together.
As I pressed Enter, I was greeted by a fairly bare-bones menu: It contained a Game select, an extra section, the options and then the exit button. I clicked the options first out of pure curiosity. Fortunately for me, there wasn't anything that needed changing, but I was thankful to see that while the game had added some new abilities to Sonic (Although they had some ridiculous names, like seriously, peel-out?) they at least told you how they worked.
Once I returned to the main menu and clicked Game select, it had me choose between the four games. I decided to play Sonic 1 and chose between the four characters to play as Sonic.
Since I never played a classic Sonic game before, it took me a while to get used to the new controls. I never realized it could be so much fun! (even if the enemy placement left a lot to be desired)
Once I reached the goalpost, I noticed that Sonic looked a little bit "odd": He looked a lot more pale than how I remembered him to be, and his sprite had a weird green hue. At the time, I just passed it off as an error with the character's color palette. I knew something was definitely off when in ACT 2 the goalpost had Eggman with blue eyes. They looked like the eyes he had back in those old cartoons, but except of being red they were blue. This wasn't an error, it was definitely something done on purpose.
As I reached the boss in ACT 3, something akin to Metal Sonic showed up in the Eggmobile. He looked a lot more bulkier compared to Metal Sonic and I could notice a yellow cape as he was sitting in the eggmobile. What's stranger is that he had a mouth (unlike Metal Sonic) and his eyes were the same blue eyes of the Eggman goalpost. Was that thing supposed to be Eggman?
Since it was my first boss, I took my time trying to defeat him. I noticed that he and Sonic were getting weirder and more broken down as time passed. Sonic's weird green hue was getting more prominent and weird red marks started to appear all over his sprite, meanwhile "Eggman" was missing an eye and seemed to have blood coming out of his mouth and eyeholes. Weirded out, I went back to the menu hoping that everything I witnessed was just a stupid joke.
I decided to try out Sonic 2 and I picked Tails to spice things up. To my dismay, I discovered that no matter how hard I pressed Enter, the game just wouldn't let me play as him. So I decided to just play as Sonic and Tails and I could finally manage to play the game.
As I played through Emerald Hill, Tails was picking up badniks and launching them into the air. I thought it was a new mechanic this "game" added to make Tails more useful, although he proved to be more of an obstacle rather than an ally.
If Tails was infront of me, he wouldn't move, I had to jump over him to continue on my path. The Badniks he would pick up would always be launched against Sonic, making me lose all the rings I had. He would randomly pick me up and start flying, only to drop me right infront of an enemy. Due to Tails being an extremely obnoxious obstacle, I couldn't even get past ACT 1 of Emerald Hill.
Once I heard that game over jingle one too many times, I went back to the main menu to try out Sonic CD. I picked Amy and pressed Enter.
She was a rather peculiar character: She had an hammer which she could use to glide over the air or use it to launch herself upwards. Once I started though, I had to go answer the door. As I left the game running without pausing it, I answered the door, only to discover it was one of those door-to-door fraudsters. I spent a good five minutes to convince him to go away. Once he finally gave up and left me alone, I went back to play my the game, only to be greeted with a horrible sight.
Amy's sprite was much,much worse than I remember it being. She had her stomach cut open, and I could see the intestines falling out of her open stomach. She looked like she got mauled by a bear. This game had to be a horrible joke, something people would use to prank unknowing people, people like me. As I went back to the main menu to finally turn off this stupid game, it glitched to hell and back. A high-pitched noise pierced my ears, and the sound kept going and going. As I looked back at my PC, I saw bodies, real dead bodies being flashed on my screen. It was always the same four bodies, two of them looked like they got mauled by something. Then, the screen went black and the high pitched sound finally stopped. A few seconds later, the head of that Metal Sonic lookalike appeared on the screen, his eyes were completely black and empty, blood was coming out of his eyes and mouth. As I stared at him for a few seconds, a voice came out of "him".
"FREE ME"
His voice sounded robotic but human at the same time. He kept on repeating the same two words over and over again as the high pitched pierced my ears again. It might have been the panic taking over me during that situation, but I think he was getting closer and closer to me despite only being in the computer.
I couldn't take it anymore, I took out the disk and broke it in half with my bare hands. The sound didn't stop, and as he was getting closer and closer I tore out the PC screen and launched it against the wall, breaking it into a thousands pieces.
I think I laid in my bed for god knows how long before I got up to clean my room. I threw the broken disc and the screen in the trash, before going back in to just forget about this horrible experience.
The next morning I found the disc on my table. It was fixed, almost as if I just imagined breaking him. Just to make sure I did not imagine breaking it, I took my hammer and smashed the disc to bits.
I looked away for just one moment, just one moment, and once I looked back at the disc I found it normal again. This disc wasn't something made for a prank, this thing was cursed. There was a reason they sold this to me at a cheap price,they wanted to get rid of this thing before they ended up getting killed.
In the following days I tried everything to destroy it, but it was no use. Even when I tried to bury it somewhere far away from me, once I returned home it was there, almost begging for me to play it again. I tried to ignore it, but it tempted me again and again. I went as far as putting the disc back into my computer before realizing what I was doing.
Having no other option left, I sold it on Ebay at a cheap price. Once it was bought, I finally got rid of the game at the price of condemning someone else to play through that thing.
But even years after that, I can still see that "Eggman" in any other Sonic game I play, reminding me that he's never going to leave me alone. Maybe I'm just hallucinating him. Maybe it's because of the trauma, but I don't think that's it. What I know is that some things are best left alone.
Whatever you want to do with that game, it's not worth it.