Well there I am. Its a Saturday evening. I’m drinking wine, and I end up on the iTunes store.

Jumping out at me is “The Game of The Week”.

It happens to be Sonic The Hedgehog 4. A game I’ve been waiting to be released for years. Now I know I want to wait for it to come out on the Wii, I know its going to be rubbish on the iPhone, but the wine now has control, and I’m wasting just over a fiver on a game thats going to be rubbish, I’m officially dangerous with money, and OH is going to ban me from holding onto my wallet (shes more sensible with money then I am – by a long way)

So – as I’m sure you can tell. I opened it with an odd mixture of love and loathing… My word its almost beautiful.

It opens with a familiar sounding Sonic theme, with a familiar looking title screen – Sonic shaking his finger and all that. The opening act is basically the Green Hill Zone… This is where we come across Sonics’ Homing Attack – strange – I don’t remember that in the original set of Mega Drive games. I can see this being a big thing there to divide the fans, on one hand it helps to control Sonic as he speeds along, on the other hand there sometimes seems to be an over reliance on using the Homing Attack to get past certain parts of the level.

I’ve not played the whole thing yet, as I prefer the idea of playing it on the wii, and I dont fancy too many spoilers, but I’ve used the level select to jump straight to a few other levels. Yes you heard that… “level select”… On one hand its nice to know you dont have tp keep replaying the same old levels when you die, but on the other hand… it feels kinda like cheating, and not in a good way.

They’ve thrown in a casino themed level, with a gambling machine section again (ala Sonic 2), and I suppose its on this level where they have the first big miss. I understand needing to have a mix of challenges, but why do they need to have one level set around a giant pinball machine – only letting you pass the level once you get too many points. The iPhone controls just arn’t that forgiving really.

The Mine Cart level is also kinda cool… but I wonder why its one of the later levels, I can see some people hating it!

So is it worth the six quid asking price… mmmm possibly… Its fun. Its nice to see Sonic back, but I suppose if the wii version had came out first, then I wouldn’t have had the wine fuelled moment of impulse on iTunes.