Sonic Advance

Sonic Advance is a 2001 platform game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, developed by Dimps and Sonic Team and published in Japan by Sega, North America by THQ and Europe by Infogrames for the Game Boy Advance, it is the first installment of the Sonic Advance Trilogy.

Why It's Advanced

 * 1) The game features four playable characters; Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy.
 * 2) Solid controls.
 * 3) Fantastic graphics.
 * 4) Each character has the same moveset as they did in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, with the addition of a melee attack.
 * 5) Cooperative gameplay between two characters.
 * 6) Grind rails first introduced in Sonic Adventure 2 also make their first 2D appearance.
 * 7) Great soundtrack.
 * 8) There are 6 normal zones, each of which contains two acts. In each zone, Act 1 is cleared by reaching the goal and Act 2 is cleared by destroying the boss robot at the end.
 * 9) Special Springs can be found near the top of certain acts; by jumping onto these springs, the player can reach a Special Stage.
 * 10) Creative boss battles.
 * 11) The game features an extra game called the Tiny Chao Garden, in which players can raise Chao.
 * 12) Also, players can transfer their Chao between the Tiny Chao Garden and the Chao Garden from the GameCube versions of Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) To access special stages, you have to find a giant spring hidden somewhere in the level. Not only is it time consuming, but it can also be frustrating to find them, as there may be traps to hinder progress.
 * 2) * Speaking of the Special Stages, They are worse due to the Frustrating Difficulty and Horrible perception.
 * 3) Some stages have poor level design, such as the sixth Zone, which is not only the worst Zone in the entire game, but also one of the worst Sonic levels ever made.
 * 4) Amy's controls are well disliked due to her inability to curl up in a ball when she jumps and her lack of a spindash.
 * 5) You can't play as Super Sonic.

Reception
It was generally well-received by critics, and by July 2002, had shipped over one million copies worldwide. In March 2009, Official Nintendo Magazine ranked Sonic Advance as the 75th greatest game ever released on a Nintendo console.

Legacy
The game spawned the Sonic Advance sub-franchise and was the first Sega game on a Nintendo console alongside Sonic Adventure 2: Battle. In 2003, it received an N-Gage port called "Sonic N". In 201x, it received a Japan-exclusive android port through a paid Sega service, and in 2015, it was released on the japanese Virtual Console for the Wii U.

Trivia

 * THQ is the owner of the rights to distribute the game outside Japan, explaining why the re-release for the N-gage was called "Sonic N", so on a technical level, this port is a different game, keeping Sega from having trouble with THQ.