Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 that was made to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. It was developed by the Sonic Team and directed by Shun Nakamura.

The game shares its name with two earlier video games, a manga, a television series, a comic book series and, of course, Sonic the Hedgehog himself. To disambiguate, the game has been called by a number of different aliases, including Sonic 2006, Sonic '06, Sonic 360 and Sonic Next-Gen. Xbox Live solves the problem by referring to it in all-caps as SONIC THE HEDGEHOG.

This is the second Sonic the Hedgehog game to get an E10+ rating by the ESRB, the first being Shadow the Hedgehog. Other content rating organizations agreed with similar ratings. The PEGI rating is 12+, while the CERO rating is A.

This game marks the first appearance of Silver the Hedgehog, from Blaze's future, as well as the return of Blaze the cat from Sonic Rush. This is also the first game that uses the same voice actors as the anime Sonic X, different from those used in previous games.

Although each character plays the same levels, each character's unique abilities allow him or her to get to different areas of each stage, and deny them from accessing certain items.

Gameplay is broken up into two gameplay styles, similar to the original Sonic Adventure: Action Stage and Town Stage. Action Stages are primarily where the bulk of the gameplay takes place, whereas Town Stages are free-roaming locations where the player can talk to non-player characters and explore, similar to Sonic Adventure's Adventure Fields.

For each of the action stages in the respective stories, gold medals are obtainable by achieving high ranks in these stages.

There are a total of eleven stages. The ranking system in the game for each of the levels (and even the town missions) is similar to Sonic Rush, providing score ranks with the highest rank revealed to be S Rank. The lowest is D Rank, unlike previous Sonic games where the worst rank was E Rank and S was the highest (Save for Sonic Riders, where C was the lowest and X was the highest).