Sega has released a trailer for Sonic Generations Dreamcast. The game, due out in November, recreates levels from the 3D era of Sonic the Hedgehog.

The trailer shows City Escape, Seaside Hill and Speed Highway, re-imaged. The game will allow you to play those and more as both the modern and the classic Sonic.

The trailer also hints at an appearance from Shadow the Hedgehog at the end.

What do you think? Excited for a new Sonic game? Leave some comments below.

Today, Sega relased this trailer to promote Sonic the Hedgehog’s 20th anniversary. Looks like we may be getting Sonic: Generations. Here’s hoping it’ll buck the trend of recent games featuring the blue bolt and actually…you know, be good.

The Sega Dreamcast holds a special place in the heart of many gamers. One of them apparently is Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka, who holds the system in such high regard that he hasn’t given up hope on making an successor to Sega’s fan favorite.

“Of course Dreamcast was my baby back at Sega and I want to carry on making good games for the European market and one day I’m hoping it gives me the opportunity to work on Dreamcast 2,” Naka said in a recent interview with CVG.com. “”If Ivy the Kiwi? does well in Europe then maybe I can make Dreamcast 2.”

Though Naka has formed his own production company, he is viewed by many as one the founding fathers of the Dreamcast, and views the days where he had a hand in the design of the system as one of the best of his career. “I do miss those old days when I was heavily involved in hardware making at Sega,” Naka said. “I was involved in most of the consoles and controllers that Sega came up with. If I have the opportunity in the future I want to be involved again with hardware making,” he said. “It would be ideal if I could become some sort of advisor working with the platform makers in future.”

Of course, Sega hasn’t made any sort of announcement regarding a Dreamcast 2 or any future plans to return to the console department. Does the famed creator know something we don’t?

LOS ANGELES — Sega is working on a new 2D platform Sonic game in the spirit of the original series. They had a demo of it available at E3 2010, allowing people to play one of three early levels in the game. The game takes place after the Sonic and Knuckles game.

Sega promises that this is the beginning of a new series of games. The game starts with Sonic going off exploring, and Egg-Man comes after him wanting to just kill him now and get him out of the way, so Sonic won’t stop his next plan.

The game levels are built to feel like the original with a slight difference. The bosses will play like the original but with upgrades. The game then has a twist ending that will lead into Episode 2, and continuation of the new series. They are taking great pains with this title, since the last game in the series was in 1994, there is a lot of time in here, and gamers have a lot of expectations from a new sonic game.

This is evident from the fact that they have delayed the game to make it correctly. They were originally scheduled to release at the end of this summer, but are now targeting the end of the year. When I played with the game it looks like the original sonic games, just having a higher resolution. Sonic has a nice upgraded look, without changing too much to character. I was disappointed with Sonic’s acceleration in the demo. When you move Sonic he walks too long before he will start to run.

They said that was one of the issues that they have decided to rework after showing the demo off. I also had an issue that when you press down to go into a roll it would usually not start spinning rolling fast, but goes back to slowly moving. This bothered me as being very unlike the previous sonic games that were always about speed. The people at the booth said that was one of the reasons they have delayed the release of the game, to give them more time to make it more like sonic.

Sega has included the Chaos emeralds in the new Levels. Like the original games, it requires 50 rings to activate get them, though the game allows the player to replay, and jump to a level that they want. This is nice since if you miss a chaos emerald you don’t have to start the game from the beginning like the previous ones.

They included the original power-ups from the original series, plus some additions from the later Sonic Adventure games. One such addition is the ability to jump attack from one enemy to another. The invincibility and fast shoes are back though.

They made some differences between the PlayStation 3, iPhone, Xbox 360, and Wii Versions for the special stages. The PS3 and the Wii can control using the Tilt controllers. The iPhone can control any level with either tilt, or by controls on the screen for directional pad, and action button for jumping. They arranged the level, and the View point on the iPhone so that the controls on the bottom wouldn’t obstruct viewing the level.

Definitely excited to see this one come out.

Did you know how many Sonic games have been released in the last five years? Discounting re-releases of old arcade titles, and any game that also had Mario in them, there have been at least eight, and their quality has ranged from sort of okay to just plain bad.

For some reason, Sega seems content to churn out a bunch mediocre Sonic games to keep the franchise alive long enough to get its characters into Smash Brothers while it could put the same amount of time and manpower behind an actual quality endeavor you would be proud to put on the shelf next to Mario Galaxy and Twilight Princess. With Sonic and the Black Knight, exclusive to the Wii, Sega continues this fairly disappointing trend, using the beloved blue speedster in titles that are, frankly, beneath him.

Thankfully, Black Knight is on the higher quality end of the spectrum, but it is a far cry from the quality gameplay and genre that made Sonic a landmark franchise. It’s mostly ‚ hack-and-slash game with a few speed-based and platforming elements at odd intervals, featuring a sword wielding Sonic in the kingdom of Camelot. For purists of the Sonic franchise (and scholars of Arthurian legend), the very idea of this might seem offensive, but when you put those details aside, and accept the fairly high level of ridiculousness as just entertaining, it makes for a pretty decent game.

The game opens with Merlina, granddaughter of Merlin, being chased by a huge scary looking King Arthur, who is the titular Black Knight. Merlina, being a wizard like her grandfather, casts a summon spell when faced with an army of dark soldiers from the underworld. A hole is torn in the sky, and out falls a blue hedgehog and two chili dogs. Sonic rescues Merlina, but can’t defeat Arthur because he is in possession of the scabbard of Excalibur, which grants the bearer the power of immortality. Sonic and Merlina go off to find the lady of the lake (who is Amy acting in that role) and Arthur dispatches his Knights (Knuckles, Shadow, and Blaze), and from there on out the very basic objective is to run fast and smash stuff with your talking sword, Caliburn. Yes, there is a talking sword.

Once you take the plunge and accept that you are playing an Arthurian legend game with a hedgehog protagonist, the game actually starts to get fun. The principle mode of gameplay is running in a mostly straight line, steered occasionally with the nunchuck, and hacking with the Wiimote to swing your sword. The combat elements are a little repetitive, but the fun comes in at fighting at as high a speed as possible. The sword swinging graphics aren’t great if you slow down and really scrutinize them, but you shouldn’t be doing that because you’re Sonic; RUN! When combat is at its height, you are charging into thick groups of enemies, sword swinging, and you can barely see anything but the crush of soldiers and demons until the dust settles and Sonic moves on to the next battle. The combination of speed and swordplay is a fairly novel one, and, I think, worth a lot more exploration, though it’s done fairly well in this game.

At its worst, which occurs in the somewhat-to-very awkward boss battles, the combat expects an aggravating amount of precision timing in your Wiimote swings: swing half a second too late, you get hit, swing half a second too early, you get hit (yes, there are instances where this Sonic game will punish you for being too fast). However, the satisfaction of leveling an entire phalanx of underworld soldiers makes the frustrating bits worth enduring, and ensures a strong replay value.

Unfortunately, the other aspects of the game do not play out as well as the combat. If you’re looking for a Sonic-style speed platformer, you will not find it with Black Knight. There are definitely platforming elements, and some of them are very cool (near the game’s end you run across the back of a beam of lightning), but they are few and far between, though the levels in which they are most prevalent are definitely the most satisfying to complete. These platform-intensive volcanoes and dragon’s caves are, unfortunately, mostly towards the end of the game, and don’t completely make up for the bland environments of the castles and villages. Sure, there’s lots of jumping from one stone structure to the next, but most of it is just progression down a line of enemies and can quickly get repetitive if that’s not why you invested in the game.

The game also has a few, very weird glitches. There was one instance in a boss battle where, as Sonic was running towards a fire-breathing dragon, he came to an abrupt halt and attacked a stone pillar on the side of the battlefield for no apparent reason; it had no bearing on defeating the boss, and Sonic’s attacks seemed to do nothing more than waste time and attract fire balls.

There was also the instance where I was somehow able to completely bypass a story-relevant cut-scene, where Sonic and his new wise-cracking sword go visit Amy, the Lady of the Lake. I know this scene exists because I saw my roommate play through it, but I somehow just played around it, and was surprised to find myself completing the mission Amy would have otherwise have set before me. It wasn’t really detrimental to the game overall, but just keep it in mind if parts of the story don’t seem to flow together the way they should.

Definitely the strangest thing about the game-yes, even stranger than Knuckles, the flying echidna in knight’s armor-is that after you defeat the knights of the round table and find a way to bypass King Arthur’s Scabbard of immortality, the credits roll. What makes this strange, and this is crucial to your gaming experience, is that the game is only half way over at this point. There is only about 3 hours of gameplay up to that point (it’s a short game), and there are at least 3 more much, much better hours afterwards, but there is also a full credit sequence dividing the two. There’s a chance I would not have caught it and gone on thinking I had just finished the shortest game ever. If your gaming experience does not sync completely with the rest of this review, check your game status: you may have only just started.

Sonic and the Black Knight gets off to a rocky and somewhat ridiculous start, and is likely not what a lot of us are looking for in a Sonic game, but give it time and it will grow on you. It definitely picks up in the later levels, and without giving too much away, there is the requisite Super Sonic level, which is one of the better boss battles. The story and the characters aren’t subtle, and the world isn’t particularly imaginative or worth exploring, but the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, and can provide several hours of good solid fun. It’s probably not worth the full $49.99 price tag, but it’s definitely worth playing if you get the chance. It’s by no stretch the corner stone game the franchise really needs to stay afloat into future generations of gaming, but it’s more fun than not, and in the end not a bad game. It just doesn’t live up to the expectations attached to the name Sonic the Hedgehog.

In 1996, Nintendo released Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars for SNES and decided to have an outside company known for their success in the genre to develop it. Sega must have taken a cue from that, because they went to another popular RPG developer, BioWare, makers of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, for Sega’s first mascot-friendly RPG. While Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is a valiant effort on BioWare’s part, it has several flaws.

The game has a few nods back to Sonic’s past, and not only his video game past. Growing up, I’m sure we all would wake up every Saturday morning to catch the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon. One of Sonic’s notable traits in his cartoon was how much of a complete and utter asshole he was. Sure, he had a friendly side when he needed it, but for the most part, he was snarky, full of himself, and “way past cool.” Bioware titles are notorious for their dialogue sections — where you pick what the protagonist says in conversations, in a return back to the old Sonic cartoon, you can once again have Sonic be an ass.

This is a nice nod back to the old cartoon. In Dreamcast titles, from Sonic Adventure onward, Sonic has become rather flat and undeveloped as a character, and it”Ëœs nice to see what BioWare does with him. Another nice nod to the old cartoon is the return of Dr. Robotnik’s SWATbots. I always thought they were much cooler than those goofy Eggman robots which littered Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog.

The music and graphics are good — nothing really special, but by no means bad.

There is a bittersweet mechanic involving special attacks where one must tap circles on the screen or follow a circle as it glides over a line in a very Elite Beat Agents sort of way. However, the biggest flaw with this mechanic is that unlike EBA, the tapping isn’t in sync with any kind of musical cue – Something that some players might find annoying, and it might take a few tries before one can successfully get the hang of initiating or dodging an attack. I guess this mechanic was added in to make the game more upbeat and “tricky” like some Sonic games are, but in many cases it becomes tedious and repetitive. This could be a turn off to more traditional RPG gamers.