Sonic Adventure is a very attractive looking game graphically. There are times when you will literally stare in awe at the speed and intensity of this game. In the old days of Genesis and the Master System, Sega coined a fancy buzzphrase "Blast Processing." Well this game really deserves to be associated with the concept of "Blast Processing," because it really moves at the speed of light. I just love to play this game for the utter speed at which Sonic goes though these levels. It takes the speed of it's predecessors on the Genesis and translates it into 3-D imaculately. There are levels where you will watch Sonic zoom down an a twisting and turning corridor or rollercoster track and he will bounce off a bumper and soar thousands of feet in the air to land another twisting and turning track then bounce off about 5 bumbers at blazingly fast speed and then end up running down the side of a skyscraper with the camera at over the shoulder view as he dodges obstacles and grabs rings. Then of course there's a 3-D translation of my favorite Stage from Sonic III thrown in for good measure, where he's on a Snowboard rushing down the side of a mountain at undescribable speed with an avalance chasing him. It is a paragon of graphical beauty in effect and intensity. 1080 Snowboarding doesn't hold a candle to this. This game also include some FMV's and they look sharp too. There is some room for improvement in the detail of some of the environments and characters considering the capabilities of the Dreamcast but overall its detailed enough to make it immersive in nature.

The control for all of the characters except maybe Amy and Big is very good. It is easy to just pick up and play. Each character has their own gameplay features that make them worth using. The game has many varying scenarios that you have to adapt to like flying a plane and shooting down bogeys or racing down a track with a car or being inside a pinball machine. What's amazing is that extremely fast characters like Sonic can still be controlled at the such great speeds. Sometimes though it gets so fast that the camera doesn't catch up properly and you lose your bearings. There were a few glitches in terms of the camera getting stuck behind walls and this caused me to die by falling off the edge or through a hole in the gaming environment because I couldn't see what I was doing. Usually, the only thing that kills you is falling out of the bottom of the gaming environment or down a hole which is sometimes easy to do because the angle of view sometimes distorts the distance between platforms or ledges and you make an incorrect jump. Overall, there are only minor flaws with the camera and most of the time it doesn't pose a problem.

I've got to say that soundtrack for this game really kicks ass. I mean, the hard edged guitar with wah-wah effects and rock/techno/big band really sets the mood for this game. Running at full speed down a twisting and turning corridor listening to in-your-face loud CD quality music dripping with heavy guitar is almost heaven to say the least. It seems that each character had their own "Theme song" so to speak. The sound effects are appropriate to the specific circumstances although there was some distortion when they seemed to have voice, heavy sound effects, and music simulaneous although it may have been that my TV couldn't handle the audio range of all these overlapped sounds but this happened only once that I am aware of during Sonic's flashback with Tikal when the Giant Emerald was on fire and she sealed Choas within the emerald. The voice overs for the characters are a little corny but appropriate considering the subject matter of the game. The main aspect that gets this game a 10 in this category is the intense background music. It really rocks!

The game itself isn't that difficult. Like I said before, the only way you die is by either falling off the edge into oblivion or losing all your rings and getting hit without any rings. Overall, your goal is to complete the objective of the stage to progress to the rest of the storyline and the next stage. Some character's use the same stage but must naviagate different parts. The creators of the game threw in an Emblem Quest for added replay, but once you get though the game with every character, it's kind of anticlimactic to get all the Emblems, there's no kind of special reward or ending. You would think that they would figure these things out by now. If you put a really hard goal to achieve in a game, make a kick ass ending or super ability. I kind of was a little bummed that I couldn't play all the stages as Supersonic except the last one.