Sonic is an interesting and unique character in more ways than can be counted. Most prominent of these, today, is his omnipresence within the gaming industry. Sonic games can be found on every console since Sega’s Genesis and PC, mobile phones and gaming devices, and in character collection series like Super Smash Bros. and Mario & Sonic. His most recent leap over the walls of uncommon platforms is the announce of a Sonic Lost World PC port. It’s to be made available on Steam, who is offering Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed for free with pre-orders.
Lost World is one of many old Sonic games getting the PC port treatment. In the words of John Clark, VP of Commercial Publishing for SEGA Europe:
We’re delighted to be able to bring Sonic Lost World to PC. This is the latest in a string of high quality PC ports of past SEGA titles that we will be building on in the coming months and years.
Clearly Sega has no intention of ending this PC port trend. In this way, though, Lost World joins the very limited roster of games made for both PC and Wii U. Games developed for PCs have, since consoles became mainstream, generally had something about them that made PCs an ideal platform. This category includes games like Civilization and Cities: Skylines and The Sims that require the precise mouse and keyboard inputs a computer provides. In most other cases, creating your shooter, for example, for both Xbox and PlayStation will yield access to both markets in a fraction of the work, but Nintendo’s movement away from traditional controller setups and input methods has made most parallel ports more expensive to make than the Wii U’s low console sales will return in the long run. This means that Wii U is even further isolated from the content created for literally every other platform.
One exception to this phenomenon is Sonic. He’s been on more consoles than most characters will ever be able to claim, and Lost World is just one more example of his ever present one-but-I’m-told-there-are-two eyed gaze.
More to the point, though: set at $29.99, you can pre-order the PC port on Steam now and purchase and download it when it’s released on November 2nd, 2015.