Sonic Riders

Sonic Riders (ソニックライダーズ Sonikku Raidāzu?) is a hoverboard-racing video game spin-off produced by Sega and developed by their second-party, United Game Artists for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC. It is the fourth racing game in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, preceded by Sonic Drift, Sonic Drift 2 and Sonic R. This time, the characters ride on hoverboards called "Extreme Gear".

Sonic Riders was revealed by Famitsu on 7 September 2005 prior to 2005's Tokyo Game Show. The game was released to start off the 15th anniversary of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. This game introduces five new playable characters, the Babylon Rogues and the E-10000 series. A sequel to Sonic Riders, entitled as Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, has been released on the Wii and PlayStation 2 systems. A second sequel, entitled Sonic Free Riders, was released on 4 November 2010 for the Xbox 360's hands-free Kinect peripheral.

Gameplay[]

The game is played in its entirety using hover boards, which function largely like skateboards. Players must race seven other competitors on a total of 16 tracks, 9 of which must be unlocked through progress in the story mode, and two of which must be unlocked by winning Gold in each World Grand Prix (5 tracks per Grand Prix). Each individual character has different statistics, altering their performance slightly in races.

A key component of the game is the Air Tank, displayed in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Air serves as the fuel for Extreme Gear and is depleted gradually as the race goes on and by certain maneuvers. These include cornering, allowing the player to round sharp turns with ease and building tension before a jump, which involves using Air to propel the player higher off of ramps. If a player runs out of Air, their character will start running, putting them at several disadvantages; they can't boost, attack, corner easily or use charged jumps. After going off ramps, players can perform various Air Tricks, which refill the Air gauge according to their rating.

In the Story Mode, players take part in consecutive races, one after the other, based on the storyline, in order to defeat the Babylon Rogues or the Heroes and win the Grand Prix.