LogFAQs > #979918261

My attempt as being unbiased as someone who played them way after the fact is that it's kinda complicated. Like, no they're both way too janky in multiple aspects to hold up today at all, and even at the time those issues would've still been a problem, but there's more to their appeal than just low standards for Sonic games. They were full of sound, ambitious, and ahead-of-their-time ideas that were let down by the execution being so sketchy.

Obviously it's natural to compare them to platformers of the time and see how bad they look because of the mechanics, but if you compare them to the more modern AAA story-driven single player action adventure paradigm, they're just like a really, really primitive version of that, and it's sort of impressive considering what they were working with. For '98/'01, I can see how they were impressive to anyone who could overlook how they actually played.