Sonic Heroes is not a good video game choice for you if you are:

a) prone to carsickness, or;
b) easily startled, or;
c) drunk.

Please do not take this warning lightly. It is serious. If you play Sonic Heroes on a wobbly stomach, you will feel terrible, and your lunch will bubble northward, and you will have to make an emergency run to the corner store in search of Febreeze. This will make you unhappy and will sour you on video games in general and even if you are a big jerk you do not deserve that sorry fate. Know when to say "no," is all.

Sonic Heroes is a new game starring Sonic the Hedgehog. You may remember him from the early 1990s, when he was all the rage and appeared frequently in TV commercials. Sonic is blue. He can run very quickly. He consists of a pair of very skinny legs and a pair of very skinny arms attached to a gigantic oversized head, which resembles a Power Rangers helmet. He is good-natured and helpful but desperately wants to think of himself as a rebel and an outcast.

He is, in other words, just like those boys from the Pizza Pockets commercials. He is eager for your approval. He is even more eager for your disapproval. He is monstrously, grotesquely, embarrassingly annoying. Won't he please shut up? No he will not. This is another reason not to play the game in a mood of anything other than high-spirited sobriety. To do otherwise is to risk an appearance on CityPulse at Six, covering your face in your hands while peace officers remove you and your bullet-riddled TV set from your home.

The Sonic the Hedgehog games have always been all about running really, really fast. If you have never seen one in action, imagine the classic Mario jumping-and-smashing-crates-open idiom, and then imagine it with the accelerator pushed all the way to the floor. Sonic's games are a kind of hypercaffienated alternative to traditional "platforming." The new one is more of that, with a few flourishes tossed in for variety's sake. It features Sonic himself, of course, and it also features Tails and Knuckles, two of Sonic's pals. Tails is a little fox thingy with two tails, which he can spin like the rotors on a helicopter. Knuckles has pointy things on his knuckles, which he can use to smash things.

As the three friends go adventuring, they frequently find themselves in situations only one of them is equipped to solve. For example, they will come to a great big stone door, and only Knuckles will be able to knock it down. Occasionally they come to cliff faces, and Tails must fly the three of them up to the top. They will be attacked by evil giant robots, and only Sonic's quick running will get them out of danger in time. That sort of thing.

The basic idea is a sort of high-speed, on-the-fly teamwork. You always have three critters under your command, but at any point you can change which critter is in the lead. What it mostly boils down to is learning which formations of leading and following are best for which tasks, and then learning to hit the buttons that put Knuckles in the lead as smoothly as you hit the buttons that make you jump and punch. It is easier than it sounds.

The play arenas here are not as wide-open as you may be used to. Sonic is all about speed, remember, and good speed really demands a good race track. Accordingly, most of the action consists of blazing along elevated roadways and stopping when necessary to beat up evil robots or fly to safety. It is a bit like a racing game with an overdeveloped sense of aggression, which makes for a deeply lurchy play experience. You go from zero to 60 to 120 back to zero, and then you do it again ten or twelve times per minute. It is really a lot of fun, but it is not for people who can't handle reading in the car.

There are a bunch of other characters here too, assembled into three other teams. You can take them on adventures very, very much like the one for Sonic and his pals. They are stupid and doe-eyed and there are too many of them. Nobody knows why they are in the game. Ponder the question all you like, but try not to get angry with your TV.