Lets Play / Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

aka: Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 Lets Play

"In the beginning, there was a goon who was very fond of Sonic games. This goon had an idea: play through Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) from start to finish in one sitting..."

—Introduction

In 2008, Something Awful forum member pokecapn decided to make a Let's Play of the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game for the PlayStation 3. For this task, he enlisted the help of fellow goons Kung-Fu Jesus, IlluminatusVespucci, medibot, and NoTimeForSocks (who left early on). Somewhat atypically for a Let's Play, they decided to do the whole game in one sitting.

What follows is the epic struggle between five (later reduced to four) poor souls against one of the worst video games from a big-name franchise ever made. Watch as the crew runs the full gamut of emotions from playful mocking, savage mocking, anger, depression, Sanity Slippage, and more. Marvel at how utterly broken the game in question is.

Can be found here. More recently, it found its way onto pokecapn's YouTube channel.

For a more upbeat, but still very funny, take on a modern Sonic game, there's also their follow-up LP of Sonic Unleashed. They've also done Sonic and the Black Knight, Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I, Sonic Colors, and Sonic Generations, among others — you can find it all here.

Has been (sort of) revisited with the livestream of Sonic 2D, which is based on Sonic's story in this game. More recently, MyNameIsKaz, being the only member of the core posse that was not present during the event, did an audio commentary of the uploaded YouTube videos, which he named Let's Play Let's Play Sonic 2006 2012

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This Let's Play provides examples of:

• Achilles in His Tent: pokecapn, as The Hero (or at least Anti-Hero) of the group, is the one who deals with the majority of the game. But he can only put up with so much of the End of the World before he cracks. He returns after the other members of the posse have completed the level in order to defeat the Final Boss.
• Acrofatic: One of the challenges issued was to explain how Eggman is capable of outrunning Sonic. The essays can be seen here.
• Aerith and Bob: pokecapn, Kung-Fu Jesus, IlluminatusVespucci, medibot... and John Condit. (Subverted when his Something Awful username is revealed to be No Time for Socks.)
• A God Am I: pokecapn's "Yes! I am the Jesus!" in response to Sonic glitching majestically along the edge of a roof.
• Angrish:
  • Sometimes there is no attempt to soften the blow.
    MURDER!
  • Sometimes there is.
    there once was a man from Soleanna who degenerated into making grunts because it's less mouth movement than cursing
  • Inverted when they finish the billiard ball puzzle. Basically, a joy so great that it cannot be expressed in words; rather, it is done in a combination of a scream and an orgasm.
    medibot: ALL GLORY TO THE CACTUS KING!
  • Another beautiful instance is the first run of the Radical Train stage's Mach Speed section. After suffering through a ruthless timed chase beforehand, pokecapn finally loses his grip on his composure and his grasp of the English language. A special mention goes out to the strangled scream of pure undiluted frustration when pokecapn loses his final life and is forced to start the stage over once again.
    Sonic: Uh oh! Gotta speed up!
    pokecapn: UH OH! I'M A TARDASS!
    Goons: ...What?!
  • Invoked beautifully in the third attempt at Radical Train's Mach Speed section, almost right off the bat.
    pokecapn: AAAGH! NRRRGH! GOTTA SPEED... ABAAAAAAH! RRRRRRRRRRRRGH!
  • Also in episode 16, the second time they fail the ball puzzle, even going so far as to chant a circus theme as they go.
  • The "Stupid Room" in Dusty Desert, Shadow's story. pokecapn pretty much just loses it.
• Apocalyptic Log: The Let's Play itself documents the Goons' descent into despair and madness.
• Artistic License – Ornithology: Played for laughs with the Kingdom Valley eagle, referred to as an owl throughout.
• Ass Shove: The guys think Sonic and crew hold onto their Chaos Emeralds by shoving them up their anuses.
  Please spread your butt cheeks!
• Atomic F-Bomb:
  • Sometimes, instead of a cluster, pokecapn will simply let one of these fly.
  • And sometimes both, especially in the case of Sonic's Radical Train stage.
• Audience Participation:
  • Throughout the LP, they issue challenges to the readers of the Lets Play thread.
  • The timed comments on the Viddler pages.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: After getting a game over during the first section, pokecapn hopes that he doesn't have to start from the beginning of the level. A few seconds later and he realises that he has to start from the beginning of the GAME.
• Benevolent Boss: Pokecapn's boss, who let the goons use the office computers for the weekend... though this had the unfortunate effect of making them start the LP in the evening when it really should have been started in the morning.
• Berserk Button: The entire game, for both groups of players. Particularly End of the World and Sonic's Radical Train for pokecapn.
• Big "NO!":
  • The crew need to poke fun at the game to hang on to their sanity.
    Shadow: [falling into a Bottomless Pit] NUUUOOOOAAAAGGHHHH!!!
    pokecapn: He seems to disagree.
    medibot: Why you gotta be such a negative Nancy, Rockman Charcoal?
  • Pokecapn's scream of rage during the third try of Radical Train's Mach Speed section.
• Big "YES!": IlluminatusVespucci's reaction to activating the switch that ends the first section of the Radical Train stage just before the train can hit the bomb. His jubilation is short-lived, however, as the others quickly remind him that he has a Mach Speed section ahead of him.
• Breather Episode:
  • The first two videos of Shadow's story, having been dubbed over due to a failure of some sort with the original audio, lacks the angrish and much cursing present in Sonic's run-through. The group is much calmer since the dubbing was made after the fact, albeit slightly affected from the insanity of the rest of the game.
  • And the majority of Silver's story, which consists of mediocre platforming and physicsing, however less frustrating than Sonic's hellish speed trips.
• Brick Joke:
  • "Hit the bell!"
  • "Maverick!"
• Brief Accent Imitation: A typical feature of Kung-Fu Jesus's commentary.
• Captain Obvious: Every time it happens, the goons crack up with hysterics (except when Silver pointed out that his stages and bosses take too long), and sometimes shout Captain Obvious statements of their own, includng "People die when they're killed!" and "When people run, they move faster!"
  Shadow: The instability of time caused this time-space rift.
  [pokecapn bursts into hysterical laughter]
  Kung-Fu Jesus: [deadpan] Oh, that's all?
  medibot: Yeah, you know, pretty standard end of the world scenario!
  IlluminatusVespucci: The instability caused instability!
  pokecapn: [imitating Shadow as Solid Snake] A time-space rift!
• Call-Back:
  • Kung-Fu Jesus makes a lot of references to God Hand, which he previously did a Let's Play of.
  • One early episode even reveals he has a God Hand ringtone.
  • When they are first given the controls, medibot briefly mimics the "children's show host" narration they did in their Kirby 64 LP.
    IlluminatusVespucci: [through laughter] I'll kill you, I'll kill you. Where's- I need a knife.
• Camera Screw: invoked While the players believe the game's controls are the more pertinent issue, the camera still works against them at many points, flailing around on occasion and often sending their hedgehog back in the direction he came from.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • medibot's "JUNK!" and "CUNTWAGGLE!"
  • pokecapn has a tendency to say "WHY?" or "BRRRRRRRRG" when something goes pear-shaped. In this case, that means most of the game.
• Chekhov's Gun: A minor example: during the hellish final level, in Silver's section, Kung-Fu Jesus points out a spring above a quicksand pit. He expresses his confusion as to why the spring is even there, given that in order to use the spring, the player would need to fall towards the deadly quicksand. Later, during his run of the level, he uses the spring to recover from falling towards the quicksand.
  pokecapn: Maverick.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • medibot, who admittedly may just be like that in general. Mainly through their insistence that each and every little thing in the game has some deep metaphorical and societal meaning. Ironically, they end up the most sane out of all the goons. It also didn't hurt that they actually did get a full eight hours sleep, where the rest only got five.
  • Lampshaded about halfway through. Kung-Fu Jesus calls medibot on the phone to see if they're up for more Sonic '06, and worries they might be... affected:
    Kung-Fu Jesus: He sounded really out of it.
    pokecapn: As he always does?
  • Kung-Fu Jesus doesn't get off the hook either, as he attempts to articulate several extended metaphors (one comparing Sonic 2006 to Harry Potter in a weird way) that not even pokecapn and the others get, despite knowing medibot.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right:
  • medibot tends to articulate precisely what makes the game so infuriating.
    medibot: Mario Galaxy did not have a perfect camera, but it had a pretty good camera and it, you know, maybe didn't have perfect controls, but it had pretty good controls, so when the game says to me, "Alright, here is a clever challenge involving things that may temporarily alter the way you control your characters," I say, "Okay. That's fair. I'll give it a shot." Now, I might not get it my first try, I might not get it my tenth try, but at no point do I feel like I have been asked to do something that is simply unreasonable. This game is unreasonable.
  • They're also the first to notice that the Soleanna Battle music is very similar to a song from Mega Man 2. It takes the remainder of the posse a few minutes of listening to the song before they make the connection.
• Cluster F-Bomb: There's at least one instance of a literal cluster F-bomb, where pokecapn is so frustrated, "Fuck" is the only word he's able to say.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Condit, although he left pretty quickly.
  • Kung-Fu Jesus, with emphasis on the deadpan.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • You can literally hear them cross it when Kung-Fu Jesus begins chanting song lyrics.
  • pokecapn crosses it a bit earlier than that, which is to be expected since he was the one stuck playing the game for most of the run. See 10-Minute Retirement below. When he says that line, there is (for once) no trace of anger in his voice, simply resignation.
• Determinator:
  • Whenever pokecapn gets a game over and he even thinks about just going to another hedgehog's episode, the other goons loudly shout him down and tell him to continue with the current hedgehog's story. They keep persevering even in the face of Sanity Slippage, horrendously broken levels, and near-impossible-to-surmount brick walls like End of the World. Truly, the last video "Rest easy, heroes" is well-named.
  • In the last episode, one of them contemplates quitting if they can't finish End of the World in their next two tries. What follows is three voices simultaneously yelling "NO."
  • IlluminatusVespucci, in particular, seems to refuse to let the game wear him down, despite its best efforts.
    IllVes: [referring to the final level of the game] If [pokecapn] won't do it over and over again, I'll do it over and over again!
• Dissonant Serenity: In the penultimate video, Kung-Fu Jesus starts chanting lyrics in a monotone voice. It's quite jarring, really. Especially after all the "FUCK"s.
• Engineered Public Confession: Narrowly averted, when they call out for Chinese.
  Condit: Maybe we should disconnect the mic before you give the Internet your credit card number?
• Even Sonic Nuts Have Standards: pokecapn's reaction to the Game Informer review.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • They complained when Shadow's bike would 'randomly' explode while chasing Eggman's train. They never noticed it had a life bar that wasn't exactly hidden on the screen.
  • During multiple parts of Silver's episode, pokecapn doesn't allow the action gauge to refill before he starts hovering or tries to pick up objects. At one point, this results in him dying.
    IllVes: You don't have any boost!
    pokecapn: I never notice that until, like, 10 seconds after you say it.
• Fan Nickname: All in-universe examples:
  • The gang consistently refers to the main trio as Rockman Blue/Classic (Sonic), Rockman Charcoal (Shadow), and Rockman Chrome/Steel (Silver). Mephiles is also usually called "Mephistopheles".
  • medibot dubs the giant magma lizards "Thrill Lizards" after seeing how they flail around when Silver picks them up with psychokinesis.
  • As mentioned under Artistic License – Ornithology, the eagle in Kingdom Valley is referred to almost exclusively as an "owl".
  • Princess Elise is called "Mary Sue" several times.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the comments on the video, about the insanity to come. Not only that, but if one chooses to watch the Let's Play on Viddler, a quick look at the stream bar at the bottom of the video will showcase clusters of comments at certain points — a sure sign that either something very good or something very bad will happen at those moments. Considering which game they're playing, it's almost always the latter.
  • Also, in the two redubbed videos, some of the things foreshadow what happens in the later videos.
  • An early video shows pokecapn allowed to 'redo' a set piece and someone comments, "Since when is Sonic the Hedgehog forgiving?" The rest of the playthrough is one unforgiving torture session for the present posse.
• Follow the Leader: The game is accused of doing this on several occasions by the various participants, with Final Fantasy X, Super Mario Sunshine, Metal Gear Solid, and Half-Life 2 being the main games they felt similarities to. They even accuse Sega of ripping themselves off, with the number of levels taken pretty transparently from the original Sonic Adventure.invoked
• Gag Dub: An erasure of the audio at the beginning of Shadow's Story forced them to provide the voices for the now completely silent cutscenes, resulting in such hilarity as a a very deep-voiced Rouge, a Solid Snake ripoff Shadow, and Liquid Snake as Mephistophiles. Sadly, none of them thought to follow up Shadow's line of "Who are you?" with "I'm you! I'm your shadow!" at the time.
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • They manage to hold on to their sanity for most of Sonic's section of the game... And then they get to the 3 trials. About 19 minutes into the video, Sonic is killed by bending lasers that come out of nowhere. The goons react to this by chanting insane lyrics in synchronicity. "It's a LASER!" After this, insanity kicks in.
  • Although another example occurs earlier on in Sonic's story, during the infamous Radical Train level. Having endured a particularly frustrating mission involving destroying bombs on railroad tracks, pokecapn is relieved to progress onto the next section. Lo and behold, the remainder of the level is the infamous Mach Speed section. The goons' screaming is frequently mixed in with hysterical laughter.
    Pokecapn: (Sonic runs into a bridge and falls sideways to his death) Cha-FUCK?! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
    (all the goons laugh hysterically)
    Medibot: Zip Zop Zoom!
    Kung-Fu Jesus: The train... is late! (Goons join him) The train... is late!
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Pokecapn did not enjoy playing this game.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": Parodied.
  I'm gonna go ahead and buy — see if I can buy something that gives me access to cracks.
  Ha ha! You said 'access'!
• Homing Laser: Used by some of Eggman's mechs throughout the game, much to the frustration, confusion and despair of the posse. One particular instance is chronicled under the Go Mad from the Revelation entry above.
• Hope Spot:
  • The goons enter the home stretch of the game, titled Last Episode, after struggling to beat the last boss of Silver's story. They have a hearty laugh at the game's ridiculous cutscenes (and particularly Eggman's emerald scouter glasses) and seem to be in renewed spirit. Then they spend two hours struggling through End of the World, crossing the Despair Event Horizon in the process.
  • To name a specific example during that unbearable stage, on their third go, as they go through Shadow's level (the final one of the stage), they end up with seven lives, and even after all of that...they still fail to make it in that go.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Invoked at one point when Kung-Fu Jesus was explaining why pokecapn didn't have to worry about getting hit by enemies.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • The implications of this prompted them to issue a challenge to create the worst Sonic fanart ever:
    If Sonic and Elise's love on the battlefield truly bloomed, there would be an inevitable conclusion. The challenge is for you to draw fanart of Princess Elise giving birth to a hedgehog (specifically, her and Sonic's child). With this, the thread about the worst Sonic game will have created the worst Sonic fan art.
  • The second challenge they issued is even worse.
    The challenge is for you to find the worst Sonic fan art.
  • TV Tropes advisory: don't try and look up the worst Sonic fan art, madness lies therein.
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: medibot wants Elise's stuff very close to the end.
• Large Ham: While pokecapn is mainly angry at the game and IlluminatusVespucci remains the voice of reason, Kung-Fu Jesus and medibot deliver this trope in spades.
  Eggman's ship: Thrust increasing.
  Kung-Fu Jesus: [grunts loudly]
  medibot: Thrust!
  Kung-Fu Jesus: THRUST!
  Eggman's ship: Course plotted.
  Kung-Fu Jesus: Course plotted into her penis!
  medibot: Falcon CROTCH!
• Laughing Mad:
  • What Kung-Fu Jesus was reduced to.
  • Parts of the Radical Train section are accompanied by this, and a lot of screaming.
• Left the Background Music On: Used to censor their address and Kung-Fu Jesus's phone number.
• Literal-Minded: During the Knights and Knaves sidequest, the "Lieutenant" tells Sonic "There are five soldiers, including me" and to "talk to all of them". pokecapn states "well, you're right in front of me", talks to the Lieutenant first, and bypasses the puzzle for an instant S-rank.
• Loads and Loads of Loading:
  • pokecapn calculated the total loading times in his group's videos spent en route to beating the game. The total result? Eleven point eighty-eight percent of the entire game. Over two hours.
  • One viddler user decided to count them all. There were 539, or one loading screen every two minutes and fifteen seconds of footage.
• Madness Mantra: At the very end, Medibot begins chanting "JUNK!" over and over, usually at a stupidly-caused death.
  medibot: Junk.
  Kung-Fu Jesus: What? I couldn't jump.
  medibot: No, I said JUNK.
• Malevolent Architecture:
  • In Kingdom Valley, while the goons were on the stairs of a tower, the stairs fall without warning, causing Sonic's death in an I Wanna Be the Guy like fashion.
  • The pillars in the hall of the billiard ball puzzle constantly interfered with the goons' attempts to get the ball in the hole.
• Mathematician's Answer: This is another one of medibot's quirks.
  Condit: "Pursue the Egg Carrier"? ...So is it a battleship or a carrier?
  medibot: Yes.
• Mundane Made Awesome: After the deliriously bad events that had preceded it, the posse pounced upon the first genuinely good concept introduced in at least a few hours: Dr. Robotnik's glasses are scouters.
• Oh, Crap!: At the beginning of Silver's Dusty Desert stage:
  Kung-Fu Jesus: We didn't save. We have one life, and we didn't save.
  [twelve minutes later...]
  pokecapn: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-
• Only Sane Man:
  • medibot. Well, only person with some shreds of sanity by the end of the LP.
  • Illuminatus Vespucci also manages to remain relatively stable during the game's hellish final sections. Relative, of course, to pokecapn's rage and misery and KFJ's bizarre chanting.
• Orphaned Punchline: "...Ideas!"
• Parrot Exposition: In keeping up with the Shadow/Solid Snake Running Gag, the goons will have Shadow mimic Snake's habit of repeating the last words of the person he's speaking to.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Several coined by medibot over the course of the LP.
  pokecapn: And I lost my ability to homing attack... why?!
  medibot: 'Cause he hit you with a... with a chuffleguff.
  pokecapn: I was not hit until I hit the ground.
  Condit: It's because it was a chuffleguff. It doesn't actually hit you. It just makes you junk.
  Kung-Fu Jesus: Oh, yeah. "Chuffleguff" means "Game Breaking Bugs." The game breaking in the other way, you know, the bad way. ^note What (probably) actually happened is that the projectile that nearly hit Sonic acted as solid ground for a split-second, causing him to very briefly stand on nothing, uncurl, and then fall down as the game realized he wasn't standing on anything, before he had the chance to jump, curl up, and homing attack. The end result — Sonic drops like a rock into the lava.
• The Power of Friendship: The final level is only defeated once various members of the group determine their individual strengths and start passing the controller around from section to section. It's enough to make the viewer believe in the real super power of teamwork!
• Precision F-Strike: medibot delivers a few during the course of the game (including a Cluster F-Bomb during Silver's billiard ball puzzle.) It's a little jarring considering how calm and sane they were compared to the other goons.
  medibot: Attention game designers: FUCK! SHIT! CUNTWAGGLE! Love, medibot.
  Ill-Ves: Cuntwaggle?
  medibot: You fucking heard me! Cuntwaggle!
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: During the infamous Radical Train Mach Speed section.
  pokecapn: THIS GAME! CANNOT! BE! CONTROLLED! BY HUMAN REFLEXES ALONE!
• Punctuated Pounding: This is to add on top of other angrish in the game.
  This is junk!... J! U! N! K! JUNK!
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: A significant portion of the posse's slog through The End of the World is made up of medibot's "The Reasons Sonic 2006 Sucks" Speech. It gets to the extent that medibot actually sounds somewhat angry.
  medibot: I think, really, what the root of it is, is that we are dealing with an obstacle that alters your controls in a game where the controls are already inadequate. If the controls were tight, and this were really the first thing in the game that says, "Ha, ha! Now I am messing with your controls!" they'd be, perhaps, frustrating, but maybe bearable. (...) It's that you do not feel that, in this game, you are in complete control of your character at any time.
• Rule 34: Deliberately invoked so that the "worst Sonic game would produce the worst Sonic fanart ever."
• Rule of Symbolism: One of the goons put together a death reel of Sonic's branch of the story. It ends with a clip of a train wreck.
• Running Gag:
  • Whenever the gameplay mechanics are being particularly uncooperative, medibot shouts "PHYSICS!"
  • Part of the way through the LP, they start using "physics" as a verb, an early sign of their Sanity Slippage.
  • They also refer to Sonic, Shadow, and Silver as "Rockman Blue/Classic, Rockman Charcoal, and Rockman Steel".
  • There's also the recurrent comments on the PS3 version's inexplicable lack of gondolas.
  • Multiple references to David Blaine, the magician. Notably, the phrase "Alright, these guys..." comes up several times, referring to one of Blaine's sessions as a street magician where he'd scope out passers-by to perform for and tell the camera who he chose.
  • Everything is the Iblis Trigger. Including pokecapn.
  • Referring to the Kingdom Valley eagle as an owl.
    • They continued this gag when they LP'd the 2D remake, veering this into Insistent Terminology.
      [Sonic reaches the eagle]
      pokecapn: Wanna touch the owl?
      KFJ: [laughing] That's a bald eagle.
      pokecapn: No, that's an owl.
      medibot: Touch the owl.
      ...
      pokecapn: Look, you didn't notice these things back in 2008. Why are you noticing them now??
      KFJ: Huh? 'Cause I wasn't paying attention in 2008.
      pokecapn: They're OWLS.
      KFJ: All right, all right.
      medibot: Definitely owls.
    • Averted at one point during the final level, where they start addressing it as an eagle when dispensing gameplay advice, showing how frustrated they are to the point of taking the level seriously.
  • medibot being the original voice actor of every character in the game.
  • State transitions.
  • KFJ always asking about the blue "stun boxes", only to be shot down by pokecapn.
    Kung-Fu Jesus: Whoa, what was that bright light?
    pokecapn: Don't know, don't care.
  • "Tech", said repeatedly, pronounced as "tetch".
  • medibot's love for birch beer.
  • The phrase "fucking ponderous".
  • Flash Man's theme comes up a lot, considering how they noticed it sounds strikingly similar to one of the game's mission themes. They even begin singing it at times as part of their many Madness Mantras.
  • Everything related to White Acropolis is Metal Gear Solid. They call the level itself "Shadow Moses Island", they dub over Shadow's lines with a bad Solid Snake voice affectation, and the titles of the videos involve the title "The Other Shadow Moses Island Incident", adding another "Other" each time they have to visit the stage.
• San Dimas Time: This is discussed during a particularly inane plot point.
  Sonic: If we don't return in time, Elise will die on board Eggman's battleship.
  Kung-Fu Jesus: What? If you don't return in time? What?! But... you can return any time you want, that's the thing, you can go back to whenever you want!
  IlluminatusVespucci: People never seem to realize this when they have time machines.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Over the course of the whole playthrough (medibot: "Who... in their right mind...would frost a CAKE... with their BUTT?"), but emphasized extremely well in the five videos detailing their attempts to get through End Of The World, which are named after the Five Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It eventually gets to the point where Kung-Fu Jesus starts reciting song lyrics in monotone.
  • The crew even start with a reasonable amount of optimism. This has eroded by the time they reach Radical Train, and then... things got worse.
  • "ALL THE BACON IN THE WORLD COULDN'T SAVE YOU NOW!!! 'CAUSE! IT'S A LASER! IT'S A LASER! IT'S A LASER!"
    • The period characterized as "Depression" actually occupies part of "Bargaining" and "Acceptance" as well. You can tell where it is because for the entirety of this period, all four guys are dead silent.
    • It's important to note, at this point, that the guys started this far later than any sane and rational person should have based on their respective schedules. As a result, by the end of the LP, they'd been up for a few hours over a day with only about five hours of sleep and one or two hours dedicated to breaks.
• Sanity Slippage Song:
  • Eventually, pokecapn takes to blaring out an ironic, irritated, a cappella rendition of Flash Man's theme whenever the gameplay gets especially boring and/or annoying. This happens a lot in Silver's desert stages.
  • KFJ's Shatneresque, spoken-word "singing" during the End of the World levels. Then subverted when they finally clear the level and all the Goons joyously join in.
• Scare Chord: Parodied in part 9 of the LP.
  pokecapn: Collect information about- duh-nuuh!
  medibot: Visit the- duh-nuuh!
  Kung-Fu Jesus: ...I just don't get why there are sailboats everywhere and you can't- duh-nuuh!
• Schmuck Bait: The reason pokecapn started this LP in the first place was because he heard the game was bad from reviewers, and given their history of reviewing Sonic games, didn't believe it could really be that bad. However, in pokecapn's own words, he got a train wreck.
• Squee: The Goons' reaction to Eggman activating his high-tech glasses to locate the Chaos Emeralds.
• Shout-Out: Several throughout, from Star Trek: The Animated Series to Neon Genesis Evangelion to Look Around You to The Big O to DragonForce to a very subtle one towards Zero Punctuation after they beat the game.
  medibot: Ten years ago, Welches' Jelly-Jam had a—
  IlluminatusVespucci: "Jelly-Jam"?
  medibot: Yeah, I went to a camp there once.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • invoked The goons note that one of the battle tunes sounds like Flash Man's theme from Mega Man 2, and the Kingdom Valley music sounds like it was lifted from Chrono Cross.
  • And a chunk of the Jungle theme is ripped straight from the Bowser stages from Super Mario 64. Not to mention a part of that music was used in Crisis City. Which the goons didn't take note of until they played the remake of the level in their LP of Sonic Generations.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Quoted by KFJ in part 11, in a Shout-Out to the Trope Namer.
  Kung-Fu Jesus: You can't just have characters say how they feel! That Makes Me Feel Angry!
• Take Up My Controller: The three times when pokecapn absolutely refuses to continue playing the game (namely during Sonic's Radical Train stage, Silver's Dusty Desert stage, and End Of The World), the supporting Goons pick up the controller (despite having not nearly as much playtime as pokecapn in either case) and attempt to beat the level while he cools down, with IlluminatusVespucci outright refusing to stop until the game is completed at End Of The World.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In three different levels in Sonic's story, Sonic or Tails warn the player about falling into lava/water/bottomless pits. All three times, the goons manage to fall off within seconds.
  • Kung-Fu Jesus at one point declares "We've reached that time during which the game has really done most of what it can do in terms of being awful." Immediately upon saying this, an explosive crate flung by an orange Time Dimension blasts pokecapn out of the air, and shortly thereafter he tries to jump to the next platform only to be kept hovering between instant death from a black Time Dimension and instant death from the quicksand.
    Illuminatus Vespucci: Well, that was kind of new.
  • At one point, the goons state that "anything is better than that nightmare", followed by a hideously broken Mach Speed Zone.
  • Right before starting Shadow's Dusty Desert, pokecapn realizes he hasn't saved. medibot pipes in with "You'll be fine, it's just a desert level." You can imagine what ensues after that. ^note  For those not in the know - Dusty Desert is considered That One Level in Shadow's story, due to the terrible hovercraft section at the start, and the rest of the stage being the longest Marathon Level in the game, all culminating in a platforming section that's easy to die in. Lo and behold...
• 10-Minute Retirement: pokecapn, thrice. The first time during the Radical Train Mach Speed Zone, the second during the infamous ball puzzle in Silver's Dusty Desert, and the third time during End of the World.
  pokecapn: I'm done. I'm done. I can't play a game this fundamentally broken. This is completely done.
• The Power of Friendship: The Posse coming together after Pokecapn's breakdown and figuring out which of them is good at which stages. It works.
• Theme Music Power-Up: The Last Episode ended up being the single most difficult and harrowing segment of the game—seven consecutive levels with only five lives and less than half the checkpoints you could reasonably expect, rendered into a virtual Platform Hell due to teleporting instant death black holes. It eventually reduced the group into mostly silence except for Kung-Fu Jesus chanting song lyrics. When they got to the final and second most difficult segment—Shadow's—Kung-Fu Jesus had gotten to the lyrics to "Down Under". When they manage to finish Shadow's segment and defeat the level once and for all, Kung-Fu Jesus stops chanting the song, and the entire group finish singing it together.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: KFJ has little patience for Omega.
  Omega: What is Eggman up to? Who is Mephiles?
  Kung-Fu Jesus: He's Satan, you bitch!
• Throw the Dog a Bone: In Part 11, after clearing the disastrous Radical Train and beating the Egg Genesis, they agreed that it was actually a very interesting boss fight and by far the most fun they had with the game up to that point.
• Title Drop: "The End of the World" section of the pokecapn LP is titled after the chorus from Rocket Man by Elton John, which Kung-Fu Jesus starts to chant à la William Shatner at the 1978 Science Fiction Awards as they near utter oblivion.
  Kung-Fu Jesus: And I think it's gonna be a long, long time. 'Til... touchdown... brings me 'round again to find.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • The goons make a point of ordering General Tso's Chicken, as it will make them "full of ideas". Kung-Fu Jesus ends up not liking the chicken; Illuminatus Vespucci isn't too fond of it either.
  • medibot mentions Outback Steakhouse and Blooming Onions multiple times throughout the play.
• Tuneless Song of Madness: The team exhibits pronounced Sanity Slippage as the bugs, badly-implemented controls and difficulty spikes slowly take their toll, eventually forcing some of the players to resort to song as a coping mechanism: pokecapn himself takes to blaring out an a cappella rendition of Flash Man's theme whenever boring gameplay begins to get on his last nerve, while KFJ's journey through the End Of The World level is punctuated by him reciting the lyrics to various songs in a dead monotone, concluding with "Land Down Under." And after finally winning this section, the entire group bursts into song.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: One mandatory side quest in Sonic 2006 is a very out-of-place Knights and Knaves logic puzzle, where the player gets clues from various guards to find the specific guard who can unlock a particular door. The twist is that the guard in question is the same guard who sends you on the side quest in the first place. Pokecapn and his friends, playing the game for the first time, get the highest possible score on this side quest just by talking to the guard over and over and barely paying attention to what he says.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • medibot constantly trying to fit game mechanics, locations, characters, and plot elements from other games into this one (i.e. explaining that the meter in the bottom right corner of the screen is a tension gauge and expressing concern that when they get to the end of the game they'll actually need to have collected all the silver medals to race Wizpig.)
  • In the first Sonic mission, they literally roll a d20 for Sonic's Gather Information check.
  • While hunting for keys as Rouge, they admit^note They had to re-record commentary the audio for nearly an hour of footage due to technical mishaps that they were using entirely the wrong genre savviness, pretending the game was like Sonic Adventure 2 and searching for secrets, rather than following the footpaths to clusters of enemies and opening the guarded boxes.
  • medibot takes over for pokecapn during the mach speed section of Sonic's Radical Train stage. The line below is the first thing they say.
    medibot: Oh, my God, I'm so not ready, I've never done a mach speed, help, how do I ... how do I inhale, what ... Do I just press down to copy their power?

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"...such crap."