"Hi there! I'm Sonic the Hedgehog! You're going to play in MY schoolhouse!"
Sonic's Schoolhouse is a 1996 PC Edutainment Game developed by BAP Interactive and published by Orion Interactive. Here, Sonic owns a schoolhouse and teaches kids math, reading, and spelling from kindergarten to 4th grade.
The player moves around in a first person perspective similar to Wolfenstein 3-D (although there are varying angles of walls and textures on the ground/ceiling a la Doom, there is absolutely no variation in height in the levels), finding objects in the various rooms and matching them with the proper blackboards. Along the way, you can pick up Sonic icons to play one of two minigames (one has you collecting rings while the other is a memory matching game with statues) and school buses for field trips (you can watch educational videos about various animals).
Click on me for help!:
- Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Going against Sonic tradition, where characters invert this trope by wearing nothing but shoes (and gloves), all of the students are wearing full outfits (save the kangaroo, who's bottomless), but not a single one of them is wearing shoes. Due to the first-person viewpoint, though, you largely can't tell this outside of two-player.
- The Cameo: Tails and Knuckles only appear as pictures hung up in the walls of the school and as statues in the memory match minigame.
- Canon Foreigner: An anthropomorphic bull, crocodile, elephant, hippopotamus, kangaroo, monkey, pig, polar bear, rabbit and zebra appear as students, and are not mentioned in other media.
- Civilized Animal: The students. The school bus videos describe the animals they are based on as if they are the same.
- Dolled-Up Installment: The graphics, gameplay and even Sonic's voice already make this pretty much a Sonic game In Name Only, but people have dug through the game's files and discovered video files of a host who would be a talking clock; it was later revealed that this wasn't going to be a Sonic game, but an original IP.
- Drives Like Crazy: Sonic is apparently driving the bus used for the field trips. As you can guess, he isn't any slower on the road.
- Edutainment Game: The educational videos on the school bus describe the animal behavior of the animals the students are based on.
- First-Person Shooter: Except the only shooting involves "shooting" objects toward their respective blackboards.
- Furry Confusion: The educational videos describe the real animals the students are based on as if they are the same species as the anthropomorphic characters, without making a clear distinction between the two.
- Harmless Villain: Robotnik and his Badniks only serve to steal answers and, in one schoolyard game, rings from you.
- In Name Only: Has almost nothing to do with the Sonic series aside from Sonic himself appearing and a bunch of Sonic artwork hung up inside the school. The only other Sonic-related things to appear include cameos from Tails and Knuckles, along with Buzz Bombers, Motobugs, and Robotnik himself appearing as enemies in the schoolyard games.
- Nonstandard Character Design: Sonic's simple, cartoonish appearance contrasts heavily with those of the animal students' more detailed and realistic character designs.
- Not Even Bothering with the Accent: One "field trip" movie about kangaroos in Australia features a woman voicing one of the 'roos with an accent that sounds more British than anything.
- Offscreen Teleportation: It's easy to get this impression from how Sonic is present in every room, particularly when trying to open the doors to the minigames without the passes only for him to shoo you away from the other side.
- Recycled Soundtrack: The title screen features the song played in the slot machine bonus stage of Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
- Vocal Dissonance: Sonic's voice is noticeably higher-pitched here than in any other media.
- A Winner Is You: If you get all ten answers correct, you are treated to a short cutscene that sets at night outside which consists of Sonic holding up two sparklers while the sound of children cheering plays, followed by Sonic declaring "You got all ten right! Great job!".
"Sorry you're leaving. You're gonna come back soon, right?"
