Somari (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
1,390A playthrough of Hummer Team's 1994 unlicensed platformer for the NES, Somari.
Ah, the infamous Somari. For any of you that somehow might have not seen this one before, it's an unlicensed "port" of Sonic the Hedgehog for the NES starring Mario. It was the product of the Hummer Team (widely known for their unlicensed NES fighting games, including Street Fighter II and Kart Fighter, and for sharing a name with an awkward fellatio euphemism), and is rumored to be based on reverse-engineered code derived from the original Genesis/Mega Drive game.
It was extremely popular in Asia in the mid 90s (especially in Russia on the Dendy) in markets that were somewhat less-developed than the three primary territories (North America, Western Europe/Australia, and Japan) in which Nintendo and Sega officially did business - places where the 16-bit consoles had yet to put any dent in the market.
Somari has been hailed as both a miracle and as a miserable failure - opinions on this one's quality vary widely. It can't hold a candle to the Genesis title, but there's no denying that like many of Hummer Teams' efforts, far more effort and care was invested in Somari than was ever seen in great majority of unlicensed, Chinese-made NES titles of its era.
The levels are mostly based on those from the first Sonic, though the layouts tend to differ quite a bit. The Scrap Brain Zone is missing, but most of the areas still feature three acts and are all capped off with a Dr. Robotnik battle. You also can play the bonus stage from the Master System version of Sonic if you clear any Act 1 or Act 2 stage with more than 100 rings in reserve. There are no chaos emeralds in this game, though, so the only real purpose the bonus stages serve is to boost your score.
Graphically, Somari is surprisingly decent. Many of Sonic's graphics were reused, and even though the colors are garish, everything is recognizable and familiar. Mario's sprite looks uber-goofy (that walking animation!) and often falls victim to his wildly off-kilter physics, but the animation is more fluid than I had expected it to be. The game also moves at a good clip, and slowdown and flicker are rarely problematic. The music is also generally faithful to the original, though the music doesn't sound so hot after the conversion.
In some ways, it's an impressive bit of work. In other ways, though, not so much.
The viewable screen area is cropped thanks to the NES's lower resolution, but nobody seems to have told the enemies that. This means that you'll constantly be shot at by enemies that you can't see, and more often than not, they're positioned in exactly the right place to hit you when you least expect it. Mario gets caught up on the scenery constantly (those surfaces that appear to be curved are actually flat surfaces of varying height) and this royally screws with any sense of momentum - good luck on some of those jumps. The charged rolling attack (from Sonic 2) is somehow even worse: it causes Mario to pop-up into the air, usually directly into the path of a hazard.
The game also has some nasty bugs in it. You can see a couple in this video: I had to kill myself in Labyrinth Zone Act 3 after I got stuck when the boss fight didn't trigger, and in the final zone, notice how Mario gets stuck pushing on the computer console as he's trying to chase Robotnik? He can only get over the obstacle and give chase if you jump just before the game takes control - otherwise he just sits there straining against the computer until the final end screen pops up.
Nobody is doing to mistake this NES game for the Genesis title, but it is a really cool novelty and I imagine many of the people that grew up playing Somari have a lot of nostalgia for it. It's awkward, it's derpy, and it needs several more coats of polish, but Somari is a fun and quirky title that put Mario and Sonic together several years before they were officially introduced to one another.
And now that I think of it, maybe the team that handled the port of Sonic 1 to the GBA should've played this and taken notes ;D lmao. Just kidding!... okay, maybe not.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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