Sonic 1 was and still is a masterpiece for anyone to say its mediocre is clearly a nintendo fanboy.

The fact of the matter is Sonic 1 alone convinced many NES gamers to switch brands and buy a Genesis. Myself included. I loved Mario 3 but I just had to have a Genesis and Sonic 1, I guess when I saw Mario World in magazines etc it just didnt look like a huge leap from Mario 3, whereas Sonic graphically was a huge leap from mario 3. Also mario world seemed to be a bit rushed and came out not very long after mario 3. Sonic was this brand new awesome game. The graphics sounds level design, just the whole Sonic 1 game was mind blowingly good in 1991. Ya it was shorter than Mario World but personally I dont like really long games and Mario World was a bit too long for my tastes. Mario 3 is about as long as I like platformers to be. Even that game is pretty darn long. And to this day I prefer Mario 3 over Mario World. I dont care for riding on Yoshi or the cape at all. I also dont care that the game designers try so hard in mario world to confuse you and at certain points hard to figure out how to progress in the game, I hate that and its a reason I never really cared for Zelda games. Zelda games are too long and confusing and require too much effort lol.