User blog comment:Niko Amadeus Prower/What I've realized about Sonic as a fandom/@comment-9749276-20170928093445

Honestly, I just enjoy the games because I really liked playing them. Nothing more to it than that, really. Because of that, I've found enjoyment in many Sonic games that people have marked as terrible and I myself have played... with the slight exception of 2005's Shadow the Hedgehog. The fact that the version of the game I own is the PS2 version might have something to do with it...

Anyway, the best examples of this I can think of are Sonic Unleashed (the HD version for PS3) and both Sonic Storybook games (with Black Knight being the one I enjoy more and definitely the less problematic in terms of gameplay). Despite some issues those games have (especially Secret Rings), I still enjoyed a great deal of those games.

In case you ask, yes, I found some enjoyment in even Sonic 06, a game I myself consider to be objectively terrible and one of the worst games I've ever seen, when I went to a friend's house one time... at least, when I was playing through Sonic's story... I can't say much for both Shadow and Silver, I'm afraid. Then again, having already heard about what's wrong with the game more times than I've heard anime characters scream to power up over the years kind of prepared me for that.

That said, I have played the classics on the Genesis (through Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection for the PS3 and emulators), and they are all definitely solid games in their own right, with Sonic 3 and Knuckles (the one I played on a PC emulator) being my favorite of the three.

To sum it up, in the words of Sol Badguy (albeit not entirely word-for-word), "good shit's good, and bad shit's bad".