test mode. Development and release In August 1999, SNK announced that they were collaborating with Sega to develop a Sonic the Hedgehog game for their Neo Geo Pocket Color handheld system. The game was developed by SNK, with supervision from Yuji Naka and Sonic Team at Sega. This marked the first time Sega was directly involved in the development of a Sonic game for a non-Sega platform. The team planned for Sonic Pocket Adventure to be a return to the classic 2D gameplay style found in the Sonic games on the Sega Genesis. In particular, many game design and visual elements are borrowed from Sonic 2. The game's background music tracks are also 8-bit renditions of music from Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. Sonic Pocket Adventure was released first in North America on December 4, 1999. SNK released a system bundle with the game included for the holiday season. The game was released in Europe in February 2000, and in Japan on May 25, 2000. Several of the SNK staff members who developed Sonic Pocket Adventure went on to form Dimps in 2000—a new team funded by Sega, Sony, and Bandai. The new company went on to develop Sonic Advance (2001) for the Game Boy Advance and several more Sonic games for handheld systems in the following years. ReceptionSonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure received critical acclaim. Critics generally believed that despite being on a handheld system, the game successfully captured the same high speed thrills and sharp graphics as in the original Genesis games. The most common complaints were occasional frame rate slowdown and the lack of parallax scrolling, but most agreed these problems were not intrusive enough to detract from the otherwise great quality of the game. Some critics highlighted how well the system's hardware performed in their reviews. Official Dreamcast Magazine praised the joystick on the handheld as controlling better than the Genesis controllers. Daily Radar thanked SNK for developing a good enough screen to prevent any unwanted motion blur. IGN believed the game was a killer app for the Neo Geo Pocket Color, giving the game a 10, and that it filled the platform game role the system's library was so desperately missing. Official Dreamcast Magazine called it SNK's raison d'être for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. AllGame disagreed that it was a killer app, but felt it showcased the system's processing prowess well. In retrospect,