By late 2006, Sega and Sonic Team were in crisis. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 represented a massive leap in hardware power, and Sonic’s first “next-gen” outing needed to dazzle. But development was a nightmare: the team was split between two radically different console architectures, and the holiday deadline was immovable. The result was shipped on a standard dual-layer DVD-9 for the Xbox 360—about 7.3 GB of compromised ambition.

Infamously frequent and long, sometimes occurring just to trigger a single line of dialogue.