Any decent discussion of a thing involves acknowledging its counterparts. You can't talk about Batman without mentioning Superman, can't reference Battlefield without name-checking Modern Warfare, and can't discuss GamesRadar without saying something about... Google? Is that who we're mainly up against? Anyway, the point is, Mario Week is actually a great time to talk about Sonic.

Despite arriving some time after his Nintendo equivalent, Sonic's established himself as an irreducible part of gaming history and culture. If one wanted to play the best Sega's mascot has to offer, where might one start? Handily, we happen to have a list on hand answering that very question...

While Sega was tweaking the Sonic formula with high-profile home console outings in the mid-00s, the company placed a bet on this side-scrolling throwback – which would go on to become one of the series' most celebrated entries. After all, we don't want to spoil anything for you, but a recurring theme of Sonic's life story is going to be “Sonic doesn't 3D if he can avoid it.”

So when bringing the character to the DS, Sega wisely chose to employ the handheld's 3D capabilities diligently – adding 3D characters and boss encounters to a side-scrolling jump-and-dash extravaganza much more in line with the series' roots. The result is a game that bridged the gap between hardline retrogamers and fans of the character's later, chummier outings.

Sega established a formula with 1998's Sonic Adventure, and the company persevered for some years with variations on the theme. This may be the best result, with team-controlled characters deepening the high-speed constrained-3D approach established on the Dreamcast.

So successful was the gambit that for its next trick, Sega elected to pare the cast back down to one hedgehog – and to put a frustrating series of obstacles between him and his dreams of interspecies crimes against nature. But we digress. Let's move on instead to this more successful game's progenitor...

You have to understand, seeing Sonic transition so seamlessly into 3D in 1998 was like bumping into an old friend you'd lost touch with, only to find that since you last spoke they'd become World President George Clooney. It was impressive sight is what we're getting at. Seriously, the Dreamcast original still looks good alongside games made 10 years later.

Mapping Sonic's twitch-centric gameplay onto the Z-axis would prove a continual challenge for Sega, but for a while there, Sonic Adventure made it look as if the company had nailed it. At the very least, it was a step up from the previous attempt, Sonic 3D Blast, which really was neither 3D nor a blast of any kind.

No one can accuse Sega of being unwilling to take Sonic in new and interesting directions – even if those directions don't always sit well with longtime fans. Last year, the company celebrated the character's 20th birthday with Sonic Generations, setting the OG Sonic alongside his contemporary counterpart in an all-time fan-gripe showdown for the ages.

As perennial fan-gripers with a strong bias toward fun and/or forgetting how many years we've been alive, we welcomed the new Sonic as one of the character's best outings since the Genesis era and were disappointed to hear that Sega has no plans for Classic Sonic beyond Generations. Still, if Classic Sonic was ever going to cash out, you'd think he'd have done it by now, what with the eleventy billion or so times our generation's sent him to his death already...

This month brought new info on the Neo Geo reborn, with the official SNK handheld now being named the Neo Geo Gold. If you, like us, are still trying to work out what to make of the iPhoney-looking contraption, consider that SNK's been doing crazy things to portable gaming for years – such as having the first ever Sonic game on a third-party console, 1999's Sonic Pocket Adventure for the Neo Geo Pocket.

Playing much like the Genesis' Sonic 2, with a few Sonic 1 elements and Sonic 3 music tracks mixed in, Sonic Pocket Adventure showed that SNK's handheld was good for more than just SNK games; regrettably, it's a lesson few took to heart, as evidenced by the Gold's strong reliance on first-party content.

If you've played the guts out of the Genesis versions of Sonics 1, 2 and 3, you probably see yourself as quite the arbiter of all things old-school and Sega. Before deciding you've seen all the Sonic the 2D age has to offer, though, spend some time with the 8-bit versions of the series' initial entries.

Sonic 1 and 2 on the Game Gear and Master System share some cosmetic elements with their better-known counterparts, but for the most part are entirely new adventures – including early forays into vehicle sections and a dauntingly fast-paced take on the series' signature bonus stages. The titles survive on Virtual Console and various compilations; and on the shelves of the nation's thrift stores, just waiting to be dusted off by the right lucky retro-friendly hoarder.

“The game that started it all,” it's politic to say, at least if you don't feel that “it all” started when someone at Sega brought a Mario game to work and said, “guys, we need some of this action.” Regardless of the character's origins, his debut was a resounding success, in one shot propelling the attitudinal anthropomorph to international recognition.

While establishing Sonic's signature zippiness to the satisfaction of a generation yet to discover the wonders of Ritalin, the series' first instalment is also deceptively intricate, rewarding repeat play with enough extras and secrets to keep players interested until later sequels ramped up the speed even further. It's a snapshot into a time before Blast Processing had changed the way we see the world; and to think the Nobel Committee continues to look down its nose at Sega for that innovation.

Nowadays when a developer releases new bits of game with bonus additions to the original title, we call it DLC and grudgingly devour it whole on launch day. But back in the 90s, that extra content had no way of getting to you besides the medium of a whole other game cartridge; a special one, no less, that could be physically bolted onto older Sonic games to add a new character and teach kids all sorts of erroneous things about what an echidna is exactly.

But the cart's best use is probably as a Sonic 3 enhancement device. The Knuckles-augmented threequel is both the character's finest hour, and our favorite way to play Sonic 3 itself. The original game was designed with the intention of featuring Knuckes as a core character, and the three-way ability divide between Sonic, Tails and Knuckles is one of the add-on's biggest overhauls.

If we can just turn your little cookie-cutter world upside down for a second here, the canonical version of Sonic CD isn't actually the Sega CD version at all. Though, admittedly, the 1993 original looked pretty special in 1993 – particularly next to most Genesis titles, and particularly if you were young and undiscerning enough to fall within Sonic's target audience at the time.

Dig that game out now and all the new bits (such as Metal Sonic, in-game time travel and, ahem, Amy Rose) look a little less shiny – though it must be said, Sonic CD works the Mega CD so hard that you can sometimes see little beads of sweat pooling on the edge of the disc tray. Last year's downloadable port, rebuilt for modern consoles and mobiles, is the game that actually plays as well as you remember.

The game where much of the Sonic formula fell into place, Sonic 2 on the Genesis is probably the title most commonly associated with the character. The game launched in November of 1992, the same month Bill Clinton – the model for Sonic's “can-do” personality, according to creator Yuji Naka – was elected to the Oval Office. And it's fair to say that both events had a comparable effect on the next decade. Maybe?

Launched amid a barrage of international hype, Sonic 2 would become a standard of Genesis players' collections as the pack-in game for the redesigned system. So fruitful was the title's development that many of the more ambitious elements intended for Sonic 2 would end up forming the backbone of later entries in the series. Meanwhile the bits you did get – Tails, the Spin Dash, increasingly inventive uses of the Genesis hardware – would become Sonic standards.

Someone once told us that if you say something about Sonic the Hedgehog on the Internet, people are liable to get worked up and want to chip in with their thoughts on the matter. Is that right? Have we posted this to the right Internet?

Kidding aside, this is a series that inspires strong feelings - and we want to hear yours. Did we put the right game in the top spot? Have we neglected to mention any hidden gems? Should we scrap it all and just get started recapping the Sonic Archie comics? Off you go...