You have the odd habit of hating on the best 2D sonic game.
I love the art direction in Sonic CD, I love the music, I love the ideas
I do not love to play Sonic CD because dealing with finding the right time warp panels, finding enough space to maintain speed, finding the robot generator, it's all INSANELY tedious. It's not like Sonic 3 where you have like, five or six warp rings per act. There's one robot generator, and often only 2-3 good places to build up speed. I don't want to say I hate it, but maybe I kind of hate it? At least a little bit. Unless you go out of your way to memorize the position of every robot generator, you can spend like, 20 minutes in some acts looking for it.
And the strategy of "just do the special stages and ignore the robot generators" isn't a great option either because the collision detection on the UFOs was janky in the Sega CD version and is still pretty janky in the Taxman remaster.
And some levels are specifically designed to kind of fuck you over, to send you hurtling miles away from where you want to be, or maybe even trick you in to warping to a time zone you don't want to be in, like a Bad Future. And, like, what's your reward for a Good Future? A few more rings? A new song you could listen to on Spotify? No enemies, even though you probably killed half the stage in the 8 minutes it took you to destroy the generator and warp all the way to a Good Future?
But you
have to get all the Good Futures, otherwise the game will taunt you for not doing it right. Great! Awesome! Thanks!
Taxman's version does help it be a little easier to stomach, however:
1. The Sonic 2 version of the SpinDash is nice
2. Levels themselves were given a once-over to get rid of weird slope hiccups
3. If you do try for special stages, if you run out of time, you can just pause before the fail screen comes up and pick "Return to Menu" and you'll restart the Special Stage with no penalty
But that still doesn't mean I like the game. It's still Sonic CD, at the end of the day, and I'd still rather be playing Sonic 2 or Sonic 3.