Commenting on the whole "kicky fast!" crap:
Find yourself a Genesis emulator that is capable of slow motion. Run any Sonic game in it. When you have a really good speed going, turn on the slow motion (an emu that manually advances frame-by-frame is best, so you can see what I'm talking about next). You will notice that the frame rate never changes, but the amount of pixels scrolled increases. In essence, the game is always working at exactly the same speed, but the scroll increment changes. Any game console with hardware scrolling is capable of it. It would be incredibly easy to make a game even on the pokey old SNES appear to run faster than Sonic by simply increasing the scroll increment.