At one time, Sonic being cooler than Mario was practically a fact. Some of y'all just don't know! Unfortunately, I had kind of a falling out with the franchise a long time ago.
I dug Sonic so much as a kid. I'd play the games repeatedly and listen to the Sound Tests for hours. I even made my own Sonic comics, and so when the Archie comics first came out, I got kinda jealous and avoided reading them. Eventually my parents bought me some back issues, and once i put my feelings aside, I found myself getting really attached to the stories and characters Archie had created. By the Sonic CD issue (#25), I was totally hooked. During the "Great Lull", those comics carried the fanbase on their frikkin' shoulders, man.
So when Sonic Adventure came out, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew the games were a different continuity from the comics, but the games had never bothered to tell much of a story before. I figured they owed Archie at least a few cameos or something. By the time I played the game, I realized not only did Sega avoid doing that, but they were also creating a zany world for Sonic that I just didn't care about. Archie gave me Bunnie, Enerjak, Mecha Madness...while Sega gave me Big the Shit and a bunch of humans. The gameplay wasn't enough to swing me over, so I figured I'd just forget about Sonic games for a while and focus on the comics.
Then the comics started to suck. The plots were turning into a bad soap opera and you could tell they were trying to figure out what to do with Sega's bullshit. This Sonic thing just wasn't fun anymore. My friends and I were flipping back to issues 1-50 the same way we were flipping back to Sonic 1-3&K. We realized we needed to move on to something else.
Obviously I've played other Sonic games since then, and some of them aren't bad. I thought Sonic Battle in particular was really fun. Overall, I'm glad the hedgehog's still kicking, but for me it'll just never be quite like the old days.