Quick question. Would you recommend this game if someone hasn't played many of the handheld Sonic games?

Hmm I do tend to think that most games today are less challenging then games of the past. There is only a few games that I can think of today that is challenging. Most of those however are based off the highest difficulty. Things like Metroid Prime 3 and Sin and Punishment 2 come to mind as being pretty challenging on the highest difficulty. .

I'm going to have to agree with Nate on this. Typically every year the game media latches onto something before E3 that is going to be revealed there. There is a lot of contradictions amongst the rumors so I'm just going wait and see if all these rumors are true and if they are not true I'm not going to jump up and down and put blame on Nintendo or any such thing like that.