It depends on your opinion, give a Sonic game a go and see if you like it.
Sonic the hedgehog is an awesome series, and its nothing like Mario
of course its sonic the hedgehog and freinds on 2011
There are a lot of good guys in the Sonic series, so I'll only list the main ones: Sonic the Hedgehog, Miles "Tails" Prower, Knuckles the Echidna, Amy Rose, Cream the Rabbit, Silver the Hedgehog, and Blaze the Cat.
Your question needs to be more specific. But if you are talking about the original, it's a good 4.0-5.0 game... Good music, graphics (old though), and the characters are good. The difficulty of the battles, stages, and minions increases steadily, which gives you a challenging game. But, if you meant the newer Sonic (Sonic The Hedgehog 06), I'd say it's a good 3.5-5.0 game. Good voices, game playing, storylines, and characters, but often times you will mess up for a strange reason like Sonic running on water then falling in unexpectedly... If you want a good Sonic game, i suggest getting Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games (both winter and normal) for the Wii, Shadow The Hedgehog for the PS2 or Sonic Heros for the PS2.
There's no text based sonic website game as far as I know, but if you like to play a sonic game with others you can try out sonic2online.com
Type in Blueblurzone and then select Sonic Smash Bros which is a sonic fighting game and there is the Sonic-City where you can read about the characters and do other things. They are the only good ones.
Sonic?
Yes, Sonic the Hedgehog is a good gift for a 17 year old boy.
I personally enjoyed it first rent it if you find enough fun in it buy it
yes, its not very good
No
DeviantART is a good, free, well known site, for submitting and browsing various artworks including fanart to the Sonic the Hedgehog series.