This is pretty cool.



Wouldn't mind if future 2D Sonic games could zoom out at times when it gets going fast. I'm surprised Sonic Mania (mostly) still works fine at this resolution, though it does break the cutscene at the end haha.

I'm still playing this game! And coming across glitches!

pic.twitter.com/VLk0HA9dsd

— nate (@EatThePennies) September 15, 2019

Flying Battery 2 is pretty moody when the music drops away!

Kind of surprised we never got a Mania 2 yet. Wouldn't be shocked if this is on the horizon in the next year.

Would love if they ported the Sonic 1 and 2 Christian Whitehead ports to consoles too!

@PogueSquadron I don't know...there are a lot of little things working against the possibility of a Sonic Mania 2 I think. Christian Whitehead founding a new studio for original projects doesn't help, especially if he's less willing to lend Sega his Retro Engine. And Sonic Mania already took most of the iconic Zones from those classic games (and pieces of many others), so another tribute game in that vein seems doomed to underwhelm.

That certainly doesn't rule out an all-new all-original Sonic Mania 2, but considering how much of Sonic Mania 1 was built from reskinned pieces of the classic games, it does mean a game with all new stages and gimmicks could take significantly longer to develop. Or not, considering they already have the Mania template to build on, who knows.

But yeah, it's a damn shame the Taxman versions of Sonic 1 and 2 are stuck on phones and crap. I really liked what he did with the Hidden Palace Zone in Sonic 2, and obviously having widescreen and 60fps for both games makes a huge difference. I guess they didn't want his port to step on the toes of Sega M2's 3D Classics and Ages lines? And those lines are great, but I think most would prefer the Taxman remasters, given the choice.

Also, the game's on sale on the eShop for $5 off! That's not a ton, but that's the lowest it's gone on sale for so far.

You can also pick up Team Sonic Racing for $20, a whopping half-off just a year after release. Has anyone here played that? All I know is I like the CARTOON

Another blow to the chances of us getting Mania 2: Simon Thomley's studio Headcannon has launched a Kickstarter for a new game: Vertebreaker. It looks pretty good! Grappling hook reminiscent of Umihara Kawase, bassy synth Genesis sounds, and the protagonist is a skeleton named Richard Boehner, which makes me cringe but also giggle slightly.

But yeah, the two big "names" behind Sonic Mania have seemingly moved on to original projects. There's still PagodaWest games, the third wheel of the Sonic Mania development tricycle, and there's a slim chance Sega tries for a Mania 2 on their own. But yeah, I'm not counting on getting another retro Sonic game any time soon, or possibly ever.

And you know what? That's fine. Mania's so fantastic, and I never imagined that dream of mine would come true. Seems greedy, as a long-suffering Sonic fan, to hope for more.

@nate38 Well that Kickstarter went nowhere! Shame, the gameplay looked really fun.


In other news, a ROM of a Sonic 3 prototype from about 4 months before launch has been made available online, and there's some interesting stuff in there...including the Drop Dash! Holy crap!

Gamexplain has a pretty good video of that and other notable changes, especially the music.

So this weekend there was a Coronavirus relief Games Done Quick event, and this Sonic Mania speedrun is ridiculously fun.



The guy running the game is clearly having a ton of fun, he breathlessly explains just about everything he's doing as he does it, the run category (Good Ending) means you get to see him do crazy maneuvers as Super Sonic, and the glitches used don't cut out the majority of the game or anything like that, typically just skipping the occasional boss phase or something like that.

I love this game. Probably the very best Sonic game of all.

@kriswright

How very dare you. How have you forgotten Sonic's magnum opus:



(Only half joking, I actually really like Spinball. I'm far better at it than I am mainstream Sonic.)

@Shadowlink

Spinball is probably the first (ofmany) Sonic games you can describe as “great idea, weird execution”.

Or as the Japanese commercials famously put it, “Sonic Spinball: American Funky Action!”

@kriswright Yeah, after replaying the classic trilogy recently, it's especially clear how thoughtful the Mania devs were at spotlighting Sonic's best qualities while dropping a few bad habits that kept popping up in the Genesis games.

I still think it's a missed opportunity that they haven't ported the Christian Whitehead versions of Sonic 1 and 2 to consoles, or possibly remaster the original games using the new engines. I could play them over and over again!

This wonderful wonderful game is three years old! I think I'll play some Time Trials tonight to celebrate.

I've been playing Sonic 1 and 2 and CD on my new phone lately, and the super wide 19.5x9 aspect ratio has spoiled me even on the standard 16x9 widescreen, let alone the classic 4x3.

And good news, these definitive phone-exclusive versions can now be played on PC thanks to some guy on Github!

You can even change the screen width in the settings, and it seems the only limit is your imagination...

(...and/or computer...also the game soft-locks in places if you go beyond 19.5x9 I've found...)

If anyone wants to check out the best versions of these games, let me know.

In my eternal quest for illicit Nintendo Gold Points, I borrowed the Sonic Mania/Team Racing double-pack from the libe, only to find that the Switch recognizes it as the two original, separate games, which I had already redeemed!
Anyway, I played a bit more of Mania. It really is an impressively made, loving tribute to the ol'... Blue... thing. The variety and music and animation and cute little touches and easter eggs are really nice. The base Sonic mechanics keep me from loving it unreservedly, but it IS probably my favorite Sonic game.

Been playing this game a little more lately. It clicked for me once I realized: this is just pinball. People say that going fast is your reward for learning the stages, but is that even true? It seems like even at high levels of play, the game would be much more about momentum than speed.

I've always found the maze like levels in these games to be disorienting in a pretty unsatisfying way. I want to find the fun there. Understanding the layout of a space is really rewarding to me in games, and it seems like Sonic wants you to delay that gratification for quite a while.

@Secret_Tunnel Yeah momentum is the true core of classic Sonic. It's the key to exploring the levels, and it's also crucial to going fast through the level once you have a lay of the land.

The pinball comparison is pretty appropriate, and obviously the designers recognized that with the obligatory pinball-themed levels in most of the games. There's a lot of ostensible randomness in the way Sonic can, say, bounce off of a bumper in a hundred different ways depending on the angle, but what seems like an impediment of randomness at first can be mastered and used intentionally. And unlike pinball, you can even make the ball put on the breaks and send it back in another direction easily enough.

And yeah, the levels are huge and sprawling. I've played through these games dozens of times and my mental map is still incomplete. But I kind of like that about it: I've got the main throughline of each stage pretty well memorized after just a few playthroughs, but each time I revisit the game I try to take a road less traveled, and often discover something new in a corner I hadn't quite fully explored before, or rediscover something I'd found once and forgotten about.

Chiming in because I recently reminded myself how absolutely brilliant this game’s soundtrack is. Tee Lopes is a genius.

@PogueSquadron He did (most of) Penny's Big Breakaway too! Check it out!
He also contributed some excellent songs to Sonic Superstars, where they're a nice reprieve from the rest of the OST...