![]() ![]() I waited a couple seconds to just watch Sonic and Tails’ adorable new idle animations. Sonic’s new sprite is more cyan than cobalt, and complements an overall softer look that reflects the animated opening cinematic directed by Tyson Hesse. I will never have fun with blue spheres.īut, finally letting myself actually play Sonic Mania, I began to really appreciate the small details. Sonic Mania wasn’t simply a nostalgia trip, it was a marked improvement on the objects of my nostalgia.Įxcept for blue spheres. I started to play Mania less like someone who recently trained myself on the classics, but as someone who was raised on them someone who had a tacit understanding of what a Sonic game should feel like. With practice, I even found myself getting better at the special stages, which rewards a calmer head by providing plenty of time and speed-boosting resources once you give them a couple tries to learn the track-layouts. And, even though I was still falling to the bottom paths in many levels, I wasn’t falling into many bottomless pits. And the jump physics are floatier – more forgiving – than the classic games, making precision platforming that much more manageable. Firstly, the game is in 16:9, which means that you can actually see things ahead of you as you speed through the levels, meaning not all of your button-presses have to happen a fraction-of-a-second before whatever you want to jump over is touching Sonic’s sprite. Sonic Mania doesn’t play like the classic Sonic games, it plays like how I remembered the classic Sonic games.Īnd from then, I started to notice how Mania improved on the classic Sonic formula. Something was clicking that wasn’t the day before. Then, I blasted my way through both zones of Hydrocity – my least favorite stage from 3&K without a single death, and got my third Emerald in Mirage Saloon. I still died a bit, but I managed to get through and beat Metal Sonic without getting a game over. The next day I started back up in Stardust Speedway, and I wasn’t dying anymore. Either way, after about four-to-five hours and countless game overs, I made it to Stardust Speedway with only one of the seven Chaos Emeralds in my possession, and called it a day. Now, I do admit to being generally bad at video games, but not this bad and I did also just replay the classics – so I shouldn’t have been this rusty. And, as I continued to fail my way through Chemical Plant, I made the unfortunate discovery that the checkpoint-bonus stages were the blue-spheres from 3&K, and the special stages to get the Chaos Emeralds were based on those from CD. And, on a personal level, I was never great at the special stages in 3&K, and likely never will be.Īll of this gave me some trepidation as I started up Sonic Mania and immediately beefed my way through the new Green Hill Zone with Sonic and Tails, missing every opportunity to take higher paths and jumping straight into badnicks and – this is embarrassing – losing a life to the first boss. Plus, some of the boss battles are just, obtuse and the special stages in 2 and CD were – to put it kindly – too ambitious for their mechanical limitations. I replayed as much as I could of 2, CD, and 3&K while waiting for the delayed release of Sonic Mania on PC, and while they do hold up better than following games in the franchise, with the exception of Sonic Generations there are also scores of flaws and bad design choices: the classic Sonic games never had great physics for the more precise platforming they sometimes demanded, levels are full of enemies that pop-out of nowhere, and bottomless pits, and the camera is never far enough ahead of you to give you room to react unless you’ve memorized the levels. Sonic games have this habit of never being as good as you remember them, and yes, this goes for the highly venerated within the fandom Genesis quad (pent?)-ology of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, Sonic CD, and Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
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