Even the game's levels adhere to this philosophy: Most of Sonic Mania's stages are throwbacks to older games, but all of them are more than what they seem. Here's the gameplay you loved in the '90s but with new abilities and gimmicks to keep it fresh. Here's a familiar-looking hero but with smooth, nuanced animation that lends his character more charm than you expected. On a visceral level, it looks and feels like a classic Sonic the Hedgehog game, but it delivers an experience that's just beyond your nostalgic expectations. That's the crux of the Sonic Mania experience - a careful merging of the old and the new. It's still nostalgically pixelated, but the game uses a much broader palette of color, lending the game's characters, backgrounds and power-ups subtly detailed highlights. Mania overlays that excellent base gameplay with gorgeous sprite work that outstretches the limitations of its 16-bit inspiration. Sonic Mania feels right in a way that a mainline Sonic game hasn't since 1994.Īgain, that's no surprise, considering it was created by a team that made a name for itself in modernizing Sonic's original adventures - but this faithful re-creation of the original game's physics serves as a foundation for an experience that both celebrates and adds to the history of the franchise's classic games. In Mania, Sonic, Knuckles and Tails jump, run, dash and move exactly as they did in Sega's classic platformers. Sonic Mania works for the same reason Whitehead's updated Sonic the Hedgehog ports work: It understands and accurately re-creates the delicate balance of speed, acceleration and momentum that defined the series' early games. Whitehead's modernized remakes, however, are rare exceptions - and Sonic Mania builds on everything that makes those ports great. There's a stigma attached to Sonic the Hedgehog games a pattern of expectation and disappointment that's become so ingrained in the series' community that it's known as the "Sonic Cycle." The cycle is mostly an old joke, but there's a grain of truth to it: Sonic games are typically announced with a lot of fanfare but often fall flat after launchh. That might sound a bit overzealous, but it's written with honesty. This week, the fruits of that partnership reached a new high point in Sonic Mania, an all-new 16-bit Sonic the Hedgehog platformer that sees the mascot return to his glory days. In 2009, he created an unofficial proof of concept iPhone port of Sonic CD using a custom-built game engine - a project that eventually led to Sega hiring him to officially port Sonic CD, Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to modern platforms. This led to Naoto Ohshima's (one of the original creators of Sonic) company Arzest working on Sonic Superstars instead, which seems to have turned out well.If you've played Sonic the Hedgehog on your phone, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 in the last half-dozen years, you have Christian Whitehead to thank. It was revealed by VGC last week at Summer Game Fest that that was almost meant to be the plan, but that the deal fell through and didn't end up happening. The use of Mania's physics engine when making Sonic Superstars does make it a little stranger that the team behind the game didn't return to make Superstars. Mania was largely praised as being one of the best-feeling Sonic games in years, so it's the perfect base to work from when making a new game. This confirms that, apart from the co-op and new abilities that Sonic and friends have, Superstars will play extremely similarly to Sonic Mania.Ĭonsidering all of the gameplay footage that we've seen so far has made Superstars look very similar to Mania, this isn't too surprising, but it's certainly good news. Responding to a tweet that compared Mania's physics to Superstars, Whitehead said, "Will have more to say on this when it's appropriate, but the Mania physics were indeed fully translated to modern 3D".
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