God the mystery of that image! Really can't see them releasing a standalone Blue Spheres game - so what could it be if it's not Sonic Mania? It's either a red herring as sonicblur suggests, Sonic 3K remastered but with updated Blue Spheres - or it's just something else entirely.
Maybe Mania was originally going to have Blue Spheres as special stages and what we saw was just something from the cutting room floor?
Ugh, you guys. No. No he didn't. First he joked about it: "Who says that's Sonic Mania", then he clarified: "you haven't seen Mania's Special Stage". Which we hadn't. If it's anything, it's Blue Sphere 2. No sense in throwing it out, and technically it's neither S3 nor S&K.
Maybe the Blue Sphere special stages from 3&K will be reimagined as a Bonus stage for Mania. We already know Mania has at least one bonus stage (although it hasn't been revealed yet).
At SDCC was there any confirmation if the Switch version will be getting all future updates and bug fixes? I know with Sonic CD, the console versions didn't as that was handled by a third party (I forget the name of the company). Given the new direction Sega is taking, I would be surprised if the Switch version lacked anything, but a confirmation would be nice.
Of course it will. The whole thing with CD was that, technically, those bug fixes were minor and the cost to patch them MONTHS afterwards when it hadn't come out on all systems yet was to expensive. So the mobile version ended up being the definitive version there.
But because a third party is involved, wont there be the extra costs of hiring them to patch new bug fixes? (There might not be any extra costs, I don't have a clue about how any of this works!) Also, does Nintendo charge publishers for releasing updates?
I belieeeeve that any updates get submitted to Nintendo for the usual quality checks (seal of approval and all that) which costs a small fee, but I'm not sure if anything after that costs additional fees or not. A friend of mine who was doing QA'ing for the Wii U version of All Stars Transformed told me the whole game had to be submitted twice to Nintendo due to a typo in the instruction manual. Ouch..
On the topic of the blue spheres I'd be inclined to agree with Neo. There's zero chance they had the time for both Mania and a remaster, it would have easily pushed the release back an extra year. I would find it a million times more believable that The Taxman was just joking, there's no separate game, and it's just the blue spheres making a cameo of some sort in Mania, be it as a bonus stage, game mode or in some other form. Though I will say it's a bit odd that no one from the team has come forward to outright deny the remaster yet. But I guess they must enjoy the speculation :v:
Considering the proof of concept of Sonic 3 remaster, I'd say developping blues spheres stages for Mania wouldn't take much time since it's been already done for them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdHL-MWO0Go&t=65s That and the particular shade of blue on that twitter pic, I'm inclined to believe they'll be in one way or another.
I don't doubt the Switch version will get updates the same time as all the other consoles. They know the demand there was to have a Switch version to begin with, and they used the Switch version for various demo events, so it's by no means a rushed job. Not to mention Nintendo has been MUCH more lax about updates and Eshop submissions and such since the Switch.
I was just telling someone one of my memories of Mania and thought I might share it here, because I think it's funny. I didn't see the Sonic stream because, as I live in the UK, it was on long after I was asleep. I woke up in the morning and didn't actually check out any game reveals straight away. That might sound incredible, but I was completely burnt out by Sonic at this point. I thought Sonic was dead for good. I had no interest in his upcoming games and thought Boom killed the franchise forever (in fact, I didn't even buy Boom despite owning a Wii U). I always had this idea in the back of my mind that Whitehead was the only way to get a good, new Sonic game, I just never thought they would actually get him on board. So then I eventually saw the thumbnail of Sonic Mania on Youtube. Initially I thought it looked cool but then I immediately thought "oh God, SEGA's going to make another Sonic 4 style awful Sonic game, but this time with pixel art, well at least it'll be funny to see the fandom get pissed". So I had incredibly low expectations going into it. But I was still intrigued (obviously) and checked it out. The trailer was going along, all well and good - but we know SEGA make good trailers, and then Christian Whitehead's name popped up and I was absolutely gobsmacked. I knew there and then it was going to be a new game, and when they announced Headcanon it confirmed that this was going to be the best Sonic game in over 20 years. I had wanted Whitehead to direct a Sonic game ever since his remake of CD came out but I just thought there was no justice in this world :v: . I was absolutely shocked, but it was an amazing moment. My absolute distrust in the game went to absolute confidence within only a few seconds.
I had something similar happen to me. I follow Retro on Twitter, but that day I didn't went to Twitter straight away. I was checking the news on Google Go, and the thumbnail for Sonic Mania (with a screen of Studiopolis Zone) appeared. Sleepy, my first thought was "What zone is that...?" but then I realized it was something new. But, if it was something new, why the style matched the Genesis era? So many questions in the blink of an eye. I think the description of the video on Google Go already said "Developed by Christian Whitehead [...]" so that part of the trailer wasn't a revelation, but boy, when I saw that name, I went WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT and got up from by bed all excited to watch the video on my PC. It was truly a magic moment. And as I said before, the reaction videos from the reveal in San Diego are so heartwarming, they still bring me back to that day. On another note, I watched the panel, and I have to things to say: Did Tee confirmed that the "Lights, camera, action!" sample is his own voice, or was he joking? I can't get enough of Taxman's hairstyle, and clothes preference. He's straight out of a Queen music video, I love it.
I think Tee confirmed that. Pretty cool that the composer's own voice is in the song as samples. And I find Whitehead's hairstyle hilarious - he has a picture of himself on his website and it wasn't exactly what I was expecting when I was learning about him xD . Although it's pretty obvious now that his Retro profile pic is him. I have no idea why I never figure this stuff out xD .
The mobile version lacks palette swapping for water, resorting to true transparency ala Sonic Gems Sonic CD, because it doesn't use a pixel shader. So I strongly disagree with calling it the definitive version.
