Bummed to hear about the DRM - was Sega Europe handling the PC port of Mania? I still wanna pick up the Steam version for the cards and extra bits from badges but might wait till they iron out that issue first.
***NOOB ALERT*** I'm sorry. I gotta do it. Someone's gotta ask for those who don't understand all this computer jargon. What does DRM mean? And while we're at it, what is Denuvo? Yes, simply Googling the terms would be easier and spare me the public shame. Did it ever occur to you that I like the shame?
Oh my god, this game is so fucking cool. Great visuals, great sound, fun level design... Gotta say that the team needs an additional boss designer like really badly, though. The concepts and visuals are really cool, but I swear that it feels like almost every fight had something unfair added to it on purpose. Also, boss fights should be self-explanatory and, even if the player won't be able to beat them on the first try, at least they must know what they should be doing before they get hit or killed. Oh and, as expected, I did miss the Insta-shield and inadvertently tried to trigger it against some badniks and projectiles, while I kind of forgot that the Drop Dash even existed halfway through the game (that, I didn't expect)...
Going to Disagree with the bosses. Mania has by far the best boss design in any of the 4 classic games, Advanced games, and Sonic 4 (and chaotix but eh). Studiopolis's midboss being a major highlight and one of the best running bosses in the series. The music helps make it though. The only boss I feel was annoying was Press Garden's midboss. If you miss what it does when you fall into the room it isn't really clear what you're supposed to do with the boxes and I imagine people just brute forced it with I-frames + tails.
Ok, so an update. I just got all the gold medals, and the achievement that goes with it. But I still don't have the silver medal achievement. I don't have a twitter, maybe someone could hit up taxman on there or something? Eh, maybe I'll try this if it doesn't get fixed. It is technically cheating, but then again I do pretty much deserve it since I have completed the requirement. I'll wait a few days, see if taxman acknowledges it or not. I guess this issue only really affects me, though, so I have my doubts.
So random note: Despite the Denuvo DRM... The game works fine for me under WINE via CrossOver Games on macOS. Runs perfectly, special stages, achievements and all. One of the sites complaining about the disadvantages of Denuvo was that it meant Linux and Mac users couldn't run the games, but for whatever reason this is not the case here. I was literally writing up an email to Sega support to complain and I was going to attach a screenshot of it not working, but now I can't do that. While I dislike the idea of them having DRM on it, if they fix offline support and remove the DRM completely after a certain amount of time, I'm okay with that if they really want to protect sales. But honestly, DRM on a $20 game doesn't seem necessary. Edit: Are you guys sure this is Denuvo are you just spreading around what someone decided to say? I've never owned a Denuvo game before, but based on what people have said about it I was expecting some kind of obfuscation to prevent reverse engineering, which there doesn't appear to be any. I loaded it up in Hopper and was able to find the StartupRetroEngine() function relatively quickly, and despite lack of symbols the strings are all intact. I thought Denuvo was supposed to make it difficult to find / do anything that all, even GameGuard stuff is harder to analyze than this is... Edit 2: According to some information I've read, a Denuvo EXE is apparently supposed to look normal? But various stubbed functions are inside and those are the key to preventing the game from being modified. I guess the pieces I was interested in looking at aren't actually the ones covered by the DRM? Either way, I'm just glad it works in WINE.
So, has anyone figured out if it's completely locked to 60Hz yet, or if it supports running higher framerates?
I.... really, really disagree. Most of the classic bosses do their thing in front of you so that you know what to do in advance. Here you get lots of "this one time you can attack this projectile without being Super Sonic", "oops, you should have predicted psychically that there would be insta-kill spikes in the ceiling", "now there's these small things shooting in random directions so you may reach your target or get hit, who knows", "why won't you play volleyball with Silver Sonic", etc, etc. Except perhaps for the weak missile which does looks different (I had accidentally spoiled myself the tactics to use, so I knew about it beforehand), mechanics of that kind should be made very obvious to the player a few seconds into the battles (and also random cheap hits should be avoided whenever possible).
I love most of the bosses, but Studiopolis Act 1's kind of sucks. It feels like it needs an escalation, like maybe the HBH could fire more or faster missiles. As it is, it just plays out like a minute and a half of holding right once you know what to do.
I wouldn't recommend Joy2Key... Steam configuration support very well all my controller, including my SNES and my Genesis USB Controller... you only need to know how to configure each one... in the worst case i would recommend more XPadder (is better than Joy2Key IMHO)
Remember, you can still refund the game if you've played it for less than two hours and 2 weeks or less have passed since the transaction. The publisher will be charged fees for refunded games, IIRC. I encourage everyone that is able to refund the game to do so (you can always rebuy it later with the Steam wallet). Be sure to mention DRM as the reason for requesting a refund. Hell, buy the game and immediately refund it, just to cost SEGA some more. Sorry to Stealth and Taxman, but this is SEGA's wrongdoing and I want them to correct their behavior toward consumers. They're a profit-driven corporation, the only language they truly understand is money, so we need to send a strong message if SEGA is to even remotely reconsider their involvement with Denuvo software.
Huh, found that earlier, but I thought it was in console ports and I was just too lazy to check. Nice find!
Maybe it's going to be added in an update, but I couldn't seem to find any way to properly have borderless fullscreen windowed through the in-game configurations, so I dug through the settings file and found an interesting setting: exclusiveFS=y As it turns out if you set windowed=n and exclusiveFS=n, you'll get borderless fullscreen windowed! Funny that this "exclusive fullscreen" option doesn't appear in the video options. Note that border=n will likely make no difference, but I haven't tested it.
Thanks for clarifying. I'm impressed that Denuvo works with WINE, despite previous claims to the contrary. And apparently anti-tamper just means the .EXE can't be modified, but it's definitely not protected against analysis. That's kind of neat, I was expecting worse.
Lost all my lives and got a game over here (Studiopolis Act 1 Boss). WTF. I know those smaller missiles are key but running speed and missile speed feel so out of sync and Sonic has a Knuclkes-like jump height. Rings fly right off the screen instead of some floating across the floor in front of you and moving at a speed similar to the missiles. I can't put my finger on where I've seen it executed that way before, but I know I have. I know it's only going to get more difficult from here. Chemical Plant Act 2's boss almost made me rage quit after causing my first death in the game. But second time was the charm!
I can see the criticisms for the bosses, but I really do like how they're more creative than ever before. Bosses in the Genesis games 90% of the time were "get hit, cheese the boss with invincibility".
