The PS4 version of the game does actually have some Mania-themed backgrounds and avatars. The Collector's Edition exists too, if you want to count that.
I always found it a bit of a shame that Super Mario World never got a proper sequel. I was never quite a fan of how the game panned out. It always felt unfinished, and very unpolished. Learning the development history does explain a lot of this though. Coming to it from Super Mario Bros. 3 was quite a disappointment. Anyway, Sonic. This's the premier thread of the most exciting thing to come to the franchise ever since we somehow got a Jamaican Echidna, right? :specialed:
Mario World is a launch title for the Super Nintendo. It doesn't show off much besides some rotating graphics (F-Zero and Pilotwings were obviously made with Mode 7 in mind), it doesn't look particularly impressive, and most of the musical selection is based off of the same theme, but despite its simplicity it's a solid game that does offer some challenge. I realize launch titles may also be trying to show off what the console can do, but that's not always the case. On the NES, Mario 1 looks like a dinosaur compared to games like Kirby's Adventure or even Mario 3. Games like Altered Beast look like the last generation compared how much Sonic 2 and 3 were able to get away with. The PS1 and PS2 are two consoles that also got better with time. I don't know why we're trying to draw comparisons between Sonic 1, 2, 3&K and Mario World because they're not in the same league. If we're gonna be comparing SNES platformers to Sonic, we've gotta talk about Donkey Kong Country. Yoshi's Island. Kirby Super Star. Really it's hard to compare any platformer from the time to Sonic because they just run (ha get it) at a completely different pace. TL;DR It's not fair to compare Super Mario World to Sonic 1-3&K because World (and the Mario series as a whole) is literally what Sonic Team was trying to one-up when developing Sonic. Can we talk about Mania now please
It's honestly kind of scary how much 3&K pushed the Genesis, in comparison to its predecessors. With something like Sonic 2, I can see the heart and soul of Genesis games in its blood, but with 3 it's like a whole different system or something.
In the 16-bit realm, Sonic and Mario really had totally different design goals. This makes a lot of sense, as Sega at the time knew that they could not compete with a pre-established franchise that had been developed and refined for a whole generation of hardware if they were going to try to achieve the exact same goals. So, where Mario is focused on delivering lot of levels with a mostly linear route, Sonic went with a more limited number of levels with greater replayability and more refined and complex level designs. This applies both the to the gameplay and to the presentation. Mario levels were designed in a Lego-like style with simplistic visuals, establishing a number of interactive elements and enemies early on and recombining them in increasingly complex and challenging ways. Sonic levels, on the other hand, were more focused on each level having a tightly-designed, distinctive identity with unique enemies, gameplay elements and gimmicks. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I think each zone in each of the Genesis/Mega Drive has at least one gameplay element or gimmick that no other zone in the same game has to offer. And of course, we all know about the gameplay differences between Mario and Sonic when it comes to physics and momentum. So really, I think that Sonic and Mario are a bit too dissimilar to say with any certainty that one of them is better. Each series was great at what it offered. And really, both were pretty damn great.
Why are the people in this thread allowing a USER COMMENT on KOTAKU de-rail a conversation about Mania into a petty Mario vs. Sonic debate. Let's not. On the subject of the special stage: was there actual confirmation that those are actually the Saturn models of Sonic Tails and Knuckles? The Sonic one looks pretty comparable but Tails and Knuckles feel a little different from the models used in Sonic R.
I had just assumed that they're new models built from the ground up, but just heavily inspired by the Saturn models (and of course, specifically designed to emulate the low-poly Saturn style)
The Sonic model in Mania is more akin to the Jam model because the hands are bent. In R his hands are just boxes.
Yep very true. I still remember seeing Mushroom Hill Zone for the first time. That music as well. It just felt so much different, and as you say it was like a whole new system. Limitation breeds creativity!
Seeing a bunch of stuff about "where we pulled the models from". The 3D models in Mania were all made by Kieran
I saw some people claim the 3D is "just like the saturn does 3D." Does this simply mean it uses quads, or have you guys actually mimicking the Saturn's rendering pipeline in HLSL/GLSL?
It probably means the polygon count and short draw distance. Making the models jitter due to the non-floating-point-based rendering would be really unpleasant.
The conversation you are referring to was talking about how the 3D is done using hardware rendering, similar to how the Saturn handled it. Though I don't remember where said conversation took place, so I can't provide a reference.
Modern video cards don't handle 3D at all like the Saturn handled it, unless you're going through pains to mimic the rendering pipeline in HLSL/GLSL, which is why I asked.
I always assumed any 3D pipeline would've been 100% softrendered, just like the special stages in the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ports.
I thought they said that the 3D was *NOT* hardware accelerated, but instead done entirely in software so it'd look more like the output of a Saturn.
Somehow, it seems unlikely to me that they would make the entire game way trickier to run on various hardwares and operating systems just so the special stages are technically run exactly how a Saturn would handle them when it's possible to go with a low-poly model for the exact same look. Not impossible. But unlikely.
