I had honestly assumed that was just me and my PS4. Kinda glad to hear it isn't. The Super button is pretty good, but I wish they hadn't slapped a big ugly icon on the screen. It's so inelegant. For one, it is literally tacked on and looks nothing like the rest of the classic HUD. For two, putting physical buttons to press on the screen... in a 90s Sonic game? In that era, DKC was dropping jaws and making a deliberate move to have nothing on the screen. A good solution imo would be to not bother redesigning the icon, but after the save file has used it 3 times, never show it again.
So, finally played it. Completed it. Twice only so far, with Sonic & Tails and Sonic. First thoughts: Better than Sonic 3 & Knuckles. (Bold claim) Second thoughts: I need to play this again with Knuckles. Well done Christian et al. You bloody nailed it you magnificent bastards. I have my Sonic the Hedgehog 4. I am content. I am happy. And the level choices were superb. The design just brilliant. Music is epic. I am a Sonic fanboy again. Haven't been this happy about a Sonic game since Sonic Advance. Sonic Mania has smashed all of my expectations and then some. So very happy. Well done everyone involved. Is it too early to ask for Sonic Mania 2?
How about a smaller game with say, 7 zones and a new character? And perhaps this new game could "lock on" to the previous one to extend it and add the new character to it? What a bold and entirely new idea.
Ikr. If they made a Mania 2 with lock-on's digital equivalent and then kept it under wraps until release... minds would be blown.
The more I think about it, the more I think it could be the best thing ever. Like, what was the one thing that people weren't satisfied with about Mania? Not enough new zones! If they make a lock-on game or something that includes even just a few new zones I think it would sell incredibly well. And when it comes to a new character, they could easily just add Amy in with a hammer-instashield (and maybe the peelout because she's from CD?) and people would love it.
More new zones would be really nice. Wouldn't mind having one or two remixes thrown in but the voice has become clear for Sega that they want more new stages, and that they were the strongest Mania had to offer. I feel like people kind of forget at times that there's remixed stages because the game is one of the 25th anniversary titles despite coming out a year late. Same with Forces. I do agree with everyone else though that the new zones were probably the best in the whole game. Press Garden is my jam. That stage is so much fun and oozes with creativity.
Much like Generations, Mania is held back more than helped by reuse of old zones. Both games play with the zones quite a bit, but it makes their identities less pronounced. No more reusing levels in platformers, please.
Sega's chance to bring back Episode Metal but in a game people would actually want to play in a different order.
Or in the more extreme case, fans write an open source reimplementation of the engine. i.e, rewrite Mania's engine entirely from scratch, so legal owners of the game's data can still play it, even if the original binary doesn't want to work. (Or works poorly, like vanilla Morrowind does.) And not that we'll get this benefit with Mania, but there are also many successful projects that keep old games working on modern operating systems, thanks to the availability of source code. PRBoom, ioquake3, AlephOne, among others. I highly doubt it would ever come to that in Mania's case, but it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility in this fandom. One way or another, I'm not too concerned about the game's future preservation, whether a fan-made "Denuvo remover" patch is made or some highly motivated programmer decides, "LINUX MANIA, HERE I COME." :v:
I feel like we could make an open source multi-platform implementation of the Retro Engine if there was enough people that want it. I really want it.
I want that too, personally. A DRM-free, multi-OS, open-source engine for Mania that's compatible with existing mods, and you still have to buy the game to run it with the appropriate files. It would be win/win/win, or rather, win/mac/lin. :v:
She's supposed to be slower than the others... I'd say her move set and controls in Advance were pretty much perfect.
The Advance games didn't have quite the same level design as Mania or the Classics, where sometimes speed is necessary which is something she lacks. The romhacks adding in a peel-out esque move don't even move her significantly faster than Sonic or so forth, they're just sort of a bandaid for when level design forces Amy to get speed or get stuck.
I feel like the idea of Amy being slower was introduced with her modern design. And even then, she was the speed character of her team in Heroes. I don't think it would be much of a stretch to say that Classic Dimension Amy could be just as fast as Sonic Tails and Knuckles.
I just playedx thorught thiis with sonic n tails and it was a lot of fun. Taxman, if you are listening. How about a game with nothi8;ng but scrapped sonic 1 & 2 levels. There are fan hacks but the level layouts are very un sonic like. Theres enough concept art showing off beta levels on the wiki. You can reuse their assets and maybe crank it out fast. Sega seems to like to reuse assets anyway.
Wasn't Amy only slower than the other characters in Adventure and '06? In the Advance games, her only limitation was the lack of a spin dash and that was only in Advance 1. By Advance 3, Amy is akin to what Blaze was in the Rush games. Actually, I think she may straight up better than Sonic since he has nothing over her outside of his boost mode, which she gets anyway when he's her partner.
In any case, more zones we've never played before. More new tropes, more surreal nonsense. I need it all!
