No more so than any other game within its own series or among the dozens of other games like it in the current market. Also, it's not a reference, it's almost the entire level. It felt like "Let's have Sky Chase for the sake of having Sky Chase" so there's like 2 solid minutes where nothing really happens. It's fantastic speedrun design, except when it's decidedly not (bosses, entire stages) and then it just doesn't count because ??? I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it's totally average for speedrunning among its peers. It's a good run, pretty hard to do and learn because analog movement games like this just intrinsically invoke a certain level of variation, but as far as the run goes it's about on a par with its peers and the featureset falls short. Instant restart is very nice, but it came at the cost of having the timer start via an actual physical object in the level, and abuse it people do. In-game leaderboards were nice, but lacking any type of replay functionality it quickly devolved into hacked/impossible times and swiftly becomes virtually useless for real competition. If this is high-bar then christ Dustforce would blow your mind. I know we're very eager to praise Mania and all but can we not praise it for things it really doesn't have over its peers. Mania is not an old game, so this question is facetious. It varies wildly depending on the game but usually you just slap a timer down and go. You can still do that with Mania, but it's kind of plain considering how many games that have come before have done a lot more. Previous Sonic games do this better, Sonic Colours has Egg Shuttle, for instance, which proved immensely popular with runners of that game for the simple reason of removing much of the fluff. (also many old games actually have done this better anyway, games as old as Super friggin Metroid were flashing clear times at the end of a playthrough so this question is double dumb)
I mean a good chunk of the reason the older Sonics are ripe for running is because there's a ton of really good clipping exploits and screen-wrap glitches that let you phase through the actual platforming bits, while also being not unreasonable to pull off (you can even trigger them by complete accident!). This isn't a strike against or for, but it's definitely way easier in the old games than it is in Mania to just clip through stuff or wrap around and beat stages. That being said I think Mania's LEVELS are mostly constructed to be pretty speed-friendly. Could talk about bosses but a lot of Sonic games have fluff to this extent whether it be through bosses or just things like cinematics in the case of S3K (part of why Knuckles is the fastest category is because he has very minimal cutscenes/cinematics and also less levels overall). Also being able to skip the points roll is really handy in this game, I don't recall that being a feature in S3K or any of the old games (perhaps I'm only remembering the inability to skip the points adding up at the end of special stages only). But the big reason the game feels speed-friendly is cause the level design and Sonic as a character in this game feel heavily adhered to that even in comparison to the older games.
It's not in S3K (and is a big reason those games have incredibly awkward timing methods) but this was a feature in 2D Sonic as early as Advance 2. for what it's worth again I'm not saying Mania is awful as a speedrun I'm just saying it's not a fantastic one either
Oh I know! I'm not being critical of your statements, just throwing my own out there and attempting to build on what I believe the initial proposal was, which is that the game's levels themselves compliment the notion of speed clearing (not necessarily the whole game itself, but the stages.). And yeah the points being unskippable is one of those quirks about the old games that makes em a bit annoying to run, but it does have the benefit of giving your hands a bit of a break at the end of each act/stage completion!
Dark Sonic, the leaderboards do appear to be fixed, although it looks like it takes a little while to update new times. For example, I got a new time and checked the leaderboard but it was still using my last best time for comparison. I tried a new run, didn't get a new time, checked the leaderboard and it was now comparing the correct time.
So is the complaint more that the game just isn't great for speedrunning or that it doesn't have the quality of life things that might make it better (like full game time saves and things like that)? There are some odd omissions from the game that's for sure, I think it tries too hard to be a product of a time when there's no need for it to be.
Mainly the latter, personally. It's alright for speedrunning. I find the omission of bosses from time attack in any capacity to be kind of damning but that varies from runner to runner. But either way it's not really a complaint, Mania doesn't necessarily need to do these things and the lack of them isn't necessarily a blemish so much as just a missed opportunity. I was more responding to the praise for it as a speedgame when I really don't think it does a whole lot to earn that praise, it's a well enough designed video game and that makes it a good enough speedgame transitively, but it doesn't really go terrifically far beyond that. In fact the removal of bosses and the deletion of entire stages from the game's own Time Attack kind of shows anti-confidence in its own design for speedruns.
That's fair. Although I'm surprised there wasn't any sort of boss attack mode to supplement the fact that the bosses aren't in Time Attack mode, which is especially odd given Sonic 2 mobile had a boss attack mode and all the mobile games included the bosses in Time Attack mode. Maybe they were excluded here because they were longer? I can see why they would omit Mirage Saloon Act 1 ST though, if you take the boss out of the picture it'd pretty much boil down to "hey how fast can you get through this 5 seconds of train?" And I just checked and Sky Chase was omitted from Sonic 2 mobile's time trial mode as well, since the only differences would be fractions of a second based on if you were far enough right on the screen when the level ends. Personally I like that they excluded the bosses from Time Attack, and for the most part I actually enjoy the bosses. When I'm looking to time trial I want to see how fast I can get through the level, and see what kind of intriciate things need to be done in order to shave off seconds. Granted bosses operate like this too, but once I got them down I don't want to fight it every single time I'm trying to get my fastest time. But I can see why true speedrunners wouldn't like the bosses being excluded. A completion time thing would have been a rather nice addition to the Mania Mode save files though come to think of it.
nope, just played a bit today to get the debug coordnates of where I got pushed into the wall and floor in LRZ2.
When will they patch the game already? There's still a ton of issues in it, like when the game crashes every time I open the leaderboards.
Interesting, it's not just consoles that got the update. On Steam I just got a 36.9mb update. Wonder what it's for? Patch notes hopefully will be posted somewhere soon, right?
I quickly played the updated PS4 version (took a screenshot below). So happy that the super transformation is indeed now mapped to a different button (triangle)!
Ok, is it just me or did the update fucked up the music even more ? I just finished playing the game in no save mode and the music stopped/was replaced by another track at least a dozen times. Or maybe I just got unlucky...
I was wondering when they would get added. The images and text for those languages have been in the game since release.
I wonder if there's any chance of Tails' CPZ Transition sprites being implemented instead of just look up then look at screen and blink.
So according to an edit from Random Talking Bush on TCRF, the Dunkey easter egg was removed in the latest patch (1.03.0919)
Though it was EyeKey that noticed the change in the first place, over at the Hacking Discussion thread. (I'm trying to add his post as the source there, but it keeps coming up as "source needed". Hrm.) Thanks for that, GoldS. But yeah, it's completely gone now. Not even a ring chime when you input the command.
I'm stubbornly refusing to update my Switch version until there's an option to turn off the on-screen transformation prompt when you can go Super. I've got completed saves for all characters with all emeralds and no emeralds, so the downside of the distracting prompt outweighs the convenience. I'm NOT SILLY, YOU'RE SILLY!
