Sonic Mania Plus (Consoles Physical; PC Digital) - Non-Leaks Thread

This release is obviously intended for Christmas season and stuff, a perfect game to get for holidays, and cheaper too than plus, nothing really wrong with it

 

Almost guaranteed. Idk why they'd print copies of the earliest build of the game at this point.

 

I can still find copies of Mania plus at my local Walmart so this re-release makes me scratch my head.

 

WHY ARE YOU BUYING SO MANY COPIES!?

 

Although I do hope it has some of the features of the main update like cutscenes, I do think this is a good idea. I do remember a small minority of people who were concerned the original would be lost to the sands of time or something following Plus. This can sate those needs.

 

Honestly, I'm more tempted to pick this up than the physical release of Mania Plus. I don't care the extras that come with collector's boxes, I just want the game card, case, and manual, and this is $10 cheaper? I'm sold!

It's also perfect for impromptu gifting. If I met somebody else with a Switch who saw the game, liked it, and wanted it, I could just give it to them and keep playing my digital copy I already had. :specialed: Easy, convenient dispensing of good games.

(Willing to bet this is what OverLord had in mind, if not Christmas/birthday gift ideas.)

It would be strange if it wasn't the current build of Mania sans its DLC keys included, I feel. The older builds were technically better, because Plus introduced more bugs than it fixed, (as said much earlier in the thread) but ideally a publisher only wants to present the most definitive version of their game, so the latest build will do, warts and all.

 

Which builds in particular would you say are better? From my experience, the original build was by far the buggiest, and every revision since has largely functioned as intended.

 

I'm still seeing plus available at Best buy as well. I suspect that as long as plus is still on the shelf, the cheaper version will just cause confusion.

 

Sega were originally against releasing Mania (Minus) physically because they didn’t think it had enough content. Now suddenly it does?

The whole reason Plus came into being was so there would be extra content for a physical release. But then Sega didn’t want Plus to cost more than $4.99 because even though Mania Minus was one of Sega's best selling and best-received games, Sega were certain that the Plus DLC wouldn't sell if it was too expensive. Given the $4.99 constraint the Mania Team managed to offer a phenomenal amount of content, but it ended up being rather disappointing, as amazing as Plus was, it wasn't the extra stages that most people would have preferred. Instead of releasing this new Minus Physical version, couldn't Sega have let the Mania team release a new higher-priced DLC that had the budget for extra stages?

 

I’m still in the hope we get a real sequel and this third release can convince Sega that they should just keep financing these guys.

 

Well, with how good consoles are at updating and patches these days, it might be easier and cheaper for them to just ship the game as it was originally, and just have the console do it's update to current ver as soon as the player pops the disc/cart in. Not too different from day 1 patches an' all that..

Might be wishful thinking on my part though, as it would be nice to have vanilla Mania Minus preserved in Physical form as well as Plus.

 

It won't though.

That Metal Sonic fight is lost to time now.

 

Yeah, but the original fight wasn't that interesting. I figure the original fight was a placeholder because deadlines. If Team Mania had had more time, the fight we have now would probably have been there from the beginning.

 

As far as the original version being lost can't you redownload older versions of the game on Steam? Not that there's much reason to besides resurrecting the originals sloppy Metal Sonic fight though.

Damn shame some older mods are no longer playable though. Part of me is tempted to take some of the old mods and rework them in an attempt to make them playable again but idk where to start (I'd also simplify the mods so they work better together with other mods)

 

Yeah, you can play the previous vanilla versions on Steam, I did a few months ago. Feels weird playing the older versions which only have half of the end-zone transition custscenes.

The original MS fight wasn't terrible by any means, but there's no doubt the Metal Sonic Kai boss is more exciting and the fight doesn't go on quite as long which is better.

With the new physical (no Plus dlc) release, if it is the most up-to-date version of Mania (which added all the remaining cutscenes), then whoever buys it will be able to play the seven Encore Mode special stages via level select (by inputting 07, 08, 09, 0A, 0B, 0C & 0D in the sound test respectively) and will be able to glitch into the Encore mode version of Angel Island which will have the cutscene where you free Mighty & Ray, even though they of course won't be playable.

 

One think that I hope this non-plus version does is to restore the original menus when the DLC is disabled... although I doubt it will.

 

Nah it won't do that because the current non-plus version has a link to buy the DLC which wouldn't fit in the old menu.

Besides the new menu is nice. The old one was fine but eh, not a huge loss imo

 

While Sonic Mania Plus may have fixed some bugs but also introduced more bugs, I seriously cannot agree with the statement that the older builds of Sonic Mania were technically better.

Earlier versions of Sonic Mania had some very serious stability issues which should not have passed through into a final product. I do not believe this to be a case of developers' incompetence, rather, I firmly believe that a lack of adequate time is the primary culprit. It's blatantly clear that the developers needed more time to test and bug-squash, and a bigger delay was obviously needed for all platform iterations, but that sadly didn't happen.

Critical game-breaking issues, such as the game outright crashing – most notably common when the Fire Shield Air Dashes through ice blocks in Press Garden Zone Act 2, but also when Super Sonic Drop-Dashes on the Tornado, as well as music sometimes stopping seemingly at random in apparently any Zone (and later leading to a game crash after that happened) – do not gel well whatsoever with the idea of those versions being technically better.

Now, is it true that Sonic Mania Plus' Encore Mode introduced a heap of glitches and exploits, particularly revolving around the character swap mechanics? Absolutely! However, the smaller quantity of problems with earlier versions of Sonic Mania are far more severe, as they could (and too frequently did) trigger during normal gameplay, and often crash the game at that. Comparatively, a fair amount (or even most) of Sonic Mania Plus' glitches nearly always need to be deliberately triggered with characters in specific spots (to, for example, clip through otherwise solid objects during a speedrun).

While Sonic Mania Plus may have more bugs, at the very least, it fixed the most critical and most common bugs from initial versions of Sonic Mania: the ones which caused game crashes during normal gameplay.