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

Well, for $5 less you're not getting the art book. So you're not getting everything the plus version has.

 

I stand corrected. You're also not getting a cool holo slip cover that holds said art book either.

Now I'm beginning to wonder why'd I bought the base game again when I have so many versions with Plus and all the things that go with it? LOL

 

I have a question about the Blue Spheres stages/bonus game you access from the extras menu. The game gives me random stages each time I play via this option. Is it possible to replay a stage I have just played?

 

So, I was trying to get the retail Mania Plus on Switch as a gift for my friend but it's sold out everywhere. Did I miss something? Is it out of print for the regular Mania version now? Because if so, that's wack.

 

I have the same problem. I've called a bunch of places; ended up getting it on Ebay. Can anyone confirm that Sega is no longer producing Mania Plus?

 

It's still widely available in Australia EB retail stores:

https://www.ebgames.com.au/search?q=sonic+mania+plus

However JB hi-fi lists it as 'limited stock' so I'd say that means the game might be no longer in production

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/SonicTheHe...i_think_i_just_found_an_obscure_reference_in/

Intentional or coincidence?

 

I thought Opa-Opa was in one of the special stages.

 

I think that the entire background of Special Stage 6 is a Fantasy Zone reference, right?

Or is it a reference to another game? I'm not familiar with Fantasy Zone myself, but I swear I could have heard this mentioned before.

 

This may seem superfluous to say at this point, but I never did give a review of the game like others so I'm going to put a few things out there. What is one more on the stack, right?

Mania is amazing. Obviously. Plus is even better. In spite of comments made about the palettes in Encore Mode or little hang-ups people have had with (insert nitpick here), I've grown to adore Encore Mode. The palettes have completely grown on me. Love 'em. They're soooo…funky and weird. I think I'd previously made the comparison to character palettes in Super Street Fighter II Turbo; at first sight, the colors are slightly off putting (at least they were for me) but the more you play, you learn to love them. It is all mood.

On a deeper level, the ability to switch characters in-game is beautiful. My fear that Mighty would be little more than a Sonic clone (he is, design-wise) actually works in the game's favor. Him and Ray are the other Sonic & Tails duo. It adds a bit of levity to the aesthetic. Ray is pure joy. The whole thing is fresh as hell.

The amount of love that went into Mania has elevated it to being my fave game in the franchise. I still wish they'd have included a starry background for Mirage Saloon at night (seriously…have you EVER been in the desert at night?? Seriously. The galaxy is on full display). I still wish Angel Island was fleshed out some more, but I dig the new grass. That's not a weed joke, I swear. I wish there were more new Zones but that takes a lot of time and effort and what we got is amazing. The old Zones are great, too. It is a timeless work of art IMO.

Mirage Saloon is my fave new Zone. I like the auto scrolling segment personally. It gives the stage an almost theatrical introduction. I am aware opinions vary about it, but I think it's good. Titanic Monarch is the best final level in any Sonic game. It just is. It's a bleak, ominous, mega-Zone. It is Scrap Brain meets Metropolis meets Death Egg…and is pretty much how I imagined Genocide City/Cyber City would look back in the day. The phlox-colored warp ooze is an interesting gimmick. The boss is badass.

Press Garden and Studiopolis are also great. The game itself is right up there with SMB3 in my opinion. It is fucking amazing. Show it to your friends. Buy it as gifts. Give copies to your mums and aunties. Get as many people as possible to play this thing. Air drop it on North Sentinel Island. Get it in as many hands as possible. It's one of the best platformers I've ever played easily.

I remember the first time I'd played Sonic as a kid. Before that, I'd only ever played Ti-99/4A games and some Atari (Parsec and Adventure were the shit, yo). I went from that straight to Sonic and it blew my mind. This game did that for me again. Not because of any leaps in graphics or anything this time around, but just the amount of effort oozing out of every detail. And, the graphics look great for what it's worth.

As far as a sequel, I think it WILL happen. Eventually. I think in the future the demand for another classic game won't be ignored. It is a labor of love making a game of this caliber and for a sequel to approach the quality of this, it'll take some time and planning. Development of Mania was breakneck. Something with more time put into it would be better for it.

 

The game launched on EA's Origin today. Are there any differences in that version compared to the Steam version?

 

I've yet to play that version (prob won't) but I heard that the "press "Y" to speed up in Special Stages" thing got fixed, apparently it's a slightly newer version of Mania too so there could be other bugfixes too?

EDIT: oh gosh, here's some links so yall actually know where I got this info from haha:
https://twitter.com/PTKickass/status/1288908691803181057
https://twitter.com/PTKickass/status/1288969233750208513

 

Don't buy it on Origin if you want mods.

 

Huh so they got rid of leaderboards. Prob for the best, this game was hacked to hell and back the leader boards on the PC version have prob been a mess since like day 3.

 

I wonder if they fixed the CPU idle bug, while they were at it? It would make recording/streaming the game a lot easier for more people on budget hardware.

All of the listed fixes are appreciable quality-of-life changes for the game; would like to see them on the Steam version at some point.

 

You say that, but you'd have to live without mods. The community has collectively decided that it's not worth the trouble to update the mod loader and all the DLL mods again if there's an update.

 

Damn shame every update breaks every single mod. Like it's all background shit, why does it break everything?

 

It doesn't break every mod, only the ones that edit the game's code directly, because the mod loader and the mods are using hardcoded addresses to point to the things they want to modify, and any time the game's executable is rebuilt, all of the data gets moved around by the compiler, so we have to go find everything again, and then rebuild all our mods. Theoretically it's possible to write mods in a way that they could work with any version of the game, but doing that is significantly more complicated, and it doesn't fix any of the existing mods.

 

As it is, I play the game vanilla, especially on the Switch. (Where mods would be difficult to hook in, and a legal issue.) So, a Steam update wouldn't affect me at all, save for Multiplayer Plus, and CodeNameGamma's netplay mod.

However, I totally understand the exhaustion with updating mod support at this point. If there were to be another Steam update, people would have to downpatch their Steam version for mods- which might be a little obtuse for the less technically-inclined. (It's not obvious how you activate Steam's CLI, for instance.) Some games won't let you see enough metadata to downpatch correctly, either; Mania might be one of them.

 

Yeah, we know, and we'll likely make a tool to make the process easier.