Sonic Mania (Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PC...Netflix?)

It's more like: Dark Sonic -- this is an indie game, stop being an asshole. It's a damn trailer that people are dissecting in a frame-by-frame analysis.

Come on. The game got delayed for a reason, right?

 

I'm not trying to be an asshole, and I'm glad they delayed the game since that means it gives them more time to address this stuff. I'm just hoping this game can be the best it can possibly be. With the best of the best behind this I hope for the best, and because of that I find this kinda stuff unfortunate. Deal breaking? No. Sonic 1 - 3K all had their fair share of graphical issues and bugs and I still love them, and I'm sure I'll love this.

I also find it kinda funny/ironic that these art issues exist as isn't Pagoda West the team that started Sonic 2 HD? They were all about nitpicking stupid 1 pixel nonsense. But I'm sure many of these issues exist in the redone levels because they took the original tiles and for the time being made them work to suit their needs, leaving refinements for later. It would explain why the background graphics have so much more detail than the foreground ones.

 

I think when people say they are "troubled" they mean they are "troubled that these graphical issues are going to be present in the final product", not that they are "troubled the game is going to be a mess".
That's all.

Also as to someone who spent a fuckload of time developing fangames you sounded like a complete douche, TimmiT

 

I mean, y'all are douches.
Except 360. 360's cool, and he's gonna go to Valhalla when he dies.

 

Can we please let people be critical of certain aspects of the game? Criticisms are as valid as ever, especially when nobody is crying after the entire game being a mess or broken. I think the criticisms being brought up at the moment are non-issues personally and will be sorted in time for release Specifically, Laura's comments are a bit daft - the graphical errors are easily fixed and guesses about the game's length are coming out of nowhere. I've just got the highest confidence in this game. But if someone wants to say "oh hey I'm not too hot on that bit, it worries me a little", then that's okay too.

 

I mean, this, seriously. It's not even like I've been spending my time game just slating on the game, I literally praised Flying Battery and the artwork/poster revealed a few pages back. Any whining I've done is more about the amount of content shown, let alone the content itself.

Moreover I even prefaced the Flying Battery concerns with IMO, not trying to speak for anyone besides myself. But whatever.

 

This game is gonna be great guys. Let's calm down a bit.

 

Rockman & Forte did it first, with Magic Man:

 

Well if there's at least one amusing thing about this whole tile ordeal, it's that it's taken this long for the tileset to be noticed as how it is, heh. Honestly I never really realized what was going on with it before and I suppose I either didn't mind or really did miss it entirely. Not chastising or scolding or anything, I just think it's funny. It really does demonstrate how much more critical we are now vs. when we first played the older games. Though I hope the critical lens doesn't distort the experience too much, I suppose.

 

I'm not complaining for nitpicking sake; we shouldn't be seeing this stuff in games which are close to release (summer is really not that far away). I let the bugs pass last year because I knew that the dev team has lots of time left to work on the game. That isn't the case now and what we are seeing is not normal. We shouldn't be seeing broken tilesets and sprite animations. And yes, this could be a very early build, but we are giving the benefit of the doubt here and, if it is an early build, SEGA are doing badly by presenting it.

Now I know these bugs may very well get fixed, but let's think of a past similar example for the Sonic series. Rise of Lyric ran at abysmal framerates in early screenshots (dev frame counter) and everyone reassured each other (including Stephen Frost) that the framerate would be fixed for launch. It wasn't. And I know Rise of Lyric and Mania are completely different ball games, but this point shows that we shouldn't just brush off these forms of criticisms as 'sure to be fixed'. We don't know that; we are giving all thr benefit of the doubt.

And it's not that these bugs bother me in themselves; it's when they are combined with the other worries about the game. The complete void of game features, the Flying Battery reveal which looks almost completely copied and pasted from S3AK (the art doesn't look nearly as well remastered as Green Hill) and so looks barely worked on as a showcase for the panel, the absence of even info on special stages. This all combines together and leads me to believe the game is far behind schedule and even a summer release may be rushed for the team.

The game is probably going to be amazing; no argument there, but I worry that the team should probably have more time for development but are rushing for a release before Forces. I worry thst the graphical glitches are oversights as the team struggles to complete the project with such a small team and that the game will be very barebones with no extra features because there is simply no time to work on them.

I love Team Mania and Whitehead, but I don't want to demean them as not real developers who can't take (light) criticism from aforing fans no less.

 

I'm hopeful all goes well for this as well. But as for Flying Battery Zone's tileset shenanigans, can't really blame them at first for such. I mean, it's been what...nearly 23 or soish years since Sonic 3 & Knuckles came out, and only NOW do we actually notice the actual flaws and weird stuff with it likely after they went through it so much themselves?

I think it's more-so none of us ever even noticed it until now, and that's just silly, ain't it? :v:

 

Looks like an Orbinaut. I'm more curious what that purple thing is.

 

Quality took a nose dive with that Flying Battery footage - while I'm sure much of it is due to weaknesses in the original art... well...

it has been suggested not to use the original art... multiple times. Often loudly.



I fear Flying Battery doesn't lend itself well to 16:9 aspect ratios - there's a lot of emptiness in the level - interiors constructed entirely out of the same 16x16 pixel tiles (which would explain why the outside bits look so much better). Though you could probably solve a lot of it with some extra windows.

Although I suppose having wide open spaces in an airship is inherently strange. When I think "aeroplane", it's usually paired with the phrase "needs more leg room".


While I'm not really convinced about the mangled badniks (it's very fangame-esque in its delivery)... I'm willing to bet the true crime here is the chosen footage. Speedrunning as Knuckles and only managing to show one badnik isn't the best way to paint a game in a good light. Flying Battery also had a lot of fire - not much of that here.

 

Gotta agree with that... Those almost-unaltered sprites with painted broken eyes don't look specially good and I hope they're placeholders. =\


The final version should have blood coming out of their eye sockets! =P

 

So I booted up Kega Fusion after my last post and quickly went through Flying Battery.

The science behind this is quite funky, because in many ways Sonic Mania's adaption stays true to the original design - like Green Hill Zone, entire chunks of the level are lifted, so they are literally identical in some shots.


But that 16:9 ratio makes a massive, massive difference. Flying Battery's (vertical) corridors are clearly designed with 4:3 resolutions in mind - the entire screen is used to paint the level, which although sounds dumb (because surely all levels are shown on screen), in Mania, the extra pixels mean that for all intents and purposes, we're painting more than the level.

Like there are two big borders on the left and right. Not traditional borders in the sense that they block you from seeing things, but that they're not "used" for anything. The layout is still adapted to 4:3, which typically means in 16:9 you get a better view of the aforementioned wall tiles, and you're drawn to abstract nature of the graphics (which honestly I have no qualms with). Because Flying Battery is almost as much of a "vertical" level as it is a "horizontal" one (unlike Green Hill Zone which is basically "run left to right"), the emptiness becomes really obvious.



This effect is best represented with a game like Jazz Jackrabbit 2. Virtually all the footage you see in that game is running in 640x480 (or higher), but because the character sprites are designed to still function in the low res 320x200 mode that nobody uses, you have vast swathes of level that, while rendered on-screen, you never actually look at because you're concentrating on a smaller area in the centre where the character is.

I don't think Jazz 2 looks as "clean" as the original game. Sonic Mania, while nowhere near as bad in this regard, also doesn't look quite as "clean". It's enough to appear jarring.

Game art is a science.


So it's genuinely a case where in 1994, you didn't see the original art, and now in 2017, you do. Problem is, I'm genuinely not sure how you fix it without radically changing the look of the level. And when you're doing that... well we might as well have a super unique "Blying Fattery Zone" where Sonic & Tails run around an overweight person.



also

First thing I did was pause the video to try and find Splats.

Don't tell me I'm the only one.

 

Yes, the game is a product in development. But here's a shocking development for you folks: the trailer itself is also a product. In fact, it's a finished product. As in, several people worked together to create a build of the game, pick out the content to show off, record the necessary footage, edit the footage and the audio together, and release it to the world in full 60fps glory.

These were the 30 seconds SEGA chose to represent the current state of the game, so you're damn sure people are going to analyze them. That's what trailers are for.

I don't think I've seen anyone say "doomed". What I see is people with deep feelings for this game, wanting it to be the best it can possibly be, be it for their own enjoyment, or for the sake of the franchise as a whole.

That Metacritic score is important. For the first time ever, trust has been placed in a team of indie developers to create a flagship product. The success of Sonic Mania will dictate the future of such ventures. Even if the final product is by all means a fantastic product, if it doesn't get a stellar media response and good sales figures, they probably won't try the stunt again. So of course people are so vocal and so preoccupied with every rough edge. The only time to act on them is before the game is released. I can't believe I had to write that.

Here's a thought: If people calling out flaws makes you mad, be the better man. Don't contribute to the negativity by calling out the people calling out flaws. We're all in this together, friends.