So I guess the earliest we can expect reviews is next week then? The OT on NeoGAF should be up about 24 hours before release too. 11 days and counting! Christ the game's so close yet also feels so far.
Seriously. I squealed in excitement at the new stuff they revealed today. Why are you guys all bitching about the special stage graphics, some cloud thing and the blue spheres being just a bonus stage? The game looks great and I'm sure it'll be fun. Do we need to pick everything apart and criticize almost every aspect of it? Let's just be fans and be excited for it!
I hoped it was a sign of things to come with EB Games Australia's listing. But then corporate ended up completely removing the listing about a week ago. Either GameStop Italy are also speculating wildly, or SEGA keeps either misleading or leaking stuff they're not suppose to. I hope it's SEGA leaking stuff they're not suppose to. :v:
No shipping information is given for me either, I believe they provide the tracking, etc. when the item is shipped. So basically I took a precaution and bought Mania on Steam (PC) because I really didn't want to miss it on the day of the release for this very reason.
I don't stream data files from my pc, that is astonishingly slow over 56k, considering its several megabytes of data. I pull data files from the serial port sd card reader (or cd rom) because a) its faster and b) the code is what I would be using in an actual release where I couldnt assume people are using dc load. But just sending the executable itself via 56k can sometimes take minutes. This blows when you are rapidly iterating through a bug. What could be done in minutes turns into an hour+.
Special stage looks cool. I'm thrilled to see Blue Spheres return as a bonus stage. It was always the best special stage imo. I'm inclined to be disappointed by recycled layouts though. I hope there's more than one kind of bonus stage too. I wouldn't mind seeing Sonic 1 and 2's special stages be included as bonus stages. Also I want the gumball bonus stage....
I feel like that's a bit of an overstatement. The series lack to find footing, the community's growth in passion and talent, and the constant demand for a return to form is why we have things like the Remasters and Mania. Bitching about the hue of a stage or Sonic's irises doesn't do much to make us seem legit. I'm not saying no one should talk about that stuff, that's what this place is for after all. Just saying that maybe we should try and separate genuine criticism with blatant nitpicking. This just kinda makes you look silly. Don't see how pixels on a cloud being a bit wonky demonstrates the team's lack of attention to detail or the game not being good enough for release. You could bring up the mountains as a rebuttal, but those two elements aren't even in the same league. The blotchy mountains was something that NEEDED to be fixed. Clouds...eh, not so much.
I actually pointed out the cloud issue way back when we got our first look at Greenhill Zone. It is ugly, it's not just wonkiness it's actual full blown misplaced/badly placed tiles that was present in the original tileset. Though it's ugliness you probably have to go out of your way to notice. I think the issue here is that they could have been fixed but weren't, regardless of whether they impact the actual enjoyment of the game or not. In all honesty, it's actually interesting as it gives us a look into the creation process, the tiles aren't all remade from scratch and this shows it.
While I would have certainly preferred Special Stages like the ones in the Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast, I'm fine with the ones we're getting here. The new Special Stages in Mania actually seem like a nice blend of the ones in Sonic 2, Sonic 3 and Sonic CD; you're running forward to a goal like in 2, collecting spheres like in 3 and destroying UFOs like in CD (not to mention, Mania's Special Stages aesthetically look the most like Sonic CD's). Props to the Mania team for creativity. I was also surprised to see that the Blue Sphere minigame is coming back. Not the biggest fan of it, but it's reasonable fan-service, and Mania seems to be all about that.
Maaaaan I'm trying my absolute hardest to not think about playing Sonic Mania in 11 damn days. I've done a really good job of keeping mania out of my mind since announcement, but it's getting really hard now. I have my entire setup ready. I'm going to play on a 32" SD CRT television -- the same one I had when I was a kid - at 640x480 using an SLS Sega Saturn USB controller. I'm taking the entire day off to play Mania over and over again. I've been dying for more classic sonic since the day I put down Knuckles Chaotix in 95. 22 damn years since I've felt this kind of excitement. FFFFFFF so close.... EDIT: Re: Special Stage IMO they most resemble NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams in terms of concept, more so than any other singular Sonic special stage. Chasing down the goal while collecting items necessary to go fast enough to catch said goal, with a time limit working against you... that's exactly like the NiGHTS section of that game.
This is all I needed to hear. The frustrations of jumping and missing the UFOs in Sonic CD just ... made me the cranky person I am today.
They fixed the hole in the mountain in GHZ. They fixed the doors in CPZ. They've redrawn tons of the original art with more detail and colour. The clouds in all the other backgrounds look amazing. "It looked shit in Sonic 1" is not an argument, because this isn't a Sonic 1 remaster. We already got one of those, and I'm perfectly fine with the clouds not being fixed there. That's pretty subjective, I've always found the cloud issues to be pretty noticeable, whereas the mountain issue didn't even come to my attention until Mania's reveal. There's a particular kind of nitpicking that only adoring fans bother with, though. I could do this all day.
