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Sonic mania games5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() Very familiar Green Hills they are too, as Sonic Mania is in part a greatest hits package, with most of the levels being remixes of stages from the original Mega Drive games. All the player has to do is watch in wonder as Sonic spins and dashes through corkscrews and pipes, flies up into Sega-blue skies and rushes down green hills. For every tricky series of precision leaps and enemy-filled gauntlets, Sonic Mania rewards players with breathless rushes where the blue blur’s momentum takes care of everything. The secret is to embrace the lack of control. Over the years he’s been too twitchy, or too stubborn too heavy, or too floaty and always too eager to fall off the nearest ledge into the abyss below. He’s a hedgehog that runs fast, so naturally it’s a tricky feat to accomplish. One of the problems that Sonic games have had in the near two-decades since the last great one is making him fun to control. The player guides Sonic, Tails and Knuckles across two-dimensional rollercoaster levels (sorry, “zones”) made in the style of the Mega Drive originals and full of loops, springs and spike traps. All those horrid secondary characters we’ve grown to hate over the years are nowhere to be seen, save for a couple of cameos that only hardcore Sonic fans will even recognise such as the cast of Sonic Championship. If the 90s had never ended, Sonic Mania is the follow-up we would have had instead of making do playing Big the Cat fishing mini-games in Sonic Adventure. After years of ill-thought out additions - werehogs, treasure hunts, royal love interests, even the third-dimension was arguably a stretch too far - it has taken an officially endorsed fan-game to recapture the essence of what made Sonic the only real challenge to Mario’s platforming crown all those years ago. After Sonic the Hedgehog and its Mega Drive sequels captured the imaginations of school kids around the world in 1991, the development studio behind the character hasn’t quite been able to find the magic formula that made the original game such a hit. ![]()
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