#Sonic mania flash games series

are capable of incredible speed, it's true, but there's a sluggishness as they work their way toward it. As I made my way through the revamped, reimagined Green Hill Zone that starts the game, it was hard not to feel a little giddy - could someone have made a Sonic that feels as good as I remembered the originals feeling?Īs it turns out, Sonic Mania is maybe too faithful. Sonic Mania, more than any Sega-led project of the last 20 years, feels exactly the way I remember the original trilogy. When it's working, this speed is exhilarating, and remarkably, no other game has ever managed to capture the same lightning in a bottle that Sonic did. Levels feel much bigger than they were in the Genesis games, with many, many more paths to barrel down, even as many enemies and bits of scenery hit your sense of nostalgia like a bucket of ice. That feeling of barely controlled speed is Sonic's original schtick, and it's leveraged for everything it's worth here. Instead, Sonic and his friends collect rings as they race through each level, looping and backtracking at speeds that seem too fast for even the game's camera to keep up. It's a side-scroller that is, ostensibly, a platformer, but it's nothing like its contemporaries. Sonic has a new ability, the Drop Dash, which allows him to immediately drop out of a jump and dash upon hitting the ground, but otherwise, you could draw a direct line between Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Sonic and Knuckles and Sonic Mania. This extends to the way Sonic Mania plays as well. It certainly looks like a Genesis game, or rather, a Sega CD release - animations are more detailed than I remember them being from the cartridge titles, though the color palette feels like it came directly from the Genesis. Sonic Mania looks achingly familiar, to the point where I'm not clear whether or not many assets have been pulled directly from existing Sonic games. If you've played any of the Genesis Sonic titles, Sonic Mania is going to look and feel familiar. Eggman once again steals a collection of powerful gems called Chaos Emeralds, and it's up to Sonic, constant companion Tails the Fox and frenemy Knuckles the Echidna to get them back and defeat Eggman until … well, whenever Sega rolls this whole thing out again. But in its fixation on making a perfect recreation of '90s-era Sonic, some of the series' more egregious recurring problems remain present - with some modern quality-of-life elements nowhere to be found.

As a result, Sonic Mania feels like the series' Genesis-period ideas taken to logical extremes, and then some. The result is Sonic Mania, a game that feels slavishly, almost fetishistically devoted to the old-school branch of Sonic gameplay and design. Then Sega gave these same fan developers the keys to its mascot, a partnership between developer Christian Whitehead and studios Headcannon and PagodaWest games. Sega initially shut the project down, but in a move that surprised many, the publisher gave one of these developers the go-ahead to finish a port of Sonic CD for consoles and mobile platforms to generally positive reception. Meanwhile, various fan projects have sought to create new 'traditional' Sonic games via hacked-in additions to original game code, as well as completely, faithfully recreated versions of '90s-era Sonics.

#Sonic mania flash games series

Since then, Sega has tried to reinvent the series over and over, with middling success. While some fans defend the Sonic oeuvre from the Dreamcast onward, the series' best days were behind it, reaching its absolute nadir with 2006's disastrous Sonic the Hedgehog. With the jump to 3D in 1999's Sonic Adventure, the series retained its flash, but something was fundamentally broken in the translation. After the Genesis console faded, Sega went an entire hardware generation without a 'proper' flagship Sonic release on the Saturn. Sega has had a nightmarish time trying to rekindle the magic and majesty of its iconic mascot since the blue hedgehog's peak in the '90s.

With Sonic Mania, Sega has done the unthinkable for a corporate player in video games: They've given it to the fans.