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There are some completely new ones in there too. It isn’t all just retreads of popular old zones, mind you. That’s because it may look and play just like the old games but the stages have been meticulously planned to make sure there are far fewer boring bits. In Sonic Mania, it feels more like it did back when the games first came out and those annoyances were less obvious. Remember the weird gumball machine mini-game in Sonic 3? What in the utter shit was that all about? Don’t get me started on the big mech boss at the end of Sonic 2, either.Īnd, of course, let’s not forget my aforementioned personal enemy, the Chemical Plant Zone, with its infuriating underwater moments, its lengthy spells in the purple liquid draining all the momentum out of the game. The Marble Zone in the first Sonic game is one hell of a slog when you play it today: pushing blocks into lava then slowly riding them is soul-destroyingly dull. The fact is, as fun as Sonic 1, 2, 3, CD and Knuckles still are to play these days, they weren’t perfect and over the years their imperfections have become more noticeable. That’s the important thing: it’s like we remember it, not necessarily how it always was. They may have been created in the mid 2010s, but they feel like we remember it feeling in the early 1990s. That’s exactly the case with these newly designed sections. Sometimes you got to pick up speed and it felt great, but other times you had to slow down and regain your control for trickier parts, knowing that your eventual reward if you overcame them would be a chance to build up that pace again later and enjoy the (literal) rush. The best 16-bit Sonic stages weren’t about going from 0-100 mph in two seconds and staying at that speed until you hit the goal, they were a delicate flow of highs and lows. After all, one of the reasons people love the original Mega Drive Sonic games – it’s an argument that most people are sick of, frankly, because it’s said so often – is that they weren’t just about speed, they were about momentum. This would all be pointless if the levels weren’t designed well. This is old, but it’s so gloriously fresh too. Suddenly it’s clear that you’re no longer playing the umpteenth re-release of the original Sonic The Hedgehog that Sega’s been dining out on for decades. The music’s now a full-blown modern rearrangement, there are rope slides in there, the power-ups from Sonic 3 have appeared and there’s now a pool of water in the middle of the stage, where a giant ring is waiting to take you to a new bonus stage you’ve never seen before. Someone with really complex, well-designed hands.īy the time you reach Act 2 of Green Hill – only the game’s second level – it’s almost unrecognisable (as you can see in the video footage I captured below). Sections you used to know like the back of your hand start to look like… well, the back of someone else’s hand. Then, as you continue through the level things start to change. This arguably makes the Switch version the best console one for capturing the feel of playing the original Sonic games on an old CRT telly Playing in handheld mode is particularly great because it eliminates any input lag that all modern TVs suffer from to some extent. It plays beautifully on Switch, running at 60fps on both TV and handheld.
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The layout looks exactly the same, the music’s a bit nicer, but that’s more or less it. As the stage begins you’d be forgiven for thinking you were playing little more than an HD port of the original Sonic The Hedgehog. Take the Green Hill Zone, the game’s opening level (because of course it is). They’ve been completely rebuilt – ‘remixed’ wouldn’t be doing it enough justice – perfectly balancing the line between remembrance and redress. What’s brilliant about it, though, is that these levels aren’t just ported over in a slapdash manner. This 2D Sonic reboot consists of 12 zones, many of which are revamped versions of those in the original Mega Drive (and Mega CD) Sonic games including, yes, that bastarding Chemical Plant. Amazingly, nearly 25 years later, I’ve come to peace with it: and it’s thanks to Sonic Mania.
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But the key word is ‘hated’, in the past tense. If all the zones in Sonic The Hedgehog 2 were like family members, the Chemical Plant Zone was my racist uncle: it was part of a larger group I loved, but any time I encountered it I had a lengthy, uncomfortable time interacting with it.Įven as a young 9-year-old sprog who was obsessed with Sonic and excitedly got his copy of the sequel on what was officially known as Sonic Twosday – Tuesday, 21 November 1992 – the Chemical Plant Zone rubbed me up the wrong way. Switch, PS4, Xbox One, PC (Switch version reviewed)