Sonic Mania is now older than a month. What was once a pipedream of a brand new Sonic developed by fans has finally happened. David The Lurker, Cinossu, Overlord, Bartman3010 and InstantSonic lend their voices to talk about the Mania and not-so Mania about Sonic’s return to 2D glory before the start of this year’s Sonic Amateur Games Expo and the Sonic Hacking Contest. Music composed by Tee Lopes. Expect spoilers in this one!
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PagodaWest Games
By the fans, for the fans. Truer words have never been spoken when it comes to Sonic Mania, a game does the unthinkable in 2017: get everyone excited for Sonic the Hedgehog again. And by everyone, we’re not talking about just fans of series, but folks who have been withdrawn since the days of the Genesis, people who haven’t considered playing a Sonic game since 1995. And there’s good reason for that too, after a year of development, Christian Whitehead, Headcannon, PagodaWest, and a whole gaggle of friends, members, and family from Retro and beyond have created one of the series best entries ever.
Sega just released this lovely new trailer for Sonic Mania. It features animation by Sonic Mega Drive artist Tyson Hesse and music by Hyper Potions, along with a first look at Stardust Speedway from Sonic CD. Also there’s a reference to one of Sonic’s rejected character designs, so that’s neat!
The trailer also reveals when you’ll be able to download the game: on August 15th. Plus it can now be pre-ordered on Steam, PlayStation Store, and Xbox Live Marketplace for $19.99/€19.99/£15.99.
If you want to listen to the full version of the song in the trailer, it can be found here.
Surely the internet isn’t going to make the title of this article a played out meme before it goes up, nope, probably not, nah.
So that Sonic SXSW panel happened, and we got some pretty good reveals out of it. And enough of them for us to actually make a recap article for once! Now, if you want to watch the panel for yourself, Tails’ Channel has the panel up on his YouTube channel. But if you just want all the news about Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, here’s our recap:
We played Sonic Mania, and now we’re going to tell you what we think! In this SEGA News Bits, George and I (Barry) rest our aching feet just hours after the Sonic the Hedgehog 25th Anniversary Party in San Diego to share our reaction to the Sonic Mania reveal and give our thoughts on how the game plays. Do we have another Sonic 4 on our hands or is Sonic Mania the true successor to Sonic 3 & Knuckles? The answers are obviously “nope!” and “hell yes!” in that order.
Special thanks to Neo Hazard for letting us use his footage, you can check out his channel here! Also, thanks to Bartman for being the one to play the game in our footage. You can find Bartman’s YouTube channel here!
SEGA News Bits is a production of SEGAbits, covering all things SEGA and Sonic the Hedgehog. When we touch on Sonic stories, you’ll be seeing them here on Sonic Retro as well. If you enjoyed this episode of the SEGA News Bits, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and never miss an episode!
We all remember Sonic 2 HD and how it regrettably met its end not long after releasing a playable demo of Emerald Hill Zone due to internal controversy. Just because the door on that project closed though doesn’t mean that this was the end for them. Some of the team, now working under PagodaWest Games, put their talents toward a brand new IP for iOS systems called Major Magnet.
Retro Engine creator and the man behind the 2011 digital port of Sonic CD Christian “Taxman” Whitehead confirmed as much in a tweet to his followers earlier today congratulating the group on the successes the dev’s title has met, including an Editor’s Choice award from Apple itself.
While Sonic 2 HD may be resting eternally, definitely give these guys some love and pick up the game on your iOS device and hope that they can bring the game over to other platforms. Good job, PagodaWest!