Sonic Mania – 16 Cool Nods to Sonic & SEGA

 

Sonic Mania released last week! I love it, to the point I’ve now done eight runthroughs of it; and like, 7 of those were with all emeralds!

Suffice to say, I think it’s the best Sonic game ever, but I couldn’t really think what to write about it when it came to doing a review that hadn’t already been said. So I decided to write something else that’s already been written about a million times; Mania’s callbacks and easter eggs! That being said, I’m going to try and delve a bit deeper than some of the others I’ve seen on this topic. There’ll definitely be some more expected, ‘obvious’ stuff on this list, but hopefully I can point out some neat bits you might’ve missed!

…that or ones I’ve completely misinterpreted in my hunt for fanservice. So in no particular order, let us begin!

(This should be obvious, but this comes with a huge spoiler warning. This list is no-holds barred, so if you’re say, a PC user who wants to go in with all of this as a surprise when the game launches next week, then look away now. Go. Seriously, lads.)

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Sonic Farces

Heh. I made a funny.

The last main episode of my YouTube venture, Tracker Talks, was me talking about how I thought the latest Sonic games were going to be revealed. Fast forward, and now Sonic Mania is tantalisingly close (or out, if you’re reading this after August 15th), leaving us to turn our attention to that… other Sonic game. The 3D one.

Sonic Forces’ pre-release has been… interesting to say the least. When the game was revealed, the magic of having a new Modern Sonic game quickly wore off when people laid eyes upon Classic Sonic. And then we started getting more details, some gameplay, the surprise of a custom character creator thing… and if you follow me over on the Twitterverse, you’ll know I’ve not been particularly kind to Sonic Forces.

SEGASonic Arcade – An Adventure In Early Sonic

It’s everyone’s favourite needlemouse! And some rejects!

Oh good, my first article on here is Sonic the Hedgehog themed. We’re off to a great start, aren’t we? I’ve already banged on about why I love Sonic and the like, so let’s cut to the chase; June 1993 saw the release of Sonic’s first foray into arcades outside his cameo in Rad Mobile courtesy of AM3, and that was SEGASonic Arcade. I have no idea why SEGA is incorporated into Sonic’s name for this outing, nor do I care; point is, the game’s remained somewhat elusive over the years since SEGA hasn’t really bothered giving us a way to play it legally. SEGASonic used a trackball as it’s method of controlling Sonic, which isn’t exactly fun to emulate with modern controllers; indeed, this is why it never showed up on the Sonic Gems Collection, as was apparently intended. Saying that, after dabbling about with the ROM settings in MAME a bit, I did actually manage to make the game at least playable with an Xbox 360 controller, and so I could finally experience this thing in a way at least slightly closer to how SEGA intended than with the default emulator settings.