Sega Announces Two New Sonic Games That Seek To Recapture The Glory Days (gamespot.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In celebration of Sonic the Hedgehog's 25th anniversary, Sega has announced two new Sonic games at Comic-Con in San Diego. The first game is called Sonic Mania and it's a 2D platformer that features visuals and gameplay reminiscent of the classic Genesis games. "It revamps zones and acts from Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Sonic CD, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and Sonic and Knuckles, in addition to introducing new ones into the fold," writes Mat Paget from GameSpot. The second game has no title [besides "Project Sonic 2017"], but it does have a holiday 2017 release date for PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo NX consoles. It reportedly features both classic and modern versions of Sonic, similar to 2011's Sonic Generations. Sega made two additional announcements. "Mobile game Sonic Dash has passed 200 million downloads and will receive a special in-game event that adds the Green Hill Zone and Classic Sonic as a playable character," reports GameSpot. "The event only lasts a week, but players can unlock both the classic level and character for use after the event." The second additional announcement is that the animated Sonic Boom series will be renewed for a second season. "Sonic Mania was born out of our fans' love of the classic Sonic 2D platform games,â said Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka. "This type of collaboration is a first for Sega and we hope everyone will be both surprised and delighted by this title. Sonic Mania has been a passion project for the entire team and we look forward to sharing more details about it later this year. Having the game actually playable at the event itself tonight was testament to the dedication of the team behind it.â

Comments

Put CEOs and HR in jail permanently

[Anonymous Coward]

CEOs are greedy bastards, every last one of them. I'm sick and tired of ordinary workers being treated like garbage and fired without cause while CEOs make ridiculous salaries and bonuses. A CEO is a useless employee and is a waste of money. HR is also useless and causes trouble for hard working employees. HR serves no legitimate purposes and the workers are utterly useless. All CEOs and HR workers should be put in jail and never let out. Can anyone justify allowing any CEO or HR worker to be free and stay our of jail? I think not. Fuck all CEOs. Fuck HR.

Re:Put CEOs and HR in jail permanently

[Anonymous Coward]

/. is full of temporarily embarrassed millionaires and primitive rule-based engineers, i.e. soon to be but not quite yet replaceable robots, so don't expect that sort of thinking to be welcomed around these parts for at least another decade. When the first factories appeared across the cities, factory workers were initially all cheery about the opportunities afforded by capitalism too.

Re:Put CEOs and HR in jail permanently

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we talking about Sega here?

After what they did to Sonic and Phantasy Star, I'd agree.

Re:Put CEOs and HR in jail permanently

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with you about CEOs and HR, are you sure you didn't mean to comment of the Cyanogen, Inc story? Though I suppose Sega has probably did something similar in the past too.

Sonic also comes to LEGO Dimensions

[jonwil]

As a Sonic fan and a LEGO fan, I am excited for the new Sonic the Hedgehog minifig due out later this year :)

Re:Sonic also comes to LEGO Dimensions

[Anonymous Coward]

The original Sonic the Hedgehog was cool. The rest of the Sonic games suck.

Re:Sonic also comes to LEGO Dimensions

[dosius]

I thought 2 was a worthy successor.

Re:Sonic also comes to LEGO Dimensions

[Anonymous Coward]

It was just more of the same with an annoying sidekick and worse music.

Re: Sonic also comes to LEGO Dimensions

[BlytheBowman]

It's healthy to have an escape from the real world now and then because people would get burnt out over the shit in this world and go crazy (This would be a good thing if it was only the bad guys getting their heads on a pike and their locked in chains but this is not always the case, infact far from it)

Re: Sonic also comes to LEGO Dimensions

[Maritz]

Only two kinds of people say ISIS are a threat. ISIS, and opportunistic politicians. Fuck off with your bogeymen, ISIS are fuck all.

Before?

[Anonymous Coward]

The glory days were the ones before the introduced a female character, right?

Re:Before?

[Z80a]

Then you would have to disregard sonic 2 and 3, given the fact Amy was on the sega CD game.
Sonic screwed it up when they forgot the main selling point of the game that was the fact it used a pinball like physics.
Sonic adventure and up have a greatly simplified physics that requires no skill other than paying enough attention.

Looks surprisingly good

[ChromeAeonium]

Well, I'm cautiously optimistic about this. Far as I'm concerned, last truly great Sonic game was Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Sonic Adventure & Sonic Adventure 2 were okay 3D platformers (for their time at least, the first being a bit better than the second IMO), but almost everything past that has been memorize the death drops go where the game wants you to go, and maybe for some reason push button combos to do tricks of some sort along the way. Even Sonic Generations, which a lot of people rated highly (for reasons I don't understand) was no better. They just haven't been any fun lately. Sonic has not aged as well as Mario, and as a long time Sonic fan I really hope they can go back to their roots and make more of what made the Genesis era Sonic so good. Judging by the small bit I can see in this video, it looks like they might be doing that.

And if you think this is just nostalgia talking, there are indeed modern games that are exactly what I'm talking about. If Genesis era Sonic type games are your thing, the best one right now is Freedom Planet. It is an excellent gem of a game, with developers who continue to add on for free what other developers would sell as DLC. It is what the past decade and a half of Sonic should have been, and if you're a fan of 2D platformers, I can't recommend Freedom Planet enough.

Re:Looks surprisingly good

[Anonymous Coward]

Sonic Rush on 3DS was also good, but I agree that the last "great" one was S3K.

Fans want Sonic to be different things

[guises]

Sonic has the unattainable goal of pleasing a fanbase which is split into two incompatible camps: one camp mired in nostalgia, who wants the old 2D games, and one smart and handsome camp who recognizes that a game which is all about going fast needs to be able to show what's in front of you at a greater distance than a sidescrolling camera will allow.

This divide between the fans was made really obvious when Sonic Generations came out: "It's good," some reviewers said, "but I wish they didn't have to include those awesome and fun 3D bits. Still, the 2D portions make the game worthwhile." While other reviewers were more forward thinking: "It's good," those reviewers said, "but this shows pretty clearly why 3D Sonic works better than 2D Sonic - you can actually see what's in front of you. The 2D portions are still pretty fun, but 3D is obviously the right way to go."

Re:Fans want Sonic to be different things

[Anonymous Coward]

My problem with the newer games was never that they were in 3D. There are various stages in Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 that are incredibly fun. But then there were tons of levels that were slow and boring. And they tried to add in all of these other slow, pointless characters and try to have a JRPG-style story. None of it seemed to fit. None of it was "sonic". I think that this problem started pre-3D, too.

My opinion? Sega should keep it simple. Breakneck and beautiful with just barely enough story to have a goal. Sonic should be speed porn.

Re:Fans want Sonic to be different things

[Blaskowicz]

Purely 2D Sonic with that newfangled 16:9 aspect ratio thing might work decently.
BTW, fuck that guy that came up with 16:9 : it's TOO wide. TVs would have been a bit better in 5:3 I think.

Re: Fans want Sonic to be different things

[BlytheBowman]

They shoukd have kept only 2 Sonlic lines going: the classic Soni linec (2 or 3d but not fucking with the formula that made it a hit on the Genesis) l and the Sonic Adventure line. And please, DO NOT have Sonic play like a 'rail shooter' whether in 2d or 3d. No rail shooter game has ever made it big, and there is a reason for it (rail shooters are barely a step above FMV games, and except for Dragon's Lair, those have been regulated to the shitbin of history). You're welcome Sega

Re: Fans want Sonic to be different things

[BlytheBowman]

They should have kept only 2 Sonic lines going: the classic Sonic (2 or 3d but not fucking with the formula that made it a hit on the Genesis) and the Sonic Adventure line. And please, DO NOT have Sonic play like a 'rail shooter' whether in 2d or 3d. No rail shooter game has ever made it big, and there is a reason for it (rail shooters are barely a step above FMV games, and except for Dragon's Lair, those have been regulated to the shitbin of history). You're welcome, Sega

Re: Fans want Sonic to be different things

[Black LED]

There is one awesome rail shooter FMV game that came out on the PC in 1994 called Novastorm.

Unlike most other FMV games, Novastorm's prerendered environment could actually damage your ship by scraping against it or crashing into it. The gameplay has some similarities with Gradius with the power up system. The visuals are really good for the time but the music is utterly fantastic and worth playing the game for. It's a shame that there isn't a CD quality version available because I'd pay for a clean, lossless copy of the soundtrack.

There was a later PlayStation version (maybe other systems too), but it had horrible music.

They'll mess it up somehow

[Neo-Rio-101]

They might bring the old gameplay back, but I bet they'll ruin it by staying annoying in some other way.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Interesting that they announced it at SDCC

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that they announced it at SDCC and not, say, E3 is interesting in and of itself. Sonic's original release date was closer to E3 than SDCC.

It just shows how large and important SDCC has become. E3 is probably technically a larger event (or at least lasts longer) but a lot of "geek culture" stuff only happens at Comic-Con and I guess video games are starting to join in the fun along with movies.

I just thought the choice of SDCC over E3 was interesting. Although I suppose there aren't a lot of major "geek" conventions at which to announce stuff like that.

Re: Interesting that they announced it at SDCC

[Anonymous Coward]

In Japan, the game was released July 26, 1991.

Re:Interesting that they announced it at SDCC

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't disagree with your points about SDCC, but I think that without getting into one of the major publisher conferences, it just makes more sense to reach more potential customers at SDCC than to hope the shit gaming press will give the announcement more than a footnote at the bottom of their Battlefield advertisements.

Sega?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vegas you mean. Stupid blind ass editor screws up this place as if being a stupid ass and blind is a good thing. Some people just can't be learned.

Preferred him in "The Adventures of Quik & Sil

[Dogtanian]

I rate Sonic's first and second games.

Unfortunately, they jumped the shark with his third appearance, in a game called "Sonic the Hedgehog" IIRC. Don't think that one did very well...

Did anyone else think

[rsilvergun]

Sonic Mania looks like a very nice kickstarter video? It's probably the constant appeals to nostalgia. What I real want is those Android ports of Sonic 1&2 that were done by the same team that did the Sonic CD remake to show up on Steam. Sonic CD looks fantastic on my TV, but I don't feel like buying an Android micro console for 2 games.

Also can we ditch the Dystopia theme for Sonic 2017? It's a Sonic game. It's OK to be bright and silly. Sonic Generations only had those levels because it borrowed them Sonic 2007, the worst game since ET 2600.

New Sonic games?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, this ought to make Chris happy at least.

Mico-Purchases

[no1nose]

Maybe they can modernize Sonic with micro-transactions and "energy".

This is what you are looking for. Costs nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also fun.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=emulators&stype=all

http://www.freebsd.org/where.html
amd64 for most machines.

I haven't done it but you could also install on and Android and play it all there. There are more than just Sega emulators too. So many.

Take an old Android anything and turn it into a game machine. PlayStation 4 is also a fork of the FreeBSD kernel. That is why it's best.

Re:Preferred him in "The Adventures of Quik &

[Anonymous Coward]

Is your name a reference to that old Spanish cartoon about the musketeer dogs? I used to watch that shit back in the early 80s when I lived in England and completely forgot about it until I saw your handle.

Re:Preferred him in "The Adventures of Quik &

[Anonymous Coward]

Larry Bundy is a barrel scraping idiot who desperately tries to sound more intelligent than he is and pads out his videos with filler garbage to artificially extend them. Neither of those games feature Sonic or were created by anyone who had anything to do with Sonic. It just has some enemy character that vaguely resembles him.

Holy cow this comments section is useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this what /. is like on the weekends? Sad. Pathetic.

So I'll make it even more useless.

Why should I play a game about an Apache attack copter (was announced by the same twatter account) that's not a helicopter simulator? Seems like a waste of time to me.

Re:Preferred him in "The Adventures of Quik &

[Dogtanian]

Yep.

Re:Preferred him in "The Adventures of Quik &

[Dogtanian]

Neither of those games feature Sonic or were created by anyone who had anything to do with Sonic.

Aside from the fact my original comment was very obviously tongue-in-cheek- no, I don't seriously consider those to be "Sonic" games(!)- it's still quite clear in both cases that the character is meant to be Sonic.

The first one is an official Sega release and it looks *really* like him, the second obviously isn't, but- as the video points out- given the ripping off of other mascots, it's quite clear that they've copied Sonic. (Granted, he doesn't move much like the real Sonic, but it's quite possible they hadn't even seen the original game at that point).

FWIW, the video is undeniably padded and a bit longer than it should be- as, to be fair, a lot of YouTube videos are- but it's still an interesting piece of video game history. (The background stuff on the company and game development is (ironically) probably more interesting to those of us who had an Amiga than Mega Drive owners).

Re:Preferred him in "The Adventures of Quik &

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's padded; most of the things discussed related back to the main point in a way that added value. It doesn't feel like minutes were added just to increase ad revenue somehow (and FWIU, those kinds of things would favor shorter videos, not longer ones.)
Either way, it's better than most gaming trivia videos that copy and paste from Wikipedia/forums, regurgitating the same information even casual fans will know, many times perpetuating misunderstandings or outright lies; such as saying Samus is a trans person, because some dev (tastelessly, I admit) labelled her a 'newhalf' in concept art as a joke about her height.

Star Fox is a rail shooter

[tepples]

No rail shooter game has ever made it big

Since when did Nintendo's Star Fox and Star Fox 64 not make it? Or are they something other than a rail shooter because of the all-range levels in Star Fox 64?

Choice

[mwvdlee]

So our choices are either "Retro pixelated 2D" or "First person 3D".
What's wrong with classic gameplay but modern graphics?

Re:Jews did 9/11

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think that too, back when I was a stupid kid. I grew up, so should you.