Eight Beautiful Minutes of Sonic Mania

At the San Diego Comic-Con recently, Sega had a special Sonic the Hedgehog anniversary event where they announced two new games. The mainline big budget game seems to be a 3D game in the vein of Sonic Generations, but the thing I wanted to briefly talk about is the other game, a full-fledged 16-bit style Sonic game.

Sonic Mania is described as "what a 2D Sonic game designed for the Sega Saturn would've looked like." The video above, from Polygon, shows off 2 levels of the game. It appears as if the game will feature both new, original levels and remixed versions of levels in previous games. In terms of animation and control, this game seems to feel very authentic to the original entries in the series as opposed to other games in the series that played like garbage (Sorry, Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1).

A lot of people who have played games for a long time have been soured on the Sonic franchise for a while. I am not one of those as I feel like a good number of the games released in the series post-Genesis have been good outside of a few real stinkers. So I may be coming at the future of the Sonic franchise more optimistically than others, but who cares. This game looks awesome.

A Love Letter to 90s Shooters

I know what you're thinking.

“Tim, this game came out like a week ago. Why is it on a retro gaming website?”

That's true. It is a brand new game, but the reason I want to talk about it is because if you were to release a game like this on the PC in the late 90s, it would've been right at home. Doom (2016) embodies arena shooter mechanics in a way that so few first-person shooters have done in the past decade plus.