Sonic Mania Storybook "Review" (Patreon)

How it Feels to Play Sonic Mania

Playing Sonic Mania has left us with some complex feelings, so we decided to do a review that's also a story. In all honesty, we probably laid it on a bit thick with the sappy, cutesy backstory here. If the ending makes you roll your eyes or gag, we're sorry. But not that sorry. We've had a lot of fun playing Sonic Mania over the past week. Our lack of a modern games console meant we had to wait for the PC release, and then we spent another day waiting before we finally found a way to make the game run on Kotor's original generation Surface Pro. The game, though, is fantastic, and all of us have been having a fantastic time playing - even our toddler, who loves watching her mummy and daddy play. For Kotor, this has been a particularly big deal. A lot of games that he desperately wanted to play this year - Breath of the Wild and Mass Effect Andromeda being the big two - have passed us by because we just can't justify the cost of the hardware, so Sonic Mania was the game Kotor has been really following, hoping desperately that it'll live up to his expectations. As a British child during the 90s, it was impossible to escape Sonic. Nintendo never really tried very hard in Europe back then, so Sega was the de facto choice for most gaming families. Sonic the Comic was required reading for kids of a certain age, Sega was sponsoring Arsenal, and London played host to SegaWorld, also known as the Trocadero, which was The Place To Be for anyone under thirty. Sonic hasn't exactly aged well. We have friends who love the new games, who still maintain that Sonic '06 has merits, and that's fair enough. Everyone can like their own thing, and if you disagree with the feelings expressed in this video, that's totally fine. This reflect's Kotor's feelings, though, as his nostalgia goggles slipped over the years and he began to lose interest in new Sonic games in favour of playing older titles that he actually enjoyed for their gameplay. It feels so, so good for Sonic to be back on top. For fanart to be everywhere for the character again, and for people to be enjoying a 2D physics-driven platforming adventure. It makes us really, really happy. We (Kotor in particular) just needed to share that. Next up: our oft-delayed Undertale follow-up video. We're excited to share it with you, hopefully sooner rather than later! BretonStripes (twitter.com/bretonstriped) and Kotor (twitter.com/kotorcomics) Music: Silver Blue Light by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/