#SONIC MANIA BLUE SPHERES GUIDE MANUAL#
You won't find manual saves (instead star post checkpoints and completed levels serve as autosaves), and you won't find anything like a rewind feature in Sonic Origins – it's surprisingly lightweight when it comes to quality of life or technical options. However, another problem that rears its head is the absence of basic features you'd normally expect from a retro collection like this. If all of this makes Sonic Origins seem like a generous package, you'd be partially right. Boss Rush mode is the icing on the cake, part of an effort from SEGA to provide numerous ways to rediscover and replay Sonic Origins' four games. But despite unifying the experience with a Story Mode and making Sonic's abilities uniform across the board - you can now spin dash in Sonic 1 for the first time, and perform the drop dash from Sonic Mania – having the Master System and/or Game Gear versions would have made Sonic Origins feel far more complete and definitive.Ĭompleting each game also grants access to the self-explanatory Mirror Mode, which enables you to replay the entire thing with every level flipped, if you so desire. And for someone who's completed all of the games in this collection more times than I can count, making Sonic feel vital again after more than 30 years is no mean feat. These serve as a neat connective tissue between Sonic 1, Sonic CD, Sonic 2, and Sonic 3 & Knuckles (Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles have been mashed into a single game, (as if the Sonic 3 cartridge has been shoved onto the Sonic & Knuckles one), and make playing the Anniversary Editions of each feel somewhat fresh. Of course, only old sods like me, who grew up with Sonic the Hedgehog on the Mega Drive, Master System, and Game Gear (and just dedicated an entire paragraph to it), will care about such things, and, if it's something you're willing to overlook, there's still an awful lot to like in Sonic Origins.įirst and foremost, the presentation is superb, opening with a lovingly animated intro and interstitial animated sequences bookending each game. And, while the changes seem entirely justified, the replacement tunes – made using the original sound chip – are vastly inferior to the originals. Among these is the omission of half the Sonic 3 soundtrack, due to a deeply odd, and rather messy, legal dispute, which may or may not relate to Michael Jackson's rumoured involvement.