-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Digital Foundry: Sonic Mania PS4/XO/Switch Full Analysis
- Thread starter jsnepo
- Start date
jobrro
Member
This game is easier than Sonic 2 in that it saves your progress each zone (if you get a Game Over you can return to the last zone you got up to on Act 1 with 3 lives) and you don't need to enter any boss fights with 0 rings.
pretty done
Member
It really does!
It made me salivate at thinking about what something like Yoshi's Island or DKC2 would look like on the Switch.
ShadowFox08
Member
Soo this game is only worth buying on Switch and Pro then, since they are identical across the board, minus handheld advantage on switch, and 4k resolution on Pro?
How did you even come to that conclusion? It runs great on every platform (barring the few porting issues on Switch which they've already said they're working on a patch for), it's "worth" getting on whatever your platform of choice is.
I believe he's talking about advantages. Switch and pro are the only versions that offers something more than the others.
So, for who have a switch or a Pro, these are the best places to buy. Who don't have, buy on whatever you have, because it is a game that anyone that like the classic Sonic's games will want to play.
Reset worked for me on my oldbox. Still get the cheevo garbage, but everything else cleared up.
Pimpbaa
Member
Yeah, I think it looks great too. Too many retro games have rotating sprites where the pixels that make up the sprite rotate as well. Looks smoother but it also looks wrong.
jipewithin
Member
Great video, thank you.
Now have to decide between Pro and Switch.
Now have to decide between Pro and Switch.
SmartWaffles
Member
What? It offers the same great experience on Xbox One and base PS4.
Unknown?
Member
Pro also utilizes shareplay so you can play co-op with a friend online whether they have the game or not. That's a big plus.
Using an external drive? I know for certain that it causes issues in many games. That was exactly what caused that initial backlash against Yooka Laylee and also the issue I encountered in Prey (check out the vid).
Mania seems to have issues with the HDD as wel but also it sounds like a factory reset can help.
Basically, Xbox One seems to have OS/HDD issues that can suddenly cause problems for users at random. It seems like any game can be impacted by it.
I was getting the same achievement slowdown so I moved it to the internal storage! I'll see if it fixes the issues.
Whenever I get issues like this they usually mean I need to restart the console (either hold power longer than normal or via the guide's restart option). Not sure if there's a memory leak in the OS or something but after a few weeks it tends to get slow even just moving around the console's interface (and framerate drops in some games).
Xbudz
Member
Thanks for the info. I'll try moving the games I'm playing to the internal drive.
Fingers crossed.
Good video, though the Metroid shade was unnecessary. Nintendo didn't need fans to remake Metroid 2 cuz they were already doing it, and their remake seems much better than AM2R. As for Sega doing what Nintendon't, it's a nice hot take, but Sega's the one that took 23 years to make a new 2D Sonic game comparable to the Classics, whereas Nintendo has made 2 2D games greatly surpassing the the classic 2D Marios; 3 if you count Mario Maker.
Huge Succeeded
Banned
if I had to guess
NSMBU & L
D.Lo
Member
Nintendo also made Metroid Fusion, Metroid Zero Mission and Metroid Prime 1-3 over that period, which even if they don't all surpass the great Super Metroid in some people's eyes are still top of the genre classics, unlike all the Sonic games over that time. Metroid didn't need a fan hack to have its first great game since the 90s.
NSMBWii and NSMBU are the best 2D Marios by a healthy margin. They take everything from the old games and combine it with tons of great new stuff and much improved level design.
Right. Nintendo doesn't need to hire fans to do their job for them because they're still competent at it. But hey. At least Sega finally admitted that the Classic gameplay was good and let people who knew how to recreate it take a crack at it instead of telling fans they were wrong to not like the homing attack again.
breakfuss
Member
Except for the music and art direction, sure.
D.Lo
Member
And have insane, murder-inducing-fun 'co-op' multiplayer too.
Well, maybe music, but art direction is fine at least for NSMBU. That game is very nice on the eyes. The only of the NSMB games I'd say is ugly is NSMBWii due to its bland backgrounds. NSMBU greatly increases the complexity of the visuals while stylizing them with a painted look. NSMB for DS uses a sprite-based style for its backgrounds that looks a lot like the SNES games and NSMB2 has good visual design as well.
nephilimdj
Member
Video was great and loved the cheeky pokes at Nintendo
SinCityAssassin
Member
Not that I've heard. Which is a shame, couldve been the perfect excuse to reprint the sonic smash amiibo for something.
Ok thx so ps4 pro version for me
It was external, just saw your tweet, guess that was it.
ya ive been playing forza horizon 3 and ive noticed that the achievement pop up will sometimes freeze the game for a second or drop the framerate pretty hard if ive been playing a while. on one of them it hard crashed the console into a reboot. memory leak sounds about right but who knows.
tbh I really wish Microsoft would redo the achievements, the app is slow and clunky compared to how it worked on 360.
Retro Edge
Member
Im a little bit disappointed.
Another Digital Foundry video and again without any mention of super sampling.
I mean, if someone like Digital freaking Foundry obviously doesn't care anymore, why should the developers?
It's just sad.
And like many other videos recently (specially Snake Pass) it feels a bit like it was sponsored. Sonic Mania is great but all this "it's so beautiful, so amazing, a work of art and this soundtrack is perfect" is just a bit too much again. Specially with the downplaying of other games. I almost spit out my drink when he said the Crash Bandicoot soundtrack is "meehhh. Not great". Freaking what?
Oh and I thought the Xbox One version has bad slowdowns? There was no mentioning here.
2 more things.
People didn't said the power button or home button doesn't work on Switch, people said when you press it, it takes 2-5 seconds until something happens. Strange that he didn't noticed it while every other switch user seems to have this problem.
And it's under 300mb on Switch and PS4 not under 200, he even shows the screenshot of the Switch version at the same time. Little slip of the tongue, happens.
Otherwise, good work.
Another Digital Foundry video and again without any mention of super sampling.
I mean, if someone like Digital freaking Foundry obviously doesn't care anymore, why should the developers?
It's just sad.
And like many other videos recently (specially Snake Pass) it feels a bit like it was sponsored. Sonic Mania is great but all this "it's so beautiful, so amazing, a work of art and this soundtrack is perfect" is just a bit too much again. Specially with the downplaying of other games. I almost spit out my drink when he said the Crash Bandicoot soundtrack is "meehhh. Not great". Freaking what?
Oh and I thought the Xbox One version has bad slowdowns? There was no mentioning here.
2 more things.
People didn't said the power button or home button doesn't work on Switch, people said when you press it, it takes 2-5 seconds until something happens. Strange that he didn't noticed it while every other switch user seems to have this problem.
And it's under 300mb on Switch and PS4 not under 200, he even shows the screenshot of the Switch version at the same time. Little slip of the tongue, happens.
Otherwise, good work.
Liabe Brave
Member
Downsampling would be a bad idea for this game. They should've mentioned whether Pro does or not, but you absolutely do not want it to in this case.
Supersampling would make absolutely no difference in this game, at all. Whether you're at 720p, 1080p, or 4K, what you're looking at is a 424x240 image being upscaled to your screen resolution. What matters is the quality of the scaling up - scaling up to 4K and then back down to 1080p would not give you any quality gain over doing a razor-sharp nearest neighbor scale to 1080p directly (and if anything could very possibly introduce some IQ loss if done poorly).
1) Downsampling is not something you need or want in this game. It doesn't make any sense. You want pixel perfect scaling and 1080p output provides that. Downsampling would either have no visible effect or a negative one, depending on how it's done. This is one game where it definitely does not matter at all. It's all pixel art designed to replicate 240p imagery. The Pro puts out a good image on a 1080p display that doesn't seem to downsample (thankfully).
2) The Xbox One version is fine. What people are reporting are issues tied to both external hard drives (a recurring problem) and the need for a factory reset. These are issues with individual systems not the game itself and it's not something I encountered at all. This hard drive issue is precisely what resulted in those original reports that Yooka Laylee was bad on Xbox One (it wasn't). It's also an issue I tested in the video I did on Prey (where it runs horrible on one external drive, poor on another and then perfect from the internal drive).
3) I did mention the Switch issue and spent the afternoon testing. Could not replicate it at all. Home and power were always responsive on my system but I did mention it in the video to indicate that some users are having issues while also pointing to the upcoming bug fixes.
4) The screenshot I showed in the video was from the Xbox One dashboard, not Switch (though looking at it now, I never realized how similar they look).
Here's Switch
Retro Edge
Member
Yes, thought about if super sampling would even do anything but wasn't sure.
It would've been nice if you explained this in the video cause technical things like that is what I expect and like from Digital Foundry.
Edit:
Thank you very much for the response. Interesting to read and explains much for me.
Wow, you've got me with the size screenshot. Now I feel kinda bad. I really thought that was from the Switch.
It would've been nice if you explained this in the video cause technical things like that is what I expect and like from Digital Foundry.
Edit:
Thank you very much for the response. Interesting to read and explains much for me.
Wow, you've got me with the size screenshot. Now I feel kinda bad. I really thought that was from the Switch.
Yeah, it's OK. The gray background with colored square tiles is extremely similar!
FrozenCell
Member
Bought the Switch version from eShop since PSN Store is still not available in my country - game looks great on an OLED
Ended up turning the sharper CRT filter on for all our profiles since even children say it looks better than Default and Clean
Ended up turning the sharper CRT filter on for all our profiles since even children say it looks better than Default and Clean
Here's something weird that's not really related to Sonic Mania, but kinda, sorta is. 
My PS4 have a weird overheating problem for months now, it overheat and shuts down on its own, except, this absolutely never happen while I'm in a game, it only happens when in the home screen, inside an app(youtube, twitch, etc...) or during stand by. It never happens while inside a game, to the point where I turned off the PS4's auto stand by and just pause games and leave them(sometime overnight) instead of actually using stand by.
This is related to Sonic in that, Sonic Mania is the first game where the overheating shutdowns started to happen while in a game! Can't play for more than 5 minutes without shutdowns, I went back to Tekken, Overwatch, Guilty Gear and it's the same as before, no overheating shutdowns so it's just a Sonic Mania thing!
I moved the PS4 in front of an air conditioner and it stopped shutting down, but it's still weird that this only happened with Sonic Mania!
My PS4 have a weird overheating problem for months now, it overheat and shuts down on its own, except, this absolutely never happen while I'm in a game, it only happens when in the home screen, inside an app(youtube, twitch, etc...) or during stand by. It never happens while inside a game, to the point where I turned off the PS4's auto stand by and just pause games and leave them(sometime overnight) instead of actually using stand by.
This is related to Sonic in that, Sonic Mania is the first game where the overheating shutdowns started to happen while in a game! Can't play for more than 5 minutes without shutdowns, I went back to Tekken, Overwatch, Guilty Gear and it's the same as before, no overheating shutdowns so it's just a Sonic Mania thing!
I moved the PS4 in front of an air conditioner and it stopped shutting down, but it's still weird that this only happened with Sonic Mania!
Keep those trash toys away from this game.
ResidentDante
Member
Here's something weird that's not really related to Sonic Mania, but kinda, sorta is.
My PS4 have a weird overheating problem for months now, it overheat and shuts down on its own, except, this absolutely never happen while I'm in a game, it only happens when in the home screen, inside an app(youtube, twitch, etc...) or during stand by. It never happens while inside a game, to the point where I turned off the PS4's auto-stand and just pause games and leave them(sometime overnight) instead of actually using stand by.
This is related to Sonic in that, Sonic Mania is the first game where the overheating shutdowns started to happen while in a game! Can't play for more than 5 minutes without shutdowns, I went back to Tekken, Overwatch, Guilty Gear and it's the same as before, no overheating shutdowns so it's just a Sonic Mania thing!
I moved the PS4 in front of an air conditioner and it stopped shutting down, but it's still weird that this only happened with Sonic Mania!
PS4 doesn't have Blast Processing. It just can't handle Sonic.
SinCityAssassin
Member
Bet they'll use the amiibo to store your OC in Forces if you play local multiplayer races with friends.
Yappadappadu
Member
What? That works? Would the person sharing the game control the 2nd character?
FutureLarking
Member
Honestly blaming the hard drive for this one is extremely questionable. There's no way it has any need to be streaming anything during game play considering you can load the entire games files into memory in a few seconds - pretty much everything will be in RAM with enough RAM left over to fit Sonic Forces in there too. Unless they're doing something incredibly stupid somewhere a hard drive shouldn't be any excuse for this game.
(Perhaps there's something low level in their codebase that's screwing with OS interplay though like with Switch, maybe questionable achievement tracking code. Complete heresay tho.)
Dictator93
Member
idk seems reasonable to me. Seems to be a cross-title problem as per Df analysis. Not tge first time I have heard of that.
TLZ
Banned
They were VERY necessary. Not everything Nintendo does is gospel. They do a lot of silly mistakes and should be called out for them. They're better off embracing passionate fans than bin them.
lensoftruth
Member
I agree that it doesn't make sense but, when this issue occurs, it does tend to happen in areas where the hard drive shouldn't be streaming data. I think it's more of a low level thing that occurs with certain hard drives. It's such a tough thing to reproduce, though, and it's wildly inconsistent.
I'm positive that this is tied to complaints about game performance on Xbox One in the past. We saw this with Yooka Laylee where some people, like Jim Sterling and GameXplain, had severe performance issues from the hard drive. I've seen the videos and it's obvious that it's very much real but it was not possible to replicate on all systems.
I explored this in the video I did on Prey where the exact same area would slow to a crawl briefly when using a specific external drive on multiple XO systems. Moving it to the internal drive fixed it completely while using a different external drive improved it but didn't eliminate it.
So I'm still not 100% certain where the problem is originating from but the way it manifests doesn't seem like typical hard disk access stutter.
I'll try loading Sonic onto an external drive and see. I've spent a lot of time playing on XO last night and wasn't able to reproduce any of these problems at all.
Noboru Wataya
Banned
Batman the telltale series was busted on Xbox one for me when playing on an external drive.