Disclaimer : I dont necessarily agree with the video, just posting to spark discussion :)
So youtuber HippoCrit recently posted a video called "Sonic Mania's Fatal Flaw"
To give a short summary :
In it, he says that he is not a Sonic fan, but that Sonic Mania is a good game. However, to him there is a fatal flaw in it. The game over system. The game over system, originally used to produce more money from arcade machines, is outdated to him as part of a home console experience. He sites things like the speed of sonic, the camera, and the enemy placement as issues that make the game over system a bigger derailment of the game's quality.
With the recent controversy of Dean from Venture Beat, and many other gaming journalists, sucking at video games, I expect a lot of people will just chalk this up to Hippo sucking at video games.
My thoughts :
Personally, I can see where he's coming from. My experience prior to Sonic Mania, was playing a little bit of Sonic and the Black Knight as an 8 year old, and playing a little bit of the Genesis games a few years back on the 360. So Sonic Mania is really my first big experience with Sonic, and i've been absolutely addicted for the past few days. Yet, I haven't beaten it. Part of it is due to me wanting to replay the first few levels, but 2 or 3 times I got a game over. And it's not because I sucked at the game, it's because of Flying Battery Zone!!! On the 2nd act of Flying Battery Zone I kept dying underneat the ship. There was this one part near the end where you go under this garbage and you grab onto this pole. A few times I died because when I jumped onto the upside down ramp Sonic didn't grab on the pole! But for the most part my death's started at the 2nd part. You see, you have to jump onto this spring that takes you into this windy underside of the ship. So I thought "Okay, I have to press on the dpad to keep up my momentum". I died a bunch of times and got a game over. Later I started the game up again and forgot about the section, so I tried the same tactic. Got a game over. It wasn't till the 3rd time encountering it that I looked it up online and it's like a scripted event, where touching the D-pad would make you die. The entire game up to this point was teaching you to use the dpad on ramps, and now it's a bad thing! And I still got a game over because by that point I had like 2 lives for the Spider boss.
It's an interesting question though. Do lives systems work for modern games like Sonic Mania? Personally, I don't think it matters to much one way or the other. But I don't think it adds anything valuable to the game. I imagine some games work well with it though. I'm surprised Cuphead doesn't have one.
