Indigo Rush

If I might offer a strange take, I think there's a potential benefit in porting Sonic 06 as accurately as possible in the form of a playable example, if not for the sake of preservation. There's no chance that Sega is going to re-release this game, and while I think the game is hot garbage, I'm hard pressed to argue against making the game more accessible and potentially preserved for the foreseeable future for anyone who would ever want to give it a spin, or who might want a playable example as a guideline of what not to do when designing a game. While it's true that longplays and video archives of the game exists, it's not quite the same as playing it, and a fan recreation may fall under different legal territory that isn't quite as sketchy as emulating the game, which is sure to provide it's own barriers for entry. Basically, I'm for preservation of the gaming industry for research purposes, both good and bad. And if these guys are crazy enough to do it, then godspeed. I personally won't play it, but I'm sure many others who have been dying to find out for themselves if it's trash or not will appreciate the opportunity.

Unless you're prepared to cough up some receipts and risk your insider status and destroy trust, you should continue to act like you know nothing, because otherwise this is meaningless.

Man, we have no idea what to expect with this company. Sonic Team's leadership (beneath Iizuka) is always revolving, their idea of what Sonic ought to be keeps changing, and their standards of quality are seemingly inconsistent. The best game under their namesakes' title in the past 5 years wasn't even made by them, and who knows how that board meeting went. Sonic's future under Sonic Team was a toss-up before, and it'll be a toss-up now. All you can do is enjoy the chaos at this point.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Alright, I'm about to flip a table. There's a significant difference between a compilation pack with a small game and an entire 12 Zone campaign with new features, Jango. I'm getting tired of the assumption that the rehashing of levels is something that Iizuka-san wanted but Whitehead and company didn't want; it's discouraging to know that a majority of people haven't considered that Sonic Mania would never have been as fully-featured if every Zone was original. While that might be considered the ideal situation to the more hardcore of Sonic fans, that is certainly not what the team had in mind; this was never stated, and and I'd love it if people dropped that presupposition. Quite frankly, you should respect Iizuka-san for putting up with a seemingly endless barrage of mindless cries for Sonic Adventure 3 and the vitriol for supporting the decision to use familiar locations and iconography from when the series was at it's most popular as if he's a nasty villain trying to sabotage the franchise, as opposed to waiting for him to cater to whatever concept you've canonized as the "right" direction for the series as most Sonic fanboys tend to do. There's biting the hand that feeds you, then there's disrespect. Do you want to pin blame on someone? Stop turning one single person into a bogey-man and take the time and effort to research on who's working in what area of each game, and you might come to find that it's not as black-and-white as blaming the person at the top of the pyramid; and even Iizuka-san has to answer to someone, but no one seems to think beyond Sonic Team when it comes to these thought experiments. His ambiguity of Mania's success has less to do regarding his faith in the concept or the team, and moreso on whether or not there was a demand for such a product, and because Sega had never hired a bunch of fans to make a game before to this extent. Of course he'd be a little nervous, especially after outsourcing things to Big Red Button. It's a miracle that Mania got the greenlight after Sonic Boom. Lastly, I'm not sure why you're bringing Sonic Forces into the discussion as if it's helping your point, which from my current comprehension seems to boil down to "I hate Iizuka because he doesn't make what I want," so pardon me if I'm having a difficult time seeing your perspective. I'm not going to participate in the shaming and disrespect of one man when he's not responsible for everything that's gone wrong with the franchise, as if his positive influence and consistency behind the brand hasn't been part and parcel to it's return to a generally positive critical acclaim since 2010, even after Boom happened. I don't care for Colors, for example, but I can't deny the influence it's had in bringing the Sonic brand into a better place regarding it's perception by the general public. And so this continues with games like Mania, where only pockets of biased Sonic fanboys with an axe to grind care that many of the levels are based off of places they've been before. Game design is a complicated, misunderstood and difficult industry to participate in, and after befriending people in the industry and listening to their stories and frustrations, I'll never complain about the way these things turn out, the way people like you do, ever again, because it's a complicated galaxy of people from different backgrounds, opinions, talents coming together to create a product that may never turn out the way they envisioned. Most Sonic fans have no idea what Sonic Mania's development process was like, even when we have a smorgasbord of interviews and accounts from people in the community to give us intel on the matter.

Gameplay is kind of the key thing when you play a game, so that's a pretty significant factor. Good grief, really? You try pitching anything to the CEO of a company and see how confident you are that they'll roll with it. Sonic Mania was originally going to be four Zones with the mobile remasters of Sonic 1 and 2 packed in. Iizuka-san is the one who encouraged the Mania development team to turn it into a full blown adventure. You're making an assumption here, and you should know that doesn't fly in these sorts of discussions.