Sonic Mania: Awesome Because of Nostalgia?

     Sonic Mania is out and holy crapballs is it amazing. For those who don't know and are new, Sonic mania is one of the two new Sonic games coming out this year. Mania seems to be a retro love letter to the previous Sonic games of the 16 bit era.  The constant work of nostalgia has seemed to garnered the love of fans and critics alike. But is the game's love and success due to the huge galore of nostalgia or is there something else behind why the game being so awesome?
     There's no doubt that Sonic Mania is a big pretty package of nostalgia and glory to the earlier Sonic games. It's return to full 2D and full retro feel. The return of the Blue Sphere mini game. classic retro zones returning, the Special zones being ripped straight out of the Sonic CD. It is even chocked full of secrets and easter eggs going back to that to Sonic's golden era of games. But we've seen the nostalgia card being waved before in the Sonic series and it hasn't worked or wasn't quite perfected, looking at you Sonic 4. Sonic Mania is the response to what the fans want: A simple Sonic game.
     The team fronted by Christian Taxman, who worked on the earlier Sonic games, stripped down and went with what worked in the past games, and went back to basics which ironically is what the series needed to do all along to stay fresh. No weird game mechanics. No Werehog, no dark and gritty reboot like Sonic '06 was, and whatever the hell Shadow the Hedgehog was. It is a far cry from some of the Sonic games I referenced from the series' later years where development teams tried piled on so much stuff in games that it just ended up being a big mess. The nostalgia is only a front.
      Hopefully Sega has learned learned something from this and maybe Sonic 4 that less is more and simple works. They seemed to be on the right track with Generations and it would be nice to momentum continued with Forces whenever that comes out.

Where The Hell Is A New Darkstalkers Game?

The 90s was some sort of a golden era for games. You had a SNES in almost every household. Mario was the king of games and Sonic was ever so quick on his heels to overthrow him. But most importantly quarters fell like rain in arcade shops. If it was one genre that thrived in the 90s, it was fighting games. It all started with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat took it to higher places and knocked the genre off a pit. If you could claim a king of fighting game hits it would be no other than Capcom. Street Fighter, Final Fight, X-Men vs. Street Fighter which was introduction to the Marvel vs Capcom series. All amazing hit games, but there was never a more interesting game than Darkstalkers.

     If you don't know what Darkstalkers was it was Street Fighter meets Halloween where you had fighters based off of iconic monsters. You had Vampires, Succubi, and a Frankenstein monster that attacks you with his butt. It was great, great enough to not only get video game sequels but an anime series and one cartoon that was not so great. But just like everything good in the 90s and Santa after mom and dad lost their job, we stopped getting games. Now this doesn't mean that we stop seeing Darkstalker characters altogether, the series had enough of a fanbase that Capcom featured a couple of Darkstalker characters here in there in other fighting games, most noticeably the Marvel vs. Capcom series. But why did they stop making Darkstalker games and most importantly what will get them to resurrect the series again?
     Capcom producer Yoshinori Ono has said at Comic Con 2010 that it would be his dream to revive the series and that is exactly what he has tried. At the following Comic-con even he told fans that the series is not dead and took pictures of people at the panel that wanted the series back in order to spark Capcom's interest. A couple of years later Capcom announced Darkstalkers: Resurrection which was met with positive reviews, but was a commercial flop. Nothing new about the series came after that.
     Capcom has announced that they are considering blowing the dust off of some of their more dormant titles. Darkstalkers should at least be in the considering. It was obvious that Resurrection was Capcom testing the waters to see if they can revive the series and again, despite it not selling well that shouldn't have been the main reason to not make more games. There could've been a lot of factors behind Resurrection not doing as well as it did most importantly how Capcom treated and promoted the game and people not wanting to by a full fledged fighting game than a compilation best of. Things have changed since then. With the recent re-interest in fighting games, reviving the Darkstalkers series would be the best plan for them to make. Also considering the recent success with Ultra Street Fighter II it would be a big why not for Capcom. It is time to act now while the iron is hot but not with another best of, but they should gamble more with an actual new game. It is something their still prominent fanbase would want. Plus it seems it will be better than Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite is looking right now.