Sonic Mania - Mirage Saloon 1E in Mania Mode (Mod)
16One common complaint I've seen about Sonic Mania is that Sonic, Tails, Mighty, and Ray's Act 1 of Mirage Saloon isn't very exciting. Sky Chase is a de-facto autoscroller, and while Mania's take on it is kinda cool, ultimately it's paltry compared to the brand new Act 1 for MSZ that was introduced in Mania Plus' Encore Mode.
Unfortunately, there's no way to play through Mirage Saloon 1E in a regular Mania Mode run... until now, anyway. I've been wanting to make this mod for a while, but while you'd think something like this would be a simple fileswap, it's sadly nowhere near that simple. Hell, just to make this compatible with Knuckles I had to basically overhaul the internal cutscene listings! Making this work was a matter of serious trial and error; and a little bit of creativity with the zone transitions.
(One approach I tried was making a new route for Knuckles in Hydrocity, thinking a different signpost would let him skip any cutscenes; not the case, sadly, but at least it was a novel idea!)
For the time being, annoying as it is, I'm not releasing this. It might seem like a dick move, and it kind of is, but this is what's called 'backporting'; I've basically incorporated content from the paid DLC into the main game, and that's a bit of a nono, particularly by GameBanana's standards.
On the upside, if you want the character palettes used in this video, those ARE available for download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lJoCE9Yn3f-OFfBLFaAu-XcKjUnX9FyJ/view
(On a final note, you may notice a glitched starpost at the end of Act 1; I fixed that after recording!)
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