You don't feel good when finding a question mark monitor after finding a secret tunnel, but you feel bad when you need a character and you cannot use it unless you find the proper monitor. You don't gain anything from this trade, you lose control and reaching those monitors only randomizes the output, it doesn't return back that control. You don't earn anything because those characters are already on your team, but on the contrary, in order for this feature to exist, it was imposed a limitation on how can you use your characters. They are the button of switching character that is missing from your gamepad, the switch button that opens a door or that changes your skill, but disguised as a reward using the shape of the monitor.

Those two monitors are actually game mechanics, not rewards. It may look like the reward system has been improved with two new reward types, but there's a problem: THEY ARE NOT REWARDS. On top of the 1UP reward, you have two other monitors: the first one, swaps your current character from one backup character and the other one shuffles all your characters.

This is useful when you are missing one character from your deck, but it stops being rewarding when you have the complete rooster, so it is substituted by a swap monitor. The Encore Mode substitutes the 1UP reward by a new character reward. You may like the idea or not, or you could also be indifferent, but regardless I want to analyze how this answer to the lifes' problem doesn't manage to resolve the reward system problems. If you lose all the characters, you get a game over and you reload from the last save point.

Being killed means losing the currently active character and losing characters means having limitations on where you can explore. By finding characters you add one to your party and through other paralell systems of dual characters and swapping mechanics. For those who didn't have the chances of playing it, the game offers up to 5 characters each with one different skill. So, here is where Encore Mode from Sonic Mania enters:Įncore mode is one of the first tries of the Sonic Franchise to replace the lifes systems. Games who doesn't ha a weaker reward system where the highest value reward is kind of pointless. Why? The main reason is that, for classic franchises, the lifes system is heavily embedded in the reward systems, and changing it requires a redesign of the whole reward system to make the game work as similarly as possible to the original experience and meet the expectations. Still, many games kept the lifes system during quit a long time. Die and retry doesn't sinergice very well with long games and the new progression systems. But once the savegame system is in place and became a standard in the industry, the lifes system became obsolete. It was almost a necessity in an industry with higher profits, budgets and cheaper formats (the CD rom) that allowed for more content. Games were short on content in a much less profitable market than today's and adding content was expensive due to the high costs of the cartridge format back then, so extending the game's lifetime through a die and retry system was pretty much appreciated by both players and the industry.īut all of that changed when the savegame was introduced. Home consoles used the premium model instead, where you purchased the whole package, making the lives system purpose to change from a monetization strategy to add replay value and game lenght. You basically purchased lives with coins and the games' difficulty were adjusted to make you invest your money on it. Before, the home console industry inherited the systems from the Arcade machines, ones designed to offer some gameplay in exchange for a few coins. One of the biggest changes in the industry was the savegame.

Sonic mania encore mode