At some point I came across a pretty beat up copy of Sonic 2 that looks like it used to belong to an independently owned video rental store. They glued a card in the case with their own overview of the game to replace the manual. They got so many things wrong. I thought the hints section was hilariously stupid, especially the part about Tails. Here's the transcript. SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 Stop rubbing your eyes! You're seeing right! It's Sonic and he's back ready for another adventure! It seems that the world is being threatened again and now it's up to Sonic to save it. That shouldn't be a problem with you guiding him! Travel the countryside knocking off bad guys as you go. Discover the secret of super-"Sonic"-speed as you zip across hill and dale. Fly around in loops and straight up the side of cliffs. Bounce off of plungers and fly through the air at incredible speeds and heights! Collect enough rings and you'll get a chance at a bonus stage too! Once you start, you won't ever want to stop! Good luck!!! START - Use the Start Button to begin each new game and to pause and restart games already in progress. DIRECTIONAL PAD - Use the Directional Pad to move throughout each scene while avoiding and their attacks as well as other hazards. Press Up when jumping to increase your altitude. Press Down when moving to spin and knock out some of your enemies. A BUTTON - Use the A Button to jump over obstacles, onto ledges and to avoid your enemies and their attacks. B BUTTON - Use the B Button to jump over obstacles, onto ledges and to avoid your enemies and their attacks. C BUTTON - Use the C Button to jump over obstacles, onto ledges and to avoid your enemies and their attacks. HINTS - Collect all of the coins that you can as you go. Just be careful not to run into any enemies or you will drop them all. The best way to attack an enemy is to spin jump and hit him on the head. Look for flashing boxes. These contain power-ups when you spin jump on them. Don't be afraid of the little fox that follows you around. He's your friend and he's helping you collect more coins. Take it a little bit slow at first so that you can get a good feeling for what's involved. Once you get to the chemical plant, you can bounce on the top of a tube to break the seal and get inside. Then who knows where you'll end up?! Be careful if you fall in the chemical water. It's only a matter of time before you will drown, so you'd better find a way out of it fast! Be careful not to get in between the moving blocks and the walls or you'll get smashed and lose a life.
Well, listing A, B and C separately is certainly redundant, holding up when jumping doesn't do jack, "coins" instead of rings and "plungers" instead of springs, but the rest of that's fairly accurate. The "don't be afraid of Tails" part is pretty funny, but admittedly, not many games of this genre featured a sidekick who followed you around at all times before Sonic 2 - at least, none come to mind.
Well, I don't remember the Start button ever allowing you to restart the game (without debug mode anyway, and I'm not even sure if pressing A while paused to restart is in Sonic 2, since I only remember ever using it in S3&K). Otherwise, aside from a few typos (which I shall assume were yours as there are no [sic] tags or anything similar to denote they were copied from the card itself) and what Shadow Hog mentioned it seems to be okay.
I kind of assumed they meant "restart" as in "start again from where you paused", not "start again from the beginning". I dunno, I've seen people who aren't very into video games misuse terminology like that.
Yes, pressing A while paused resets the game (B for slow down, C for frame step). You don't need to enable debug mode, level select is enough, same goes for S3K. It's S1 the one that needs debug mode to be enabled. Funny enough, Phantasy Star II also has those debug controls (except they're always available, no need to enter any code).
Honestly this is no worse than the shit we got in our official instruction manuals back in the day. Half the time it felt like the people writing them barely knew what the game was about.
IIRC that is a feature of debug mode that is present in every single one of the games in the classic series including CD. No they're obviously Japanese.
Surprised nobody's commented on the hilarity of "press up to jump higher". Still, I used to see stuff like this ALL THE TIME when I was a kid.
Given that it only goes up to Chemical Plant, I'm thinking they probably only played for like 5 minutes and then wrote that based on their discoveries. The "up to increase altitude" thing probably comes from them trying that but not realizing they were also holding the jump button or something like that. I don't know why I forgot about the restart level thing before. I used frame skip all the time in Sonic 2...
They're Chinese, and there's a good reason for it - you could put a thread through them and carry the coins around that way =P
Nope they are Japanese. My cousin gave them to me after his trip to Japan a while back, and furthermore here is what comes up on google images when you search "Japanese coins". Sorry for derailing thread here but I needed to correct this.
Well this is certainly a funny description done on a whim after the folks pretty much played till chemical plant and call it a day. The fox one made me chuckle. What I'm more curious about it now is in regards to the last part concerning the game not being available for Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. It kinda also makes it sound like more countries were to be listed too. Though wait a sec, first they say rings, then coins...? followed by the little fox comment. If it weren't for the part of "collect all the coins and watch out for enemies" at the beginning I was kinda thinking the "coins" were actually the chaos emeralds and the fox "helps you" collect more of the "coins"... in the special stage... get it?
Because those countries use PAL-N instead of NTSC, so theoretically you'd need an European system to run them... except because all TVs over here are multisystem so they support both PAL-N and NTSC, and Sega completely ignored that =/
This reminds me of in the 90s when here both Sonic and Mario were about equally popular, and loads of kids used to call rings "coins" when talking about Sonic games. The fucking cretins. I could have punched the fuckers.