You can turn and/or jump. As long as you don't press up, it will work. Unfortunately, this was fixed in S&K, S3K and Blue Spheres. My guess is that the programmers themselves found this behaviour undesirable, and decided to fix it in order to prevent "cheating" on the Special Stages, especially because of Blue Spheres. In fact, I always found the S&K and S3K Special Stages "weird", but I didn't know why until now. Also, their respectives Results Screen. I could never really put my finger on "what" exactly was wrong with S[3]K Special Stage's results screen, and only recently I found what was wrong, when I finally decided to take a screenshot from both results screen and compare them. The S[3]K one has a darker color palette... and the background is outright grey.
Indeed so - a very little discussed difference. I assume this change resulted from using white text in the super emerald results, which would need a darker BG colour to show up at all, and that the change got applied to the chaos emerald stages too. Perhaps even less noticed (I certainly didn't see it myself until I already fixed the background) is that the emeralds flash differently - it's one frame off, one frame on in S3, and IIRC one off two on for S[3]K. The same change is also made to the save screen. Here's another special stage results oddity. If you play as Knuckles in any part of S3K, including if you hack the character ID in S3 alone, the colour palette used on the results screen is the pink one used by competition and AI Knuckles. This is even true of the Super Emerald results screen, where his continue icon even has yellow socks! (Due to some very strange decisions on how the different character palettes should be dealt with there). (As to the question about fixing things in S3 Complete, everything we've mentioned in the last few posts that wasn't already fixed in 3K has been fixed in Complete - which pretty much just means the drowning recovery during a boss. It also retains the S3 special stage results screen style FWIW.)
Oh, you're kidding me! I once goofed around with Knuckles in that area, and I could swear I saw that. I tried it again later, but either the camera wouldn't cooperate, or I just couldn't see anything. Does that only appear when you're Knuckles in that area, or can it appear with Sonic too (like you said, provided you're so close you're almost touching the thing)? Would you mind if I made a quick video about this, or do you wanna do it, since you discovered it (apparently) and all?
Well, color me astonished! I never noticed it (not that I could possibly notice such a thing at 60FPS). This is a very interesting find! I know that the frame on/frame off effect were used in the Genesis Sonic titles to emulate translucence, but why did the programmers decide to add one more frame on for the emeralds? Perhaps they decided to add another emerald frame so their colors would stand out more on the grey background, considering their colors would look more "washed out" due to the so-called "translucence effect" against darker backgrounds, or perhaps because they wanted the emeralds look like they are actually flashing/blinking instead of just "see-through"? I would say go for it and upload the video, but it seems you've just reached your trial posts limit. Oh, snap.
I just had a revelation yesterday. In the opening cutscene of Sonic Adventure two the name of the helicopter is Sigma-Alpha 2. Sigma-Alpha 2 = SA2 = Sonic Adventure 2 Took me 10 years to figure that one out.
What? That's so awesome! I can't wait-- Awww... Well, shit. It's still great little bug, though. But Sonic 3's Special Stages are the ones I don't really need help on.
Speaking of Sonic 3K, does anyone know if this sprite is used at all in the game, not counting the sprite show? It didn't show up on the "unused sprites" section on the Sonic 3 "Secrets" page, and I can't recall seeing it. Edit: Nevermind, its nothing THAT interesting. Look at my next post.
http://info.sonicretro.org/Unknown_TM_Enemy Just noticed a couple of days ago. I think it's supposed to be a Buzz Bomber. That is to say, the version of Buzz Bomber seen in the Saturday morning cartoon and Archie comic book. The design is a little off, but then again so was Cluck, who was also from the show/comic. What do you guys reckon?
Here's a little oddity I found today. If you set $FA87 to 02 and run the Sonic 3 credits, this happens: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJstDo70I0o[/youtube] It looks like an unfinished attempt at scrolling credits. You can see different results if you enable the code when the credits are already running. You might get a real credit to scroll up from the bottom, but it will fairly quickly get replaced by this single-letter stuff. (By the way, if you leave a PAR code to set this enabled during the logo sequence afterwards, it'll hang, but that's unrelated I'm sure - just warning you!) If anybody feels inclined to investigate this further, this comes about through a jump table at $4052A leading you to $405AE.
Turns out I'm actually going to answer my own question! I was just randomly fiddling around with the frame advance feature you get after enabling level select. Would have never noticed otherwise!
o_0 No fucking way. And here was me thinking for all these years that that sprite was unused. Good call dude.
