That God-damned Barrel Topic

I never figured it out as a [much younger] kid. I tried to jump on it juuust right over and over again to try and get it down far enough to jump below it, but I of course never reached that far. After many years of not owning the game and learning about the internet, Google, and so on, the next time I picked it up and got stuck there I just googled it.

 

It took me a lot longer than that

I think it must've been a few plays before I latched on to it though. Previously I remembering getting Tails to pick Sonic up and dropping him onto it :v:

 

I used to get past it without (advertently) pressing up and down, after like 8 minutes or so.

I learned about the true ways a while later.

 

Obligatory YouTube link.

Seriously, is there any trap worse than that in any game at all? Like, yeah, when you know the solution it turns out to be very easy, but until then you can end up stuck, like, forever. There's still people who are trapped at it by this point This happens because they decided to make something that wasn't based on the normal control scheme =P I think there's only one other drum like that in all the zone, and you are by no means forced to go through it at all... Not to mention that you can go backwards if you find it.

EDIT: this video is waaaaay better =P

EDIT 2: check 4:27 =P

 

I never managed to work it out by myself; fortunately, a person in a similar predicament mailed into Sonic The Comic and the answer was printed. Luckily, I was a subscriber and I instantly ran to my Mega Drive to pass the stage. Weeks of being stuck suddenly forgotten, I rushed through the rest of the game in one sitting and was unbelievably happy to beat that part.

"JUMP AGAIN - IT'LL WORK".

 

I remember Cybershell building up to a dramatic entrance in his Let's Play, then gives it a 1 on his Cunt-o-meter, and starts ranting about how people are idiots for thinking it's so fricking hard to go through that barrel. Needless to say, I felt like crap and laughing at the same time because I was stuck on that barrel myself once. At first it's freaking hard, but once you find out the solution, it's so damn obvious that it makes you wonder why you didn't figure it out sooner.

 

Oh wow, who knew the barrel could cause so much stress. :v:

Then again, it is the Carnival Night zone (I find the random bumpers even more annoying than the barrels, especially if you're Super), so crazy stuff like that is expected.

 

I managed to pass through that thing a number of times, never by the way it was supposed to be.
-Tails and Sonic jumping at the same time. It took two controllers and ten fingers working at the same time.
-Sonic alone, spindashing, jumping below it.
-Tails and Sonic once again, Tails jumping like a maniac and Sonic spindashing below it at the right time.
-Once, I glitched through it with the upwards camera glitch. I never managed to do so again until I learned how it worked.
-Supersonic brakes the game as well and his jumps make the barrel move higher, so I regularly passed that place with him since it was so easy to get the emeralds until that point.
-Jam in Normal Mode doesn't have the barrel there.
-Now that I remember, I used the three shields as well. I think I used the bubble and electric once but I have no idea how and I glitched through the wall with the fire one.

It makes sense and doesn't at the same time. Sure pressing down makes Sonic shift his weight in a way the momentum is a downwards one, but jumping down has the same principle, that's what makes no sense. Yes my uncle applied physics to the barrel to help us, but even then we didn't pass it by any less than sheer luck / cheating.

 

Thank heavens for the Prima guide that said that you could move the barrels by pushing up and down on the controller.

 

Did anybody know that all barrels can be controlled like that? I discovered how to get past it earlier in the levels. And if you time your jump just right on these barrels in earlier parts, you can get a pretty good jump and get nifty stuff.

I will admit that I did have troubles with it before I discovered it, but it didn't take my that many tries to get it right. Although one time my brother and I were playing and somehow I managed to open the door. We went back (flying my brother through the corridor without hitting any bumpers) But we found it.

 

For a few days I wasted all my time, lives and continues on that barrel... I almost gave up on the game.

 

I spent years not knowing how to pass that, despite being able to complete S3&K as Knuckles. I always used to try to jump at the right time in hope that if I did it would eventually force the barrel below the point required. When I did work it out I think it was while mashing buttons in desperation.

Oh, the frustration that barrel caused me! I have never enjoyed CNZ that much due to this, even though I don't struggle with that anymore.

 

When I got to it in Mega Collection, I eventually resorted to using the debug mode from S3&K. I thought it was a glitch or misstep in the emulation; surely jumping would solve this problem in the original version?

 

Yeah. I had the same problem. Years, it took me. I got past it once or twice by jumping, and I remember glitching past it once. I had long lost my Genesis and carts and moved onto emulation before I finally figured it out. Pretty sure I looked it up, too. I just remember raging so much because I couldn't get the barrel to get far enough down. I would get close, yes, but it was just so difficult to get it all the way down, not knowing how the arrows control it.

That barrel is definitely one of the most counter-intuitive puzzles I've come across in a game. And I always hate it when I find another one. Another recent (for me) example is in Ufouria, near the upper-left corner of the map, you are told to "move" a boulder when they actually want you to attack said boulder.

 

I found if you jumped and turned into super sonic, you sometimes went through the barrel.
That's how I got past it.

Basically you had to transform just before you collided with the barrel and sometimes the barrel would go straight through you.
Other than that, I always knew you pressed up and down because my brother showed me.

 

FUCK THAT BARREL, I COULDN'T FIGURE IT OUT UNTIL I WAS 15 YEARS OLD.

 

I never knew that so many people had this much trouble at this spot... I guess it was just luck, or maybe something similar in another game, but I found it out almost instantly.

I think it may have been Metroid Prime or something, where you have to use the Morph Ball Boost to gain inertia to get over half pipes... You have to move left and right a to gain momentum, so maybe I just tried to apply that to the barrel because I saw that when I landed on top, it moved slower and slower vertically, so I saw that it was losing momentum. I had a hunch and tried to move it like when you are on a swing, but vertically instead.

Funnily enough, I never knew what people where talking about previously when I heard them saying "Man I can't get past that barrel in that Carnival Zone!" I thought they were talking about that one cylinder that you spin around for some reason...

 

Ugh, that damn barrel...

It gave me so many problems when the game first came out that I found myself constantly getting time overs. My first idea was to jump at the right time and hold down on the D-pad, then either I would get low enough to pass it or jump off to the side by the door and quickly spindash through at the right moment. Then I got my dad to play as Tails and do the same jumping method on the barrel while I waited for the opportunity to spindash through. Both methods, while effective, did take quite some time and I still found myself running out of time to complete the level. When I finally passed the barrel and realized there was still a whole huge portion of level to go, it was just pure madness.

It's not that I've had too much trouble getting past the barrel, since years of practice with my jumping method made me pretty good at it. It just wan't until a handful of years ago when I found out the up-down thing on a random website. I gotta tell you, it made me feel dumb and yet quite skilled at the same time, in that my alternate method worked so frequently.

 

I figured it out on my own (I didn't have internet access in 1994, I'm sure most people here didn't back then), but it took a few 10 minute deaths to figure it out. I think I figured it out by pressing down every time I jumped on it, and I eventually got through.