Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Special Stages

Heh, I'm glad to see this thread. Just as someone else stated, I always believed that you could only create rings by making squares or rectangles, and I'd assumed there must have been some specific pattern necessary for completing the intersecting squares.

This is very similar to the business with the barrel in Carnival Night Zone, now that I think about it (although less of a nightmare for players stuck there), in that some players will get stuck here, and others will breeze through. I think it's because the Sonic games, on the whole, are extremely intuitive - the controls are minimal and the rules are simple - and so when you throw in something halfway through the game that requires a new rule, many players will instinctively try to solve the problem by applying the rules they're familiar with, especially when it seems like they should work... for instance, jumping did have some effect on the Carnival Night Zone barrels, and the big cross of blue spheres was made of smaller squares that looked as if they could, perhaps, be collected in a chain.

What I'm really doing here is trying to justify how I was caught by both of these issues. Hmm. Still, it's nice to know I can finally get a Perfect on this stage now.

 

<!--quoteo(post=292445:date=Mar 22 2009, 08:00 AM:name=Mobiethian)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Mobiethian @ Mar 22 2009, 08:00 AM)

Are there any others hidden somewhere in this act? If so, like I said I would have all emeralds collected by the boss.[/quote]
Right before the area where you encounter Knuckles, you'll see a place in the level which has a gap and two of those cylinders that go up and down on each side of the gap (This is where you get launched up after going down the blue ramp). Go on the cylinder on the right, and as soon as it gets to it's maximum height, jump up to the right, and you'll see the 2nd Ring in Hydrocity Zone.

There are always two Special stages I have trouble getting perfects on (Both of them are in the Sonic and Knuckles special stages), but beating them isn't really a challenge anymore.

 

I don't blame you. The difficult part of that stage was not jumping too far at the end. As the level sped up, it became very easy to jump over 2 spheres accidentally.

Here's someone doing the stage correctly - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2YomUCo0A8
edit - yeah I should probably warn you the video quality is beyond terrible

 

Ugh that video quality is horrible.
I didn't want to do this, but to prevent further low-quality posts I can as well plug my own S3&K special stages video.

 

Perfect? I can't even win most of those blasted Special Stages. =/