So this came up on Tumblr featuring Greg Martin sketches, a lot of it is stuff I've seen before, but one caught my eye. It looks like the same exact area in a Metropolis Zone concept art piece. Cogs match, pistons map, steam gauges, all the detail seems inspired right from it. I thought it was pretty neat.
I was looking through my old pictures folders and found these scans for Sonic '06. Oh what could've been. http://minus.com/mbeVtIGo1Q8Jkr
Not sure what happened or where this should definitely go, but I'll move it if asked. So I'm playing through Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (alone) as I sometimes do for fun. I barrel through Carnival Night Zone with Super Sonic in a Sonic alone save, getting to the mini-boss. I beat it via bouncing on it, then land with all the blocks intact since the top bounces off the bottom of the screen, and then I hear the death noise. I wonder what that is and suddenly Tails comes flying down to join me for the Victory Screen, then joins me for Act 2, flying in when he goes offscreen and everything. The game froze part way through Act 2, but otherwise it was like a Sonic and Tails joint run. Is this a common glitch?
There's this on the wiki. Not the same, but similar. I've encountered the same glitch as you before though, and IIRC it occurs when you jump away from Tails at the start of act 1 instead of letting him gently place you on the ground.
I let him put me down, he flew off. I didn't die, so it sounds like a derivative of the glitch, with him following me instead. I'll see if I can recreate it and record it later.
I think it pretty much always happens in S3 alone if you do all of act 1 in one shot (I.e. no deaths, bonus stages or special stages). Standing around like a dolt for long enough at the beginning might avoid it, if there's a despawn trigger that only occurs under certain conditions. I think the wiki description might be conflating two issues - I'm familiar with the situation you're describing here where Tails comes back as a normal AI partner, but the wiki's situation of Tails being stuck in place is usually caused by him being in catchup flight mode when the results screen starts, so that might just be what happened when it was tested for the writeup. The curse of the reappearing Tails is fixed in S3&K. Note that there's an outstanding bug that leaves Tails jumping on the spot if you jump away at the very last moment before he lands you in CNZ - if you do this in S3&K, he'll disappear as soon as he's off screen, but in S3, he's still be there when you go back. That sort of shows you what's happening - his object (sometimes?) doesn't despawn in S3A, but he never follows you because his AI is in the 1P assisted level intro routine; killing him (via a screen resize in this case, the only viable method without debug) resets him to trying to follow. This isn't the only interesting behaviour you can uncover by one-shotting levels - the popular speedrun glitch of the AIZ2 finale cutscene bridge breaking early can only occur if coming in all the way from the AIZ1 intro, where a reference to Knuckles' cutscene object is not cleared fully. The most obvious and heinous issue is Tails' inevitable death in Icecap 1 in S3 alone, which is only avoidable by restarting from the first starpost or special stage ring.
Well, it's Archie, who have the Sonic license... just a bit of cross-promotion I'd guess. Makes more in-universe sense for Sabrina to somehow bring the possibly-exists-as-a-game character of Sonic to life than Sabrina somehow turning up on Mobius. =P
I remember that issue, along with the subsequent Sonic Super Special issue. Sabrina or some evil person in that universe opened a portal to Sonic world, and then Sonic went over to that universe. The evil one hypnotized Sonic to do her bidding, but then Sally comes and is like "Oh well if you keep that portal open you're going to have Robotnik, Mogul, and all those other idiots come over and run amok and you wouldn't want that." Somehow that scares her into letting Sonic go and then they basically tell Sonic and Sally to fuck off. I don't know something like that. Featuring the finest in Sonic art.
One of those things that's just a funny coincidence, but anyways. I was playing SADX again, since it's been a while, and while gliding over the Mystic Ruins jungle, seeing Final Egg from a distance, something seemed vaguely familiar about it... Final Egg: A few Half-Life 2 Citadel concepts: SA1 came first, obviously, but the Final Egg tower almost looks like an amalgamation of some of HL2's Citadel designs.
I always thought it looked vaguely like a city, but I've never been sure of that. It's something that's always bugged me, to be honest.
It's buildings in the distance, but the effect is destroyed if you're playing in a higher resolution than originally intended.