Yes, all those acts are random because the data for them doesn't exist at all. It's just the game reading garbage.
I've tried this on the DC version, and didn't get any differences. Discovered today: for some crazy reason, breaking any kind of containers don't add up to the score, in Crazy Gadget.
Here's something I knew from a couple years back. In Sonic Advance 3 on Altar Emerald have Knuckles as your partner. Once you defeat Gemerl, go to the fartherest right of the screen lock. When the screen unlocks, do not move, but throw Knuckles towards the final boss arena. You should hear him collect rings. NOW run to the boss arena. Don't let Knuckles warp back before you get there. If done correctly, the auto walk to the boss is disabled and you are free to do whatever you want in the boss arena before the final boss actually appears. Infact, jumping in midair right when the boss rises can lead to some interesting results! Try it yourself.
Today, on Special Stage 5 on Sonic Heroes, I managed to run PAST the Chaos Emerald. A weird glitch. However, shortly before the end of the stage, I decided to stop to get the Emerald, since getting there was a pain in the ass itself. ... That, and I guess the game woulda either crashed if I touched the Goal Ring OR the script would be identical to Bonus Stage 1, somehow.
There's a "max counter" that's a function not of the stage, but of your character (hedgehogs 20, shooters 15, hunters 10). As you've obviously seen, the number can't go above that counter value and if it would, every one animal over is yet another 1-up. If you run a code for something like Rouge in Metal Harbor, it's really easy to get to 10 or 11 animals and you'll get lives starting from 10, not 20. I don't know about Security Hall on GC, but in DC the level has 15 animals, making for six easy lives if you know where they all are and aren't bothered by the time limit (or are playing in a mission that doesn't have one). In Aquatic Mine, there are two wooden boxes that occasionally have dragons. They only come up about one time out of 50, but whenever one of them does, so does the other, making for 12 animals in the stage and three lives thereby. In this last case I believe it's a weird take on random animals: most of the time where you have random animals, there are two possibilities for what they can be, and all the locations that choose between those two, choose the same one on a given life. It might be 50% for one and 50% for the other, or something close which I can't sufficiently check, In this case, the random chooser is close to 5% for dragon and 95% for an animal pointer that's either a deliberate null or an accidental bad pointer to a value that has no animal associated with it. Without access to debug information of any kind in the game, that's about all I can say on this subject.
While being an idiot and tooling around, I noticed this thing. I don't have Hyper cam or anything like that. Sorry for the bad quality (and derailing any discussion going on). If the point is not got across well enough I can do such, or you could just go try it for yourself. hah. Sonic doesn't look up or down when ducking! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAbpCUEa6YE Looks like this problem wasn't fixed in the later Simon Wai beta. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYixV_kWLI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nM1Jghn_-0 Sonic can access Knuckles Act 2, and can reach the end of it (but no boss).
Yes, I imagined that the counter for the animals worked with the character (or the type), not the level. 15 animals in Security Hall for DC? This is complete news to me (and you please tell me where they are!!), but I usually found the number I should and then move on. Then when I started adding them to the wiki I found one appearing randomly in a place I didn't check and I get these extras. I do know that Crazy Gadget resets every box animal in the level when Sonic dies. You end up with a lot of lives because of that as well. Perhaps it's the same with Security Hall? That Aquatic Mine one never happened to me. Neither did the random animal being a special one either. But the chao containers have some weird errors that I haven't understood well how they worked, but they're there.
This is probably because they changed the way up and down scrolls between Sonic 1 and 2. The code just must not have been finished at this point.
Actually I went back and rechecked to find 16. Their locations are all up. All 16 were found in the same life, so it's not a case of improperly initialized "have you collected this animal?" entries on death. The reason that even happens in Crazy Gadget to begin with is because the boxes in that level aren't the same object as the boxes in any other level (they have to have additional traits programmed in, namely "moves in accordance with gravity switches"--note that Chao boxes do NOT move when you flip a gravity switch—and, after placing this new kind of box in the level, the programmers promptly forgot that they had these two extra lookalike objects when it came to to handle things like "Which objects can hold small animals so that we can have them remember if the player has already fetched that animal or not?" This also explains why breaking wooden and metal boxes in the level earns no points, while Chao boxes continue to be worth 20.)
Surprising about the boxes being different objects, but yes, there was something up with them because there's no other level where they don't give points or animals respawn after a life lost. I checked manually. That's a lot of good info for the sonic adventure 2 article. It's this kind of trivia we really need to get it very complete. Thanks a lot. If you know anything weird, please do say.
Oh, sorry, I musn't have gone back far enough to find that topic. My apologies. And I'm well aware that it wasn't intentional, I just found it slightly humourous.
I can't even look at it without seeing Mario anymore, it's come to the point where I can't even see the lions...
If this was mentioned during the console wars then everybody would have said that since Marble zone is meant to be the ruins of some ancient city, that it's actually the ruins of the Mario empire or something :P
