An analysis on the Sonic series' casinos and their real world inspirations

I have to ask, what's with the series' weird thing for occasionally combining casinos with forests and jungles? Collision Chaos, Casino Forest. Even the final Spring Yard has trees and greenery in the background, and "yard" in its name.

 

I don't think either Collision Chaos nor Spring Yard Zone are forests or jungles. Collision chaos looks like a coastal/river city, pretty much exactly like what Lake Charles, LA looks like which is home to a few huge major casinos albeit with neon signs everywhere. Spring Yard Zone looks like a modern city park with small shrubs, which are called yards occasionally:



You can gamble at gaming halls from this area of South Houston.

 

Some cities have a lot of greenery in them too - Berlin for instance (which I returned from after being there for two weeks) has a lot of greenery, straight up has woods in the middle of the city (tiergarten), among many other parks and huge trees just lining the streets and buildings.

 

Collision Chaos has grass, trees and plants, what appears to be frog eggs, and a BG full of greenery.

And to add to the confusion, it's supposedly "A bunch of pinballs floating atop the water"

So I guess it's a drifting pinball jungle island

 

The "Yard" part of Spring Yard and the bit of greenery in the background probably made the Sonic CD devs lean into the "green" aspect of it more so than the level it took inspiration from. I've never read Collision Chaos as a forest, but now thinking about it, I can't fault anyone for interpreting it that way, a lot of the background is dedicated to a big autumnal forest, and there's actual grass tiles as part of the level structure.

Spring Yard though, I see it as just a city with some greenery. Maybe it could be that the level itself is a city park mixed in with a "pinball park" after they had to change the background, they changed the Zone name and then had this strange city park/pinball park idea with the pun of Spring Yard (as in plants) with Spring Yard (as in the springs Sonic bounces off of).

 

Er, frog eggs in collision chaos? I don't recall those. But either way, I listed two swamp climates which have casinos in them, so that's precisely in line with how you describe CCZ, we definitely have frogs around houston and lake charles.

 

These breakables




Also present in Meta Junglira, decidedly a jungle zone: