Sonic 3 Bonus Video

unlike the sonic 2 bonus video this is not an unfulfilled obligation i never actually promised to make a sonic 3 bonus video and if you had asked me in 2017 if i was going to make one i probably would have said no because unlike sonic 2 there aren't a ton of cool public betas for me to sink my teeth into that actually changed while i was gone a really cool sonic 3 beta was dumped and uploaded online in november 2019 so even though obviously i'm a little late to the party i figured it still would be fun to talk about there are a ton of videos out there going super in depth on why sonic 3 knuckles is such a fun and cool game in the first place as well as videos discussing specific elements like michael jackson's involvement in the creation of the game's music sonic 3 being one of the most widely talked about video games is actually a good thing from my perspective because now i can focus on really diving into the minutia of the game and talking about details nobody cares about except me that said there is one little issue because i was pretty sure i didn't want to make a sonic 3 bonus video i kind of cannibalized some potential talking points i had for it and inserted them into my sonic 3 complete video so unfortunately i'm not gonna be able to blow your mind with the knowledge that flying battery zone was originally going to be between carnival knight and ice cap same with the special 100 000 point time bonus you get for finishing a level at exactly 9 minutes and 59 seconds although i'm happy to inform you this stupid-ass feature actually made its way into mania and speaking of my sonic 3 complete video i suppose it's time we talk about the elephant in the room the new best way to play sonic 3 sonic 3 angel island revisited now i stand by everything i said in my sonic 3 complete video it is such a wide array of customizable options that'll never be truly obsolete or anything but as i stated in that video if there ever were to be a widescreen 60fps version of sonic 3 i would probably consider that to be the new definitive version and well now we have that version those cowards as sega refused to make it so once again the fans had to step up to the plate and when i say fans i'm specifically referring to eukaryote the absolute lad and chad behind sonic 3 air i could do an entire video just gushing about this version of the game but for the sake of this video i'll keep it short and just strongly strongly recommend checking it out it's got so many cool and customizable features of its own they even feature some absolutely fantastic unlockable extras like the drop dash from sonic mania seriously sonic 3 air is awesome here's the obligatory part of the video where i mentioned that while it's fun hearing some [ __ ] youtuber regurgitate information directly in your ear holes you know what else is fun doing your own research into your favorite games i couldn't have made this video without the cutting room floor sonic retro hidden palace and the sonic 3 unlocked blog if you enjoyed this video i'd strongly recommend poking around those sites and seeing what else you can discover about this game as well as gaining a better technical understanding behind some of the [ __ ] i'm about to discuss as is tradition let's begin with the level select and debug mode unlike the previous two games in sonic 3 alone you don't have to input a button combination on the title screen or enter a code into the sound test you literally have to go into angel island zone and find one of these swinging objects and grab onto it then while you're holding it press left left left right right right up up up and you'll hear a ring chime now on the title screen you can scroll down to the sound test option which is actually also the level select option for debug mode is a similar story go into mushroom hill zone and find one of these weird metal pulleys then put the same coat as before debug is very similar to how it was in the previous two games oh now there's a dedicated button to flipping the gravity like in death egg zone which is kinda neat although most ceilings really aren't meant to be walked on there's also some less well-known features of debug mode like if you hold b and c it'll cycle through all the animation frames of the current character which looks pretty funny in sonic 2 or 3 alone after enabling debug mode hold c while selecting a level this activates what fans have called night mode where everything except certain objects are much darker this is actually a feature used by the devs for checking information about certain layers and planes they removed this feature in sonic 3 knuckles because i guess they just figured it's not particularly useful as a cheat code there are two very interesting objects only in sonic 3 alone's debug that can be found in the first part of angel island the first is this strange surfboard looking animation it's actually the remnants of a cut intro that was going to be used instead of the one with the tornado here's a restored version of basically how it was supposed to look the second very peculiar object you can place is this large rotating mess of red orbs this causes the game to lag and corrupts the color palette there is a lot of speculation about the purpose of this object but we'll actually come back to talk about it later before we dive into that juicy beta let's take a look at some of the cut content from the final game i don't know how i forgot to mention this in the previous bonus videos but in both sonic 1 and sonic 2 can find an unused black and white death sprite for sonic i have no idea what this would have been used for but there's a similar unused sprite in sonic 3. and there's even one for knuckles and sonic and knuckles what were these supposed to be used for i have no idea go write a creepypasta about it or something here's an interesting little unused sprite it's a shadow that gets bigger and smaller this is actually originally going to be used under the tornado in the opening sequence but they cut it out for whatever reason originally it seems like there were going to be unique buttons for knuckles to push in certain zones rather than just the default button sprite you can find this one in angel island and this one in carnival night there's also a light bulb item which breaks when submerged underwater speaking of knuckles he has unused gliding and climbing sprites for the two-player mode also check out this sick death egg hologram sprite in addition to the regular gumballs there's also an f ball and a glowing s ball you can actually see part of an s ball at the back of the gumball machine but it's not glowing presumably the s ball has something to do with super sonic for the slot machine bonus game there's an unused super sonic face icon here's a neat piece of trivia did you know the super sonic animation the final game is actually missing a frame it's meant to be a bit smoother here's a comparison so you can see what i'm talking about this isn't exactly unused but here's a complete look at the green bomber sprite from angel island act 2. similarly here's an unobstructed view of the angel island beach which shows a palm tree shadow which is totally obscured by the foreground elements in the final game the multiplayer level as your lake also has a flower garden which can't be seen in the final game since the level is in the way here's something neat there's actually a forward-facing robotnik sprite that goes unused in the flying battery zone 2 fight speaking of unused robotnik sprites there's actually a very interesting unused object in launch based zone 2 located near the death egg cutscene files it's actually a fully functioning scaling fleeing eggman sprite there's so many neat little details and oddities in this game like the knuckles shoeing thing in sky sanctuary that i already made the whole video on so it kind of goes without saying but this isn't a complete list of every single little glitch and easter egg just a lot of them that i happen to find interesting like did you ever notice that the levels for the competition mode follow an alphabetical naming scheme maybe you did but as someone who barely ever touched this mode i thought that was kind of neat here's something really fascinating the colors of the special stages in sonic 3 actually correspond to the color schemes of the levels in that game as you can see the ground and sky colors match up to the corresponding zones that is except for special stage 5 it seems to be the only one that doesn't follow this pattern except it actually does it seems to line up with the flying battery zone's color scheme funny enough even more proof that this was the original intended level order so in hydra city zone there are these weird little decorative black balls which usually move side to side but right before the act 1 boss you can find these guys which are totally static and don't animate at all what's up with that want to see something weird in this one very easy to skip part of hydra city zone you can find a special monitor unlike every other ring monitor in the game this one actually gives you 20 rings instead of 10. why is this the son of failure crash no it just seems like they accidentally put two ring monitors in the same location something else i like to do in hydra city zone is have knuckles climbing on the air this is super easy to do just let these rotating platforms push you down when you're on the wall here's another weird thing there are three rings placed in the floor under the first black anti-gravity ball in death egg zone you can see this for yourself by getting a lightning shield and back jacking on this part of the stage have you ever wanted to make lava reef zone act 1 impossible to beat no well too bad here's how you do it first destroy this badnik to open the door then backtrack to this star post and go into the bonus stage once you leave the wall will be back with no fatnik and no way to open it the only thing you can do at this point is die speaking of badniks and lava reef this little rock bastard doesn't actually give you 100 points when he blows up he says he does but he doesn't i mean i don't really care it's just points but i don't like it when the game lies to me did you know that in angel island zone act 2 after this long tube section there's actually an invisible platform you can land on off screen if you hold right coming out of the tube and sort of line yourself up with this tree you can sometimes land on it not that there's really much to do up here but i just thought it was kind of neat you can even spin dash to get on top of the main level here's something kind of weird you know knuckles theme that short little drum beat loop well at 34 seconds into the knuckles theme there's actually a short vocal sample but the thing is there's never really a point in the game where you're gonna be listening to the knuckles theme for 34 seconds i mean technically you can do it at this part in launch based zone if you just wait around for long enough but i always knew about this because you can hear it if you do that thing where you jump off the bridge at the end of angel island act 2. that one was intentional just almost impossible to hear under normal circumstances here's something very peculiar that's definitely the result of a glitch in sonic 3 alone if you wait on the file select screen for about 47 minutes one of the instruments gets much louder than it's supposed to do you know what the difference is between the japanese and us versions of sonic 3 and knuckles well the more astute viewers might remember than the japanese version of sonic 2 tails was called miles and the same is true for this game however there's also one more almost imperceptible change the japanese version drops the trademark symbol since they don't apply in japan now this tidbit has become much more well known in recent years but i remember i was shocked when i learned there's actually an eighth special stage in the game data well there's actually a unique eighth special stage in both sonic 3 and sonic and knuckle so there's two unused special stages in sonic 3 and knuckles you can access them by using a little known feature of debug mode where you can select the special stage you want to play by setting the sound test to the number stage you want if these stages seem familiar it's because they were actually both used in sonic mania so on the level select screen you can change your playable character by pressing c and it changes this little number zero zero is for sonic entails zero one is for sonic alone zero two is for tails and zero three is for knuckles what would happen if you forced the game to load the character in slot o4 well using this pro action replay code we can see there's no character that corresponds to this code so the game freaks out and loads you into a stage as blue knuckles it's a knuckles object with sonic's palette lives icon and spawn coordinates this can lead to some weird [ __ ] and some levels are unbeatable without the help of debug mode if you're playing sonic 3 alone then by pausing when the signpost is spinning at the end of an act you can catch a glimpse of blue knuckles despite sonic fans having a long history having palette swap glitches dumb names it doesn't actually look like blue knuckles has a special name he's just called blue knuckles by everyone oh my mistake he actually does have a name it's tails he looks kind of cool in his super form though and weirdly when he reverts back to normal it fixes a color palette speaking of weird things happening with the color palette after reverting from a super form if you were to revert back to normal sonic after going super hyper then the next time you get 50 rays to transform sonic's palette will briefly glitch out a number of items in the game share the same palette with sonic and are therefore affected when he goes super it's most noticeable with the balloons in carnival night did you notice that the three blue pixels on sonic's emblem on the tornado also share his palette and therefore flash when he's super well now you know another weird little thing that hardly anyone will notice is that when you're leaving the slot machine bonus stages knuckles and while the screen is fading out there are a few brief frames where knuckles transforms into red sonic how embarrassing boy i sure hope somebody got fired for that blonde did you know you can kill eggman in launch base zone remember this part of the stage once you land on the platform you can hit him maybe once before he flies away but if you're playing as sonic and tails you can use the second controller to have tails hit him 256 times and then he'll be defeated then if you hit him again he pops and an animal is freed robotnik was secretly a robot the whole time deep lore confirmed also pulling off this little glitch makes a level impossible to complete later on so you have to wait for a time over you ever wonder what would happen if you beat super mecha sonic as sonic using debug mode you can take characters into levels they aren't normally able to visit even though sometimes the graphics glitch out or the level isn't beatable well this is what happens if you use sonic to be knuckles final boss now check out what happens if we do it as tails you can also take knuckles into sonic's version of sky sanctuary for some classic knuckles and knuckles action and if you want to see some really screwy palettes try beating doomsday zone as knuckles in sandopolis zone act one if you stand on one of these moving spiky pillars with an invincibility monitor then when it wears off you'll continue standing on it without getting armed you can even walk around on it something you might already know is that in addition to pushing these blocks regular style you can actually push them with the spin dash nothing that special except you can actually push them up the sandy slides with this technique and when you reach the top you'll switch to the pushing sprite but in the wrong direction great stuff this is the type of high quality content you're here to see let me take a moment to talk about the little animals in the classic sonic games in the first game there were seven different types of animals that could come out of badniks pocky cocky pecky rocky picky flicky and ricky then sonic 2 added these five dudes lucky mickey wacky taki and becky but i guess for sonic 3 they decided to scale it back and they removed these new animals then redrew the original animal sprites but for whatever reason they decided to cut the [ __ ] pig from the game maybe this happened because he was sort of accidentally cut from sonic 2 as well i mean he's technically in the game data but the only stage he's programmed to appear in his death egg zone which has no badnicks so you're literally never going to see him in the course of regular play what a poor pathetic little useless piggy literally cut from sonic 3. how embarrassing here's a weird little inconsistency i don't know if you've ever noticed in sonic 3 and knuckles when climbing on a wall knuckles reverts to this pose whenever you're not moving but in knuckles in sonic 2 when he stops climbing it just stays on whatever the most recent animation frame was are you one of those people who wishes that sonic 3 still used his sonic 2 design well what if i told you that it still does partially the animation for using the monkey bars and flying battery zone is clearly using a modified sonic 2 sprite it's kind of hard to notice unless you're actually looking for it now that you've seen it you'll never be able to unnotice it you're welcome now let's talk about some interesting glitches that are only found in sonic 3 alone you're all aware of the bonus stage but let me tell you about the legendary doilist stage in the sony 3 level select trying to choose the bonus stage option won't work this is because you need to choose the sixth two player versus option to load the bonus stage but when it's done it doesn't know where to put you so it just loads the bonus stage again but this time the title card is corrupted so it reads doylist stage and it just keeps looping forever until you manually quit and for some reason this glitches out the level select screen absolutely incredible stuff here's something super weird and sonic 3 knuckles walking into the blastoids in hydrocity zone hurts you as is to be expected however in sonic 3 load you can simply walk into them and they'll explode here's one that's actually pretty well known during the hydra city mini boss it plays the act 2 boss music for some reason and if you allow yourself to start drowning then when you jump out of the water it'll start playing the sonic and knuckles mini boss music instead so this boss fight can potentially play two different songs neither of which is the correct one normally when in super form you don't have access to your shield abilities but in sonic 3 if you're super and have the water shield then holding the jump button when you hit the ground lets you actually bounce this is a really cool glitch and i wish it wasn't fixed for sonic 3 knuckles at the end of marble garden zone act one instead of running over and locking the screen for the boss fight you can actually use the second controller to have tails go destroy it off screen doing this will hard crash the game so installing three knuckles they actually fix this little glitch by forcing the camera to pan to the right if this happens perhaps one of the most infamous sonic 3 alone glitches involves tails and ice cap zone if you're playing as tails and when you reach the first slide area you'll automatically die this is because the vertical looping flag is actually set during snowboard sequence and tail skips that part spawning at the bottom of the mountain so is the stage unbeatable as tails well luckily there's an easy work around touching the first checkpoint and dying to respawn the level or simply entering the special stage and then leaving it will correctly set the looping flag allowing you to continue you can actually see this glitch specifically mentioned on page 27 of the us manual directly above the infamous diabolical traps section in the ice cap zone and throughout the game avoid having tails get stuck in passageways or get caught in traps have tails activate star posts or enter into a special stage as quickly as possible this one's incredibly specific and also very hard to notice but i still feel like including it anyways if your insta shield animation finishes after you land on the ground then you won't be able to use it on the next jump for some reason alright finally now i can get to the part we've all been waiting for that's right it's time for the mcdonald's happy meal toy section the most memorable moment for me was when he was selected to be a happy meal for mcdonald's yes it might sound like i'm memeing but this happy meal deal ended up being one of the main reasons the game is split into two parts naca continues when i heard they would be making nearly 200 million units of merchandise for the entire world i remember feeling both happy and under pressure although sonic 2 was a hit in millions of units sold we used to complete sonic 3 before that campaign and with far greater numbers as a result we had to divide sonic 3 into two parts which we regret also let the records show that according to a yuji naka interview from 2004 it's canon that sonic and his friends eat at mcdonald's so let's take a look at all five yes five sonic toys that you get with your happy meal of course you have the main four that everybody knows about sonic who comes with a little launcher a wind-up robotnik toy a spinning knuckles toy and a flying tails toy with a little pull string i always thought it was kind of weird how knuckles spun around in this cloud like he was a tasmanian devil or something but i didn't really care as a kid i was just happy to have a knuckles toy the fifth toy is much less well known designed specifically for children under three the only way you would know about it is by reading the fine print in the commercial or looking very closely at the in-store display it's simply a yellow ball with sonic on it nothing fancy but it does technically count as the fifth toy of the set because hardly anybody bothered requesting this baby toy it's by far the rarest in america the promotion ran from february 4th to march 3rd of 1994. towards the end the tales toy was actually recalled due to a problem with the pull string so when the promotion came to canada instead of offering a tails toy they simply offered a ball with tails printed on it instead this isn't quite as rare as the sonic ball because you didn't have to specifically request it it actually took a year for these happy meal toys to make it across the pond the promotion range from january 27th to february 24th in 1995 in the united kingdom it took so long they actually dropped the sonic 3 branding and just marketed them as sonic toys on top of that they actually received a completely different redesigned tails toy instead of one that flies with a pull string this one simply spun its tails something pretty cool the uk run had were these radical zone themed happy meal boxes over here in america our happy meal bags looked like this still pretty cool but the most interesting part is actually it explicitly makes reference to flying battery zone multiple times which must have seriously confused some kids who actually bother to fill out their high scores under this disposable fast food bag later still in june 1995 japan finally received this happy meal promotion although interestingly they simply cut out the tails toy altogether and even more interesting is that the robotnik toy received a redesign to better match eggman's design these japanese eggman versions of the toy are very rare and highly sought after among collectors it's not as well known but the sonic toy also received a very slight redesign mostly noticeable around his eyes okay enough beating around the bush let's finally talk about the sonic 3 prototype this was dumped on november 16 2019 as the finale of hidden palace's sonic month once again every true sonic fan will get down on their hands and knees and offer their praise to the godly drx the absolute [ __ ] hero of the sonic prototype community who has blessed us again this time with the earliest prototype of sonic 3 to ever be discovered rom header data suggests this build is from october and there are a number of interesting features and changes again this won't be a complete list of every single difference just a lot of the ones that i found interesting for the sega logo sonic.exe runs across the screen and then it cuts to black before the second half of the logo is drawn the title screen uses an incomplete looking render and it's not animated at all pressing start takes you directly to the level select but you can press up up down down up up to enable debug mode actually there are two ways to activate debug mode for some reason you can also do it by playing the tracks one three five and seven so obviously the most striking part about this beta is that it still uses the sonic 2 sprite although he's still missing plenty of unique animations for a lot of the stage specific gimmicks when that happens he'll just continue using whatever his last sprite was even the end of act animations are missing with sonic just reverting to his hurt pose which looks pretty funny there are a few new sprites which look kind of weird like when tails is carrying sonic also the shading on the hud looks different from the final version if you wait on the title screen you can actually view a sort of mangled version of the surfboard intro which is pretty radical interestingly it seems like they had already decided to scrap this intro using some pro action reflect codes you can enable an early version of the tornado cutscene instead and this leads into one of the most noticeable differences in the beta this [ __ ] knuckle sprite just look at it he looks so weird he's drawn in a completely different style he does this little hand gesture and then runs away at a million miles per hour i mean honestly the sprite doesn't look that bad it's just i'm so used to seeing the regular knuckles sprite that it just seems weird to me and if that wasn't strange enough this intro cut scene is the only part of the beta that uses this sprite the rest of his appearances all uses final design so it seems like they decided to move away from this style early on so there are a number of elements of this beta that are unfinished when playing the game you'll notice that there are no giant rings even though all the hidden spots that are going to be placed are included similarly you can get the stars to appear around a checkpoint if you have enough rings but no matter how many times you jump nothing will happen elemental shields are in the game but don't have their special properties yet they function just like regular shields the graphics also aren't rendered properly the invincibility sparkles don't display correctly rendering as broken game over letters or parts of whatever shield you had most recently it's hard to put this into words but the game just feels janky as hell you kind of need to play it for yourself to really understand what i mean the collision is worse like it's much more common to clip into walls than the final game similarly the sound driver isn't finished yet so sometimes sound effects just bug out and keep playing for way longer than they're supposed to also collecting a 1-up causes the level music to stop some sound effects are just wrong like the spin dash and a lot of bosses have no audio at all honestly i'll do you a favor and spare you but if you want to punish your ears try playing this beta let's talk about the other playable character tails you can play as different characters in this build by holding different buttons at the title screen his slide ability is implemented but it's still incomplete for starters he never gets tired and his momentum is still a work in progress he can also fly underwater instead of swimming for some reason which means he can carry sonic underwater which is handy however if tails gets hit while he's carrying you then you're just stuck floating in the air also ai tails refuses to enter the water when he's joining you again like in sonic 2. super sonic still exists in this beta however as there's no way to obtain the chaos emeralds the only way you can access him is by using an s monitor placed in debug mode there's nothing too special about his appearance it's still just using the sonic 2 sprites but i still haven't mentioned the most interesting part yet sonic doesn't have his insta shield in this build he actually has a different ability this beta of sonic 3 actually has a drop dash mechanic the same move that would appear 23 years later in sonic mania well it's not exactly the same instead of holding the jump button you need to hold up and it's a little finicky it doesn't seem to work on every surface according to christian whitehead this was just an uncanny coincidence well i guess great minds think alike and as if that wasn't interesting enough there are some additional unused abilities in the game data which can be re-enabled using some pro-action replay codes the first is an air dash ability which can be activated with this code this is a pretty fun ability to mess around with although it's quite similar to the one they ended up using for hypersonic in the final game you can tell this is still a work in progress because it's super easy to make the camera totally freak out when using it the second cut ability is much more interesting and unlike anything in the final game using these codes you can access the ability to fire a ring in the direction sonic is facing by pressing b in the air it even causes sonic to uncurl and fly backwards a bit the ring will destroy badniks and it even damages bosses curiously you can also use this thrown ring to collect rings too if you press the c button you'll actually shoot out two rings instead this move doesn't actually cost any rings you can even use it while you have zero it's so weird to use but it's actually kind of fun once you get the hang of it the idea of a projectile based character is really interesting alright let's briefly touch on some of the differences in the levels starting with angel island so when you load into the level you start standing in front of this weird looking knuckles i still can't get over how fast he takes off here although the funny thing is there's no invisible wall or anything so you can just walk past him when the level starts if you want which causes him to glitch out in fact you can even walk left and die at the start of the stage which is awesome interestingly tails does not spawn with you when the level starts in fact early on there's this scripted sequence where tails flies down and you can jump into his arms and he'll carry you to the upper root when he reaches his destination he just sort of floats there in the air waiting for you to jump down a bit later on he'll spawn normally and start following you as someone who's played sonic 3 a million times it's incredibly jarring how the level layout is similar but slightly different a hidden area near the start is missing and so is one of the loops before the tree there are quite a few differences in the layout a lot of the object placements are totally different too there's even a robotnik monitor in the first level there's also this weird falling log section that's much more extensive than in the final game grabbing onto a vine as tails will crash the game although with some emulators it just causes severe graphical glitches the mini boss even shoots fire during the cutscene early on in the level a lot of the boss behavior in this beta is not finalized yet also if you jump when the bridge is destroyed like i always do you still get sent to hydra city zone right away what a rip-off the most striking difference in hydra city zone is that the background for act 1 is totally different with a distinctive layer of green vegetation interestingly this layer of green is still present in the level select icon in the final version unlike angel island the level layout is actually the same as the final version but the object placement is different which actually changes the level more than you'd think you can't destroy blastoise by walking into them in this build unfortunately and in fact when you do kill them you bounce backwards with great force which was very disorienting the mini moss is using the wrong underwater palette and there's not an act transition after beating it meaning you have to quit out and load act 2 from the level select it's not actually used in this stage it's only found in the game data but there's this weird little version of the turbo spiker maybe this fly bastard wasn't gonna be the only hydra city badnik with little baby versions following them around the start of act 2 uses a different brick design during the wall chase section which totally lacks any sort of sound effects the knuckles cut scene is extremely janky too with him just pressing the button and then running through the wall it's quite silly just like act one there's no level transition after the boss once you open the capsule you're stuck and you have to exit out to select the next zone like hydra hydrocedum the level layout for marble garden is finalized but not the object layout you also start the level running down the slope not falling like in the final version in this version tails can influence the spinning top which can be an absolute nightmare also the spinning tops don't despawn after you jump off them which is really strange there's also this little spot in act 2 where you can see under the level the act 2 boss is really glitchy and you just die at the start when the ground is destroyed it's a huge pain in the ass to try and fight him in this build so the most obvious difference in carnival knight is the music it's actually using the song from the pc version before this beta came out everyone just assumed those tracks were created for the pc release to avoid the michael jackson licensing issues but they were actually the original tracks for the stages i always thought they kind of sounded like [ __ ] on pc but coming out of a genesis they actually sound way better take a listen still not as good as the final versions though touching one of these spinning things as tails will crash the game probably because it's trying to load sprites that don't exist yet the act 1 boss arena has no walls making it extremely easy to kill yourself if you go in at top speed there's also once again no way to get to act 2 without going back to the level select screen the underwater palette is incorrect although it does look kind of cool knuckles actually doesn't appear in act 2 at all which is weird because you just go through the level normally with no blackout or flooding section at the end of the act you just fall down into his area with a teleporter you have to use tails or debug mode to actually get up to the boss arena although there's not even a capsule at the end of this zone next up is of course flying battery zone this zone is very rough and incomplete you need debug mode to really explore these stages at all otherwise you'll get stuck right at the start of both acts act 1 starts indoors with these weird capsules and non-functioning spikes oddly enough these aren't objects they're actually baked into the level layout the background is different and it looks a bit like the unused level select icon in the final sonic 3's data the entire stage is basically completely empty lacking almost all objects although banks are present in the game data and can be placed with debug mode the act 1 boss is present and you can fight it like normal act 2's layout is even less complete and although there's no giant laser part of the boss fight you can find a fully functioning hang mobile once again there's no act transition ice cap zone is not too different really again the level layout is nearly identical to the final it's just the object layout that's different the main difference is again the music something starts the level by running down the mountain instead of the snowboarding sequence it's extremely easy to go way too fast and outrun the camera or even clip through the ground there's also no water in act 2 even though the platforms still function normally without it and the daytime palette is used for all the outdoor sections it doesn't change for act 2. and of course the level transition doesn't work once again launch base actually uses a different color palette with a pink sky and dark green death egg this palette is also seen in the final game save icon which is kinda cool i actually really like this aesthetic even though i do understand why they changed it for the final version after the knuckles encounter in act 1 the game doesn't allow you to continue but you can use tails to get up to the mini boss which has a weird gimmick where you can fall down a hole to get sent up above it however if you get hidden of the tube it counts as a death pit the first boss at the end of act two dies in one hit probably for testing reasons knuckles is also standing on top of this weird thing instead of his usual platform after this knuckles encounter the level just sort of stops the next boss is found within the game files but big arm just straight up doesn't exist in this build and unfortunately that's all the actually playable levels despite being on the level select mushroom valley and sandopolis cannot be loaded and they unfortunately lack a lot of important data if you try to load into mushroom valley you just die instantly there's technically an object layout present and an early version of the miniboss in the game data there's also some unused palette data from mushroom valley found within the game's code here's a recreation of what it might have looked like unfortunately it's the same case for sandopolis it's basically identical to trying to access it on the final version of sonic 3 just unplayable garbage data there is an early version of the act 1 boss in the game data which can be spawned through a little editing lava reef is also one of those nothing stages that's super glitchy if you try to force load into it but by some miracle there's actually a good amount of lava reef data from an earlier build buried at the end of the rom for some reason if the game is hacked to load this leftover data then there's enough to basically restore a version of act 1 that's almost complete although it doesn't have any objects and it's missing collision data the layout is slightly different but the most noticeable difference is how the level uses a completely different palette from the final version lava doesn't hurt the player yet and the death egg in the background looks different there's also no boss at the end now on to the bonus stages unfortunately none of them are complete if you try to load in any of them you just fall down and die the gumball one doesn't even have any defined spheres loaded in the capsule yet they're all just gray the glowing spheres game is similarly incomplete but it does use a different wall graphic compared to the final game the slot machine stage has the correct background but it's not animated yet the slot machine has basically been designed it's just not functional yet in the game data you can actually find slightly different versions of the slot machine icons they're actually a little more detailed than the final versions which had to be changed due to palette limitations these two special stages are very interesting they're actually still just in the tech demo stage of development the first one loads up this pre-rendered gray sphere surrounded by a bunch of rotating red spheres this is actually that same object we saw all the way back in angel island one's debug mode you can control the movement of the spheres with the controllers which is pretty cool special stage 2 features a bunch of red spheres laid out in a grid formation which forms a pseudo 3d effect that you can also mess around with using the controllers it's pretty neat right i have officially run out of interesting things to say about sonic 3 for now so i'll stop wasting your time and just end the video here i look forward to all the memes asking me about a sonic 4 bonus video which i promise you will never happen once again i'd like to give a special thanks to these awesome people and websites check the description of this video for some links and super special thanks to my wonderful patrons who are these people and also these people

Channel: Cybershell

Views: 588,339

Rating: 4.968039 out of 5

Keywords: Sonic, Sonic 3, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic & Knuckles, Secrets, Easter Eggs, Debug, Cut Content, Bonus, Bonus Video, Sonic 3 Bonus Video, Cybershell

Id: l6QetdQTPWM

Length: 37min 32sec (2252 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020

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