Episode 524: Sonic 3 + Knuckles, Pt. 1

While the general public may not have known about the cut content in Sonic 3, the savvier fans did. If you pause while the end-of-stage sign is spinning, you can see that it has Knuckles' face on it in addition to Sonic, Tails, and Robotnik (though it uses Sonic's palette and is blue instead of red), and there was a sound test cheat code that included music that's not in Sonic 3, and a stage select that listed (but did not let you select) some of the removed stages. Plus a debug mode that allowed you to see the Knuckles portions of stages that were inaccessible with Sonic or Tails. Also, there's a bug on the boss at the end of one of the Hydro City stages (I want to say Hydro City 2) where if you stay underwater long enough to trigger the drowning music and then get out of the water, it triggers the S&K miniboss music instead of the correct boss music.

Thad Boyd

I'll play the absolute bastard and submit my feedback - I just had to switch off after 10 minutes. A good on-topic-to-digressive-banter-ratio makes for the usual great Retronauts listening, but the lack of the former of those two just nosedived my initial interest in the ep ._.

Wood Duck

One final thought: we got a sodastream as a Christmas gift (between that and a bunch of Puma gear, awful year for BDS support, but I'm not one to look gift horses in the mouth) and I find its at its best when making flavored seltzers rather than something sweeter/syrupy. Bubbly drops are good, and come about as recommended as I can get for something branded by a company the BDS movement opposes

Aaron

Yay been waiting for this for a while can’t wait for the next parts 😁 Wonderful episode! So nice for Sega to finally get it’s due on Retronauts

litax874

More thoughts: when I first got the games, I got them together, and it just seemed obvious that you're supposed to stick them together (I mean, the box did say about as much). It was shocking after the fact to play them separately and see how different they were. I distinctly remember getting to the checkpoint right after AIZ, getting the slot machine stage (easy to do, as you only need 20-34 rings to do so, and I was a dumb kid who was not great at Sonic) and being delightfully overwhelmed by it. Later I would play Sonic 3 on its own and realize that it's a significantly buggier and sometimes weird, realizing that the stopping point between acts 1 and 2 of AIZ reset if you took a special or bonus stage, and going back and fucking around in the act 1 area inside act 2. At times it's a small wonder the game works as well as it does. Sonic 3 on its own is a pretty weird little novelty, whereas it's IMO silly to play S&K on its own without S3 attached. You *can*, but even just the way the back-of-the-box sells itself, it's mostly as expansion content for Sonics 3 and 2. You point out the similarity to the Sonic CD boss music and the S3 (alone) miniboss music. I thought that song was particularly bizarre when I first heard it (which, keep in mind, was not on my first experience with the game) and only thought it made sense once I learned what the J/E region soundtrack for SCD was like. I think it's a fascinating tune but it feels weird used with the minibosses (note they don't even use it for the Hydrocity act 1 boss, it's the act 2 boss music). The island getting set ablaze by a giant horde of flame pods feels more appropriate with the S&K music. That song works great for the Knuckles fight, which they replaced the music for in S&K as well. The songs associated with the MJ team all definitely stuck out to me, whereas the tunes in the '93 proto feel more in line with the series. Hydrocity reminds me of Aqua Lake from S2SMS, Ice Cap more than a bit like Crystal Egg. and Launch Base and Carnival Night vaguely like You Can Do Anything -- I think they're more cohesive with the series. Also while I think Hard Times is an absolute banger, I always felt its arranged version was too dour for Ice Cap.

Aaron

I don’t think it’s gonna dethrone the sloppy perfection that is Sonic 2 for me, but hearing these lads wax so passionately about S3&K has made me consider it in a new light…Looking forward to the next seventeen episodes in this series!

Rich Uncle Skeleton

This is hilarious. When they start talking about the soda stream, the Britishisms were so heavy i had no idea what they were saying at all! Brilliant.

Gordon Lin

I think the physics have been fixed but Butler likely wants 8 figures to include his music.

shea dewar

Such a great podcast. I could listen to Stu, Chris and Seumidh talk about Sonic for an infinite number of episodes. I grew up with Sonic and am now at the point where I am collecting new versions of my old games. Looks like Sonic Origins Plus will have Sonic 3 + Knuckles. I was looking forward to that, but it sounds like the music is different and the physics is off?! Disappointing.

Oh my god you mad lads have finally done it. Absolutely wonderful episode. Just nodding along all the time. Not that it contradicts anything you've said, but I need to point out that Rocket Knight Adventures came out the previous year and *also* did the short pantomime cutscenes for continuity purposes and it wouldn't surprise me if they looked to it for inspiration because everyone should look to RKA for inspiration. Also it lets me reset the "X days since a RKA reference" calendar back to 0. The minibosses are quite an interesting phenomenon, though they were with *some* precedent given I know a couple of you are the same kind of sick fucks who have played through the 8-bit Sonic games on at least one, if not multiple, occasions. Though he popped up in Sonic 2's first stage's final act to carry Sonic to the first boss, Eggman only actually was fought directly at the very end of the game, and Sonic Chaos carried that same idea forward, with both games' bosses consisting of autonomous mechs. With Sonic 2's ridiculous difficulty curve and a bad ending that doesn't let you reach the final stage in the first place, it was a particularly grueling endeavor that made that final boss all the more impactful. Here, with all the intense damage that the miniboss fleet and bombing craft perform, actually getting to beat up Eggman at the end of the stage is cathartic in its own right. You're correct that S&K does in fact have a chip that contains the code for (aslightly updated version of) the Sonic 2 engine and some data (i.e., the various hidden power-ups and items Knuckles can find his way to). Basically, the system sees the header for Sonic 2, switches over to the code in the extra chip, and then basically that runs the game from that point on. It's funny how they broke how starposts work, but I'm not *upset* by it, because it ends up overall making the game much easier (getting to end special stages *and resume from dying* with all the rings you had when you touched the checkpoint -- they made it a lot easier to get the emeralds there, for sure). Also, since it did kinda come up in discussion: Sonic & Knuckles can be locked onto itself and will pass through whatever comes after it. S&K is a 2MB rom, and the full space of the rom bus for a Genesis game is 4MB. If S&K is locked onto something it's 2MB plus whatever's attached, plus (if it's Sonic 2) that extra chip. The way it's wired up, addressing is always designed to handle what's plugged in as if it were up to a 4MB rom, but only look at the *second* half of rom, which makes sense if the attached game is no more than 2MB, because it'll see both the first 2MB and last 2MB of the bus as the same. Plugging in multiple S&K cartridges skips each successive cartridge's ROM because that's the first 2MB. You will eventually get glitches if you do this long enough, because the data on the cartridge will take longer to reach the Genesis CPU, mostly causing glitches in animation but will stay playable for a surprisingly high number of cartridges.

Aaron

Sonic 3+Knuckles was a huge game for me and my friends when we were kids, but it feels like not many people talk about it relative to any Nintendo game. I was glad to see it get the deep dive it deserves on Retronauts!

Nat

https://www.youtube.com/@ShayMay/videos

Stuart Gipp

Where can I find the Sonic YouTube videos of Seomidh's? Didn't see a link in the show notes.

Jason Ruvinsky

Time will tell.

Stuart Gipp

Maybe the only knock on Sonic and Knuckles I have is that Mushroom Hill zone has the somewhat weak music for an opening level. The rest of the sountrack is great, but it is weird to think of a Sonic game where the first level music isn't one of the best songs in the game.

Also you haven’t lived until you have heard the Sonic 3 miniboss/Fresh Prince mashup on YouTube. It’s a overused meme but works together so well. Gotta fire up S3nK again this weekend, you guys gave me the itch, thankfully figuratively.

Craig