So, I decided to play both of these games (well, all of the classics except CD) to get a high score, seeing that one of my friends on my friends list was beating me in every classic Sonic game. I think I was able to rank at the top for all games except Sonic 2 because I really do not like the bonus stages in that game. I understand that it's mostly memorization, but the design was never appealing to me. There's no sense of speed, no sense of platforming (like Sonic 1 or even Ep1's bonus stages) and I don't get how Sega felt it was worth bringing back in many future titles since 1992 all the way to 2012. Maybe it's because Sonic 2 was their favorite game (as well as for many fans of the franchise, too) but I dunno. To me, it just took away from the experience instead of really adding to it like the other bonus stages in the franchise... which I have a lot to talk about soon enough.
But I want to discuss these two games. It's rare that I'd play them separately, but this was a score attack and generally, score in a Sonic game is trivial to me (and I just noticed Sonic 3 & Knuckles - the complete game... has a Leaderboard as well, where my score ranks at the top of the list on my friends). A casual playthrough of both of these games would involve me getting the Chaos Emeralds as efficiently as possible and taking routes in stages that I am most comfortable with. This time, I wanted to clear acts with as many rings as possible, though I don't know which routes allow you to profit the most, so my goal was just to not lose what I've collected. (I also do not know if Tails is the better character for this, but given his added mobility, I would guess YES, but I played as Sonic & Tails.) It's easy enough for me to not die playing both these games so this wasn't generally a challenge. Another way of ensuring you can attain a high score is to complete a special stage in either game with a Perfect, and this alone separates the Sonic 3 special stages from the Sonic & Knuckles ones in terms of difficulty.
Personally, if I simply clear all of the blue spheres in the stages for the Emerald (as I've always done as a kid), I find that Sonic & Knuckles has the easier stages, thus it makes getting Hyper Sonic or Knuckles (or Super Tails) that much easier. However, obtaining a Perfect in Sonic 3 is much easier because turning blue spheres into rings mostly involves collecting the outer blue spheres (until the last stage where it begins to become a bit tricky). In Sonic & Knuckles, the difference is that you're not only turning blue spheres into rings, you're also turning red spheres (surrounding these blue spheres) into rings as well. The concept is still the same where you're still turning the outer blue spheres all red (which form a square or a rectangle with reds in the center) so they can all turn into rings. This means that you have to take a whole new approach at collecting rings. Plus, Sonic & Knuckles (unlike Sonic 3) has loose rings already scattered on the stage, and there is one stage in particular that makes collecting them pretty challenging as the stage speeds up gradually from you being in it.
Nevertheless, I got a perfect in all the stages and even got a perfect while still failing it once (which means an extra 50,000 points, so I suppose you can make the most out of this if you know where every super ring in both games is and save 7 of them for getting emeralds and a perfect to obtain the highest score from each stage.)
Sonic 3 was a score of 672910. I think my previous score was literally under 200k for both games.
Sonic & Knuckles was a score of 783920. Interestingly enough, I rank at 130. I'm guessing because there's no Tails.
In the future, I'll run Sonic 3 & Knuckles and do a score attack. I may try another Sonic 1 run because I don't know the bonus stages well, so I had bad luck collecting more than 2 emeralds.
I'll be recording another speed run soon. It will be my first full Unleashed stage and fortunately (or unfortunately) I can't think of a song to use for the run, so it might wind up being an upload that's not double compressed...
... or is it triple compressed if I upload it to YouTube? Shit.
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