Other

This page is for documenting references in other aspects of the game that dont fit in either of the previous categories.

Bonus Stage - Get Blue Spheres

Why, if it isn't our old friend Blue Spheres. Blue Spheres, accessed by jumping into the star ring created when touching a checkpoint with enough rings (which is a reference to how Sonic 2's special stages were accessed in the same way), is a recreation of Blue Sphere, which was Sonic 3's special stage. The rules are the same here as they were there - get all the blue spheres and avoid touching the red spheres. To go a bit more in depth:

- Blue spheres are your objective, collect all of them to win. When you touch a blue sphere, it will become a red sphere, and making a circle of red spheres around a body of blue spheres will make the circle and the blue spheres inside turn into rings, and all of the spheres turned into rings will be counted as collected.

- Red spheres are your anti-objective, if you touch one, the game is over. Simple as that.

- Yellow spheres will launch the player forward a set distance.

- Bumpers simply reverse your direction until you press up to start going forward again. Simple, but can be a run killer under the right circumstances

- Rings are just collectibles. They don't hinder or contribute to your progress, but if you collect all of them, you'll get a perfect bonus, which is just more points in the original, though Mania also has Gold Medallions to give out for perfect clears.

At regular intervals, the game will get faster, necessitating that the player be more precise with their timing to do just what they want. If the player collects all the blue spheres, they're rewarded with a Silver Medallion, a new collectible that just gives the player unlocks (more on those unlocks elsewhere), but Gold Medallions will be given for perfect clears, although there's no difference other than the way they're obtained.

todo: add demonstration video of blue spheres original mode

After beating all 32 Blue Spheres layouts (16 of which are taken directly from Sonic 3), the Blue Spheres gamemode is unlocked, allowing the player to play semi-randomly generated Blue Spheres levels, made out of pieces of existing layouts. This gamemode is a direct reference to the original Blue Sphere game, which can only be accessed by using Sonic & Knuckles' revolutionary lock-on technology to lock Sonic & Knuckles onto Sonic 1 or any other incompatible game. This game is exactly what I just described, randomly generated Blue Sphere levels (side note: the achievement for getting all 32 Gold Medallions is called "No Way? No Way!", which is a reference to the scrolling text found in the "main menu" of Blue Sphere). Mania's Blue Spheres can be played in two modes: Original and Mania. Original works just like Blue Sphere without any new additions, but Mania adds two new sphere types:

- Green spheres will turn into blue spheres when you collect them, meaning you effectively have to collect them twice.

- Pink spheres will warp the player to another pink sphere, both of which will then be counted as collected.

Both of these sphere types originate from a proof-of-concept for a "Blue Spheres 2" by Stealth:

todo: add demonstration video of blue spheres mania mode

(I don't know how to calculate it, but the original Blue Sphere has 134,217,728 unique stages, and Mania definitely more than doubles that with the addition of Mania Mode, so however many hundreds of millions of Blue Spheres stages are in Mania, I'm sure Blue Sphere Guy is very happy about it)