Sonic and Knuckles

‘Sonic and Knuckles’ – the sequel to ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’, “let’s speed, keed”.

By the way, that is the first of several select references to the original Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon (not that Sonic Underground crap) that will occur through this interview.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about – check it out on youtube while enjoying a fine Chili Dog.

This game lets you play as Sonic or Knuckles… poor old Tails has been booted from this adventure. It’s your classic Sonic story, you need to destroy the Death egg and stop Ro-butt-nik from taking over the world. Knuckles, realising his mistake in believing Dr Robotnik was a ‘good egg’ joins Sonic in taking down the overly rounded villain. Knuckles can glide, smash through huge boulders and can climb up walls; whereas Sonic is not only ‘up, over and gone’, he’s faster, he can use double jump power ups and jumps much higher than Knuckles, and all that’s missing is, “I’m waaiitttiinng”.

Due to the level and boss designs, these different character abilities effect the routes taken in each of the zones.  There is a parallel story line for the two characters that takes them through the same zones, just in different places. And some times the two will meet up and have a chit chat that’s probably about chilli dogs or where they buy their shoes from. Originally the ‘Sonic and Knuckles’ game featured a unique ‘Lock On’ Technology, no no, not that legendary Sega ‘laser tag’  game where you wear an awesome sky blue HMD headset and shoot with an equally awesome sky blue gun, no it was a special slot located at the top of the cartridge to plug other Megadrive/Genesis games into.

When combined with ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’, it creates Sonic 3 and Knuckles. When combined with ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’, it makes ‘Knuckles in Sonic 2’, which allows the player to play the game just as Knuckles and seems to make the game so much easier, then when combined with the iconic flagship game ‘Sonic the Hedghog’, the game generates, err, the ‘Blue Spheres’ special stages, which is the way you get Chaos emeralds in ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’… wooo… my most favourite part of the game, ever… With a total of 134,217,728 levels in all, this is indeed guaranteed to either keep you busy for years or just simply drive you mad.

So cleverly, if you also own all of the other Sonic the Hedgehog Live Arcade titles, you can access these extra delights though the ‘Sonic and Knuckles’ menu screen. If you already have ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’, getting ‘Sonic and Knuckles’ lets you play though the game as ‘Sonic 3 and Knuckles’ and this makes it one large combined game and all the levels from ‘Sonic 3’ and ‘Sonic & Knuckles’ come together. It makes sense playing it this way as the two games were originally developed as a single that was cut in half to meet release deadlines… and make twice as much money.

You can play ‘Sonic and Knuckles’ on its own, and it is still very playable, but it is nice to follow the story from one half of the game to the other. For instance, once you finish the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’ levels, the Death Egg falls off screen intact instead of being blown to bits, and then the story and gameplay continue straight from the first levels of ‘Sonic & Knuckles’. It still contains the same high quality chip tune music like in ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’ and the levels look really fantastic. They look even more fantastic if you use the smoothing option in the visual settings. Do it!