Sonic the Hedgehog 3C (prototype 0517)

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Sonic the Hedgehog 3C (prototype 0517)
System(s): Sega Mega Drive/Genesis
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Sonic Team
Genre: 2D Platform

Sonic the Hedgehog 3C Prototype 0517 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis was released by drx during the February 23rd, 2008 proto release. A earlier in development beta with a compilation number of 0408 was also ound. This likely is a beta for the cancelled Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles compilation called Sonic the Hedgehog 3 Limited Edition.

Download Sonic the Hedgehog 3C (prototype 0517) File: Sonic 3C (Prototype 0517 - May 17, 1994, 17.08) (hidden-palace.org).zip (2.35 MB) (info)

Various Differences

General

Hyper Sonic's stars around his body are completely different than in the final. Also, it appears that Super Sonic, not Hyper Sonic appears in the Doomsday Zone. Also in the Doomsday Zone, when you hit chase Eggman and you hit him, you don't get knocked back like in the final.

Debug mode works in this build (Hold down A when selecting level) but it causes the ring counter to screw up. With Debug activated, the Rings counter show you the sprite/frame number of your character.

To enable Debug Or go to Sound Test and enter: 1, 3, 5 & 7. The ring counter is replaced with a player sprite frame.

The final credits medley is longer, different, and uses a few additional segments from additional zones.

Knuckles is a selectable character in the one player mode.

The victory music usually played after beating the Launch Base boss before going to the credits in Sonic 3 is more developed, but can only be heard by listening to the credits music.

Super Knuckles is implemented.

On the Glowing Spheres stage, aside from having a different layout and the items falling downward, there's a chance you'll get a green ball with an F on it. I managed to grab one, but it only makes the bumper sound the black ones make. Also, the slots stage has a completely different layout and the background freezes when you spin the reels. And lastly, while all three bonus stages are implemented, you can access one randomly once you hit 50 rings. Entering the Glowing Spheres level makes you lose all your rings.

The super ring before the transition to the boss (before the pulley, guarded by that chicken thing I forget the name of) in MHZ2 does not seem to exist.

also the exit from the highest super ring in MHZ2 is different.

There is less of a transition from the first super ring to the "S&K start" without the lock-on

The MHZ2 boss does not have fire effects when killed, and you must hit him 6 times AFTER he has zoomed off.

All Emeralds: 2, 4, 6, 8. Works on both Sonic 3 prototypes.

Here's the whole thing. In-game, the credits end before the song finishes. I'm guessing they did a new medley when the plans for a Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles cart were scrapped. None of the songs from zones in Sonic 3 are included in the final.

Knuckles-only Metal Sonic boss in Sky Sanctuary freaks out when Tails is used. Once defeated, no ending comes at all (with Tails, at least.). Also he flies around wildly(Again, Tails).

Actually with Knuckles, Angel Island falls... and lands.. but no credits roll. It just loops Sky Sanctuary forever.

The Knuckles with all emeralds ending has the island float into the sky and it reaches space right away and that's the end.

You can move the moment you enter Sandopolis act 1; you're no longer forced to wait until you land in the sand and have to pop out. This occurs in both protos.

Lava Reef 3 (Boss) has a fire shield instead of a lightning shield. Also, the ring pattern is different. =)

Hidden Palace (Mushroom Hill) has Death Egg music.

S monitor makes Knuckles fully hyper. Unlike in final versions, he causes the earthquake when gliding for a distance into a wall.

Beating the Flying Battery Act 2 miniboss (The Wing Fortress style one) and dying causes the clouds to mess up (Line in that Sonic 3 speedrun...)

In Sandopolis Act 2 (Although this happened after I beat act 1), the giant sand work is rather glitched up. If you die or enter Act 2 with level select, it's fine... and everything is lit up too.

Entering the gumball bonus stage makes you lose your shield. Not sure about the other ones.

The Knuckles MGZ2 boss still plays miniboss music (sounds a bit odd IMO, and I still wonder why they did that - accident or intentional?), and doesn't play the "break-wall" sound when the spikes penetrate the floor or ceiling.

Death Egg's bosses (Doomsday act 2 that is, I didn't bother looking at the ordinary boss yet) don't play boss music, they just play DEZ music. Also, when Robotnik flies away, everything is a lot slower than the final, and if you don't press anything you can get stuck in the bottom left until you go into debug mode.

Doomsday is really glitchy - I was in debug, so I don't know how many rings I had, but either I ran out of rings and died, or the zone just screws up when you beat the first stage of the boss. Either way, I died somehow, and when I used debug to revive Sonic again, the game acted like it was a normal level, and he just kept falling to the bottom of the screen. I re-entered the zone, created a load of S monitors and tried to break them (but couldn't, since you can't spin in that zone), and eventually it froze my emulator and X11 as well. o.O

When I play without debug mode on, it seems to work fine, although all the explosions are black...

If you kill Death Egg's 3rd boss while it's firing the laser, the laser stays on screen while he dies (not sure if this happens in the final, but I've never seen it happen).

In HPZ, even though your controls are locked during the cutscene, Tails' controls aren't locked, and he will continue to use his AI if you don't touch the second controller.

Pressing down in SSZ near to Knuckles doesn't make him wave at you yet.

You die at the end of the first Hydrocity act... you die by drowning while its tallying your score LOL

Apparently the music locations are ALMOST the same in S3K and S3Beta (0517).

Also that platforms that you need to spindash to go down (in LRZ) are REALLY faster.

Also when you kill Doomsday boss with tails, the game goes to Level select-was that mentioned?

If you manage to beat the game straight through on a save file, it only lets you select the Sonic 3 levels.Yep, I got the exact same thing on the 0408 prototype.

Interesting thing about this build is that these is a Tails transformation with only Chaos Emeralds. It's basically Super Tails without the birds. Enter the 2, 4, 6, 8 code, and get 50 rings and you'll become this incarnation of Tails. However using an S monitor you get the Super Tails with the birds (perhaps there was a super and hyper version of Tails planned at one point). The emeralds seem to activate an incomplete version of Hyper mode. For Sonic, it uses the rainbow pallete and gives him the dash attack, but doesn't give him the star effect or the flash and sparks when the dash attack is performed. For Tails, it neglects to give him his flickies or the trailing sparks. For Knuckles, it adds the shockwave to latching onto walls, but doesn't replace the trailing sparks with afterimages.

The S monitor reveals Hyper forms identical to the final (save for the different star arrangement on Hyper Sonic).

And I liked the proto arrangement of the stars around Hyper Sonic. It was much more original as it didn't just copy the Hyper Knuckles holograms (granted however, the holograms make sense due to the sense of speed that is supposed to be portrayed with Hyper Sonic. Perhaps they should have done the star arrangement with Hyper Knuckles instead.)

Knuckles can still punch out Hyper Sonic and Super Tails in the fight in Hidden Palace.

In Angel Island zone (and maybe every other zone), when you finishing fighting the mini-boss, and the sign post twirls down to the ground, if you get a power-up monitor, sometimes it lands behind the sign post. In the final, if the monitor land around the same spot as the sign post, it's in front

Tried to see if this was the case in the 408 build, but no end sign came down after beating the Act 1 boss in that build so Act 2 was never loaded. = /

At this point in time, Super Knuckles had been fully completed, pallete, sprites, the whole shabang.

Another little detail, but mentioning for the sake of recording: In Doomsday Zone, during the first boss, if you move all the way to left, you actually trigger two missiles from the end of the asteroid field segment. See? Nothing special.

The save data screen does not show the number of lives and continues. Sonic 3 did not show this, either. Sonic 3 & Knuckles does show this. Also, there are only 6 save slots, while in S3&K there are 8. (S3 Final actually had 14 save slots; 6 for S3 only, 8 for S3&K.)

Playing as Sonic

Hydrocity 1

boss plays the Sonic 3 Act 1 mini-boss theme instead of the Act 2 boss theme. (S3 final plays the Act 2 boss theme, but switches to the S&K miniboss music if the drowning timer starts and you get out of the water); S3&K final plays the S&K Act 1 mini-boss theme.)

Hydrocity 2

The spring at the beginning has been replaced with a 1UP, which is the same as S3&K final but not like S3 final.

Carnival Night 1

Tails randomly appeared after the boss, even though I was playing as Sonic only. ohmy.gif

Mushroom Hill 1

The Super Ring at the beginning of the level doesn't seem to flash if you enter here via Level Select with no emeralds. If you go to MH1 with emeralds, the Super Ring flashes, but entering it merely gives you 50 rings. (Strangely, the rest of the Super Rings aren't flashing...)

Flying Battery 2

After defeating the WFZ-style miniboss, the floor begins to move up. In addition, there's a horizontal wall that moves right. Dying here not only garbles the clouds (as mentioned by someone else), it garbles the horizontal wall. Also, Sonic doesn't roll out of the Flying Battery in the level transition - he simply runs out. He appears to be rolling in the Sandopolis intro, though.

Sandopolis 1

Sonic doesn't get stuck in the sand after he falls into the level. Also, as MK said, you can move left and right during the intro.

Sandopolis 2

The boss seems ridiculously easy to beat. I was just standing where Eggman was in the Pyramid boss and Eggman was taking damage.

Lava Reef 2

Debug mode movement is affected by the lava slope at the boss. Odd...

Hidden Palace

Not only can Knuckles hurt you as Super/Hyper Sonic, Knuckles can hurt you if you're in Debug mode placing an object, at which point Sonic's graphics might be corrupted. (The corruption only seems to happen if you were Super/Hyper Sonic at the time.) Damn, Knuckles is good.

Death Egg 1

The objects that count down from 3 and then send you across some paths have a slightly different countdown tick. It's four low tones, instead of three low tones and one high tone. (I'm pretty sure the final was three low, one high. Someone correct me if I'm wrong please.)

Death Egg 2

After I beat the boss, the HUD turned green. This means that the game loaded Knuckles' 1P palette into the Knuckles CP palette slot. ohmy.gif

Credits

The S3 Final credits roll, but the extended S3C medley is played. Also, the medley is longer than the credits, but the credits automatically restarts to the Sega screen a few seconds after "Try Again" appears. (I'm not sure if the same thing happens if you have all the emeralds.)

However, on a weird note, anywhere from about D9 onwards has no sound until you get to FF which is the Sega Sound.

Special Stage 2 leads you to an unused Super Emerald Stage. Essentially it's just a giant maze, which has no rings by the way, although for some reason you don't get a Perfect. It gives you a Super Emerald. Only Super Emerald stage that's playable in the game I believe. here are six other special stages, some of them reused in Sonic and Knuckles. Stage 4, for one, is definitely a S&K level.

Something odd I've noticed. The April Sonic 3C proto has debug info turned off while in normal gameplay (assuming that debug mode is activated in the first place), like the final, but the May Sonic 3C proto has debug info throughout gameplay, like in Sonic 3's debug mode. Wonder why they went backwards sorta.

Hmm.. Something is weird with the S monitor in this build. If you have 7/14 emeralds (makes no difference), you get the same result as if you hit a S monitor, except: - No weird stars surrounding Sonic - Knuckles has no reflection - Tails has no birds (!)

So basically hitting a S monitor brings all these extra objects.

Looks like they may intended to actually change the way the super forms looked like (ie, hyper sonic animated palette is used for what it's supposed to be super sonic in this build) before scrapping this version. Just guessing, I haven't looked at any of the code yet.

In Launch Base 2, as Knuckles, you don't fight the second boss like in S3&K final.

You can't access it in anyway in the 408 beta because you're immediately warped to a special stage, however in this version the chamber works exactly like the final, with a couple differences:

1. The HUD is still present (It's green while playing as Knuckles) 2. Death Egg Music is playing (This is due to it coming right after the Death Egg Final Boss level slot in the game) 3. The intro plays every time you enter the chamber 4. The gray emerald locations don't save after you leave (They reappear after the intro) 5. The laser zaps all the emerald alters even if you already have that emerald (Although it still shows that you have that emerald) 6. There is no Super Emerald screen after you beat a special stage

Also, it's interesting to note that there are color differences in the beta, probably changed so they could correspond with the colors of the Chaos Emeralds

Levels

Mushroom Hill

• In Mushroom Hill zone act 1: You fall in from the sky just like in the previous beta.
• One of the giant ring's in Mushroom Hill Zone isn't put in yet, instead it is filled with a diamond pattern of rings.

Lava Reef

• Tails seems to have quite a few collision problems in lava reef.
• When you break the capsule, the platform on the screen floats towards the other platforms. You have to jump from platform to platform to get to Hidden Palace unlike in the final. Pretty much it is the same as the earlier one except the transition to Hidden Palace does work
• The Lava Reef boss area plays the Act 2 music until you reach Robotnik.

When you beat Robotnik, the lava is still there.

• The giant hand midboss of Lava Reef has a few messed up textures.

Doomsday

• In Doomsday Zone act 2 there is no Doomsday music and Deathegg act 2's music continues playing.
• Lots of rings are given at the start of Doomsday Zone because there are none around when chasing Robotnik.
• That palette for Doomsday is the same as DEZ2

Sky Sanctuary

• Sky sanctuary zone act 2:The teleporter that usually teleports Knuckles is not present and there seems to be a few missing rings.
• When entering Sky Sanctuary 2 with Sonic and Tails, Mecha Sonic has a glitch where there's an invisible wall in between the fighting area. When Mecha Sonic is defeated with Sonic and Tails, the game acts like Sky Sanctuary 1 was completed and doesn't continue to the next level.

Hidden Palace

When Hidden Palace is entered through a Special Stage Ring, Death Egg music will play. When trying to leave through using the teleporter the game will loop and you will return to Hidden palace.

Death Egg

• The midboss of Death Egg Zone still hit you and you will be knocked out of the Super Sonic form.

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