Originally Posted by
granz
The special stages in Sonic 3 & Knuckles are pretty easy, and definitely more enjoyable than those found in Sonic 2. Although you can bring Tails along with you, he won't actually do anything except tag behind.
One of the things about Sonic 2 and Sonic & Knuckles is that you can collect all the Emeralds in the first few stages. The developers purposefully put enough checkpoints and giant rings in those stages, possibly to compensate for the lack of battery back-up. Locating some of them can be tricky, but they're there.
Another game worth mentioning is Sonic 3D Blast. The special stages consist of narrow bridges containing rings and spikes, and there's a pretty generous helping of rings for that matter. It's kind of hard to miss too many of them, even if you do impale yourself on the spikes several times.
The special stages I hated most were those in Sonic Advance and Sonic CD. The collision detection in Advance's stages is just way off. It's nearly impossible to align yourself with any of the rings.
The stages in Sonic CD are completely ridiculous. You're running around this pseudo 3D plane trying to jump into blimps. The objective is to take out all blimps before the time limit expires. The problem is, the blimps practically teleport out of your way as soon as you jump near them, and accidentally landing yourself in a pool of water deducts 10 seconds from the timer for every millisecond you remain in the water. There's water everywhere, and jumping at any given time is likely going to put you in it.
To beat it all, you can't repeat any acts / zones you've already completed. As soon as you fail a special stage, the game forcibly saves your progress and doesn't let you go back. If you haven't collected enough Emeralds by the time you reach the final few acts, you're permanently screwed out of unlocking the good ending.
Suffice it to say, I don't like Sonic CD at all. No one should have to abuse save states to complete objectives in a Sonic game.