Carnival Night Zone

Not to be confused with Night Carnival or Casino Night Zone.

Carnival Night Zone is the fourth zone in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (or Sonic 3 & Knuckles). It is very similar to Casino Night, but with a carnival theme. The zone is a playful carnival filled with balloons, pinball bumpers, and cannons to launch from, although unlike Casino Night Zone in Sonic 2 there are no slot machines. Coincidentally, Casino Night Zone is also the fourth zone in Sonic 2.

Playing as Sonic and/or Tails, Carnival Night Zone is one of the longest zones available in the game, but as Knuckles in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, it changes from being one of the longest zones to one of the shortest. In this case, each act takes roughly just one-and-a-half minutes to complete and there is not even a boss fight at the end of the zone. Bowling Spin is still fought at the end of Act 1.

One element of the stage is a series of hovering, rotating cylinders, which can be "bounced" up and down by pressing up and down on the D-Pad, though this is not obvious.

Halfway through Act 2, there is an infamous area where Sonic is trapped in a vertical shaft, and must push one of these cylinders down a slot low enough for him to escape through. This area is unavoidable -- the player will encounter this no matter which route is taken. While it appears to be a traditional jumping puzzle, even more so since Sonic can come very close to escaping by jumping, this can only be accomplished by using the same technique listed above. This frustrated many players who didn't figure out the technique at first.

There is also a notable cylinder at the beginning of Act 1, which cannot be moved any further down than its own height, even though there appears to be another passage beneath it. This is in fact Knuckles' route, as can be revealed with Debug Mode.

Sonic the Comic
The Carnival Night Zone appeared in Sonic the Comic, in the Knuckles story "Carnival Night Conspiracy" from Sonic the Comic #39 to #44. In this continuity, the Carnival Night Zone (also occasionally referred to as the Carnival Night City) was a theme park that had been built on the Floating Island by the Marxio Brothers as a money-maker for Doctor Robotnik. They briefly tricked Knuckles the Echidna into thinking that Robotnik was not involved and, promising to give him revenue from the park to fix up the Floating Island's monuments, they made him the zone's "marketing consultant". However, when the truth of Robotnik's involvement was revealed, Knuckles literally excised the zone from the rest of the Floating Island: he struck a fault-line with his fist, breaking the zone off from the larger landmass. The zone then plummeted down to Mobius, where it crashed in the middle of the Emerald Hill Zone.

Music
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Trivia

 * Carnival Night Zone's music is famous for having similarities with Michael Jackson's Jam. Sega was originally going to hire Michael Jackson to write all of the music in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but didn't due to a current lawsuit with the pop star.
 * A zone in Sonic Rush is called Night Carnival, and it bears a heavy resemblance to the one in Sonic 3.
 * This is the zone which fits Angel Island the least, as it has a carnival-like theme and is placed on an island which is mostly covered by forests. However it may have been built by Dr. Robotnik.