Carnival Night Zone

"Night life on the Floating Island is exciting. Bounce and flip your way across this colorful Zone which is filled with anti-gravity platforms."

- Instruction manual


 * 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.

Description
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, it is not meant to be bypassed this way. It is massively difficult to get by like this, so it is much preferable to use the up and down method. 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.

Story
After defeating Eggman in Marble Garden Zone, Tails airlifts Sonic to the zone. Knuckles runs there from the last zone. Partway through the zone Knuckles appears and turns off all of the lights (this has no effect on the game play of the zone). Later a switch will be pressed to reactivate the lights. After defeating Eggman Sonic and Tails will be shot out of a cannon to the next zone. Knuckles will use a teleporter.

Boss
Dr. Robotnik appears in a hovercraft that is unreachable by normal jumps (Unless playing as Tails, who can hover into Robotnik). Robotnik will drop some type of orb onto the ground. Upon this, he will approach directly above and create an rotating electric shock with parts of the machine, which will attempt to draw in the player. After that, Robotnik will lower down to retrieve the orb, which is the best chance to attack

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.

Trivia

 * Carnival Night Zone's music is famous for having similarities with Michael Jackson's Jam, and in fact shares several samples used and composed by Michael. The most notable sample is that you can hear the word Jam from Jam in Carnival Night's music.
 * There is 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.
 * The barrels are probably by far the most infamous part of this zone. The player must press up and down repeatedly, and many players were stuck for a long time, either not knowing what to do, or trying to jump on it to get it to go down.