Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Beta elements

This article pertains to the beta elements of Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Red Revolving Spheres
This is a spinning mass of red spheres, placeable by debug mode in the first half of Angel Island Act 1. The spheres look similar to those appearing in the game's special stage, but the object itself seems to have no apparent gameplay purpose. When it is placed, many palette and VRAM complications occur in the level, and the game will lag. Player 2 can manipulate this object.


 * Up - rotates the object vertically.
 * Right - rotates the object horizontally.
 * Down / Left - moves the object up or down.
 * A / C - changes the object's size.
 * B - rotates the object sideways.
 * Start - toggles automatic rotation.

Flying Battery Zone
As mentioned earlier, Flying Battery would have been played between Carnival Night and IceCap, but when the game was split into two that zone was moved into Sonic & Knuckles to give it more levels. Still, there are some leftovers in Sonic 3 – a data select icon, its music and even its bosses.

While the player is able to access Flying Battery by way of PAR codes, it will be corrupted with IceCap tiles appearing all over the place. However, the player will need to do this in a specific way because alone, these codes will crash the game when trying to access that level data.

Even though the player can use codes to access other unused zones (such as Lava Reef), those will crash the game.