My Sonic Fan-Girl Chronicles, Chapter 6: 1994—Sonic & Knuckles

Note: I am posting my memories about this game today because…well, it’s the anniversary of the release date for Sonic & Knuckles!

Booster shots.  We hated them when we were kids.  But we were due for one.  My sister and I decided that as a reward for going through with getting a booster shot, we’d buy Sonic & Knuckles (or at least Mom and Dad would buy it for us).  Our parents thought it was a good idea to have that to look forward to after a scary event.  (Tch, I’m not afraid of shots anymore if I ever needed more.)

Sonic & Knuckles was released October 18, 1994.  I remember mainly because of the instruction manual for Sonic Mega Collection Plus, but I can confirm it because I remember seeing an ad for it in a video game magazine Dad bought for us a couple of months before.   Our appointment for a booster shot was on Halloween day, October 31^st, so it was on that day that we got Sonic & Knuckles—so that we wouldn’t have to worry about renting it or returning it to Blockbuster Video or the Warehouse.  Other than the handheld Sonic game we got in Hanukkah 1992, Sonic & Knuckles was the first console Sonic game we played without renting it—because duh, it was Sonic the Hedgehog, the only video game series we loyally played on the SEGA Genesis.

Ha hah, as awkward would have it, we were too “shy” to try the game out, so Dad tried it out first.  The longer we watched him play the first Zone, the more we wanted to play.  It was a Sunday night, I remember; maybe that’s why we were nervous about playing the game because the next day we had school.  We were the kind of fangirls that if we saw a boy wearing a Sonic the Hedgehog T-shirt (yeah, boys, not girls for some reason), we’d turn away bashfully.  Yeah, I know, it’s weird.  Anything Sonic would belong in our home, so if we saw Sonic at school, it totally made us nervous.   It was like, “What’s he doing here?”

I played as Knuckles first, maybe because he had the ability to glide and climb, and he could break more barriers than Sonic could here.  But the game was shorter than in Sonic’s mode.  The last stage was the Sky Sanctuary, which featured the final boss, Metal Sonic.  Uh, Mecha Sonic?  I dunno anymore, I’m pretty sure he was called Metal Sonic because of a funny song Sis sang about him.  That’s how I remember he was called Metal Sonic.  Isn’t Mecha Sonic from Sonic CD (another classic Sonic game I never played and may never, sadly)?

The synths for the music of Final Boss fight part one….awesome!!!!  And Doomsday Zone?!!!  :O!!  I enjoyed the music thinking I’d never hear it again; at the same time, I had to keep Sonic alive, so I was distracted often by the concentration of not losing a life, or at least keeping my rings.

When I played as Sonic the game was longer.  There was the full Sky Sanctuary and then the Death Egg Zone, and then when you get all 7 Super Emeralds, the last zone was the Doomsday Zone.  The music from the Death Egg Zone gave me the same feeling/tempo as the Metropolis Zone from Sonic 2.

Oh my goodness…the Lock-on feature.  It was awesome.  But I gotta say, we only experienced Knuckles the Echidna in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 before we got our very own Sonic 3 and played Sonic 3 & Knuckles.  I forgot how long it took for me to beat Sonic 3 and Knuckles.  But I needed a guide for the 7 Chaos Emeralds and the 7 Super Emeralds.  I forgot what magazine I used, but it had a map of all the blue balls—I mean, blue spheres, red spheres and bounce/star spheres.  Trial and error too—lots of it.  Hyper Sonic was a new thing for us because we were like: there is a Sonic faster than Super Sonic!  Whut?!  But he had his limitations: he could still run out of rings, which means that if he does, he changes back into Sonic and falls, consequently losing a life.  Didn’t want dat.  No.