Sonic Advance - Gaming

Gaming

The game follows Sonic and his friends as they travel through various zones in order to stop Dr. Eggman from taking over South Island. The game features four playable characters; Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy. Each character has the same moveset as they did in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic and Knuckles, with the addition of a melee attack. Each character has a special ability, such as Sonic's splice shield, Tails' flight and Knuckles' gliding and climbing abilities. In her playable 2D debut, Amy cannot perform a spin dash or automatically attack while jumping like the others and must rely on her Piko Piko Hammer to defend herself, making her unique amongst the characters. Grind rails first introduced in Sonic Adventure 2 also make their first 2D appearance. Sonic and Tails can also be used at the same time during the story by inputting a cheat code at the character selection screen. However, the gameplay is similar to Sonic The Hedgehog 2; Player 1 can only control Sonic, while Tails follows Sonic, controlled by the CPU.

Special Springs can be found near the top of certain acts. Each normal zone contains one Special Spring, except for Ice Mountain Zone which contains two: one in each act. By jumping onto these springs, the player can reach a Special Stage - each spring goes to a certain special stage every time it is jumped on. The stages see players fall down a tube on snowboards while trying to earn enough rings to complete the target amount. By winning the stage, the player receives a Chaos Emerald, although there is only one emerald per stage, so the same stage cannot be repeated for multiple Emeralds. Unlike most other classic 2D Sonic games, the Emeralds are "shared" between all the characters. Once the player has collected all the Emeralds and completed the X-Zone with all four characters, they can access the Moon Zone by completing the X-Zone again with Sonic.