A pack / addon for Sonic & Knuckles
Blue Sphere, known as Special Stage Mode in Sonic & Knuckles Collection, is an easter egg video game built into the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge for the Sega Mega Drive, accessible by attaching any Mega Drive game cartridge (other than Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or Sonic the Hedgehog 3) into the Sonic & Knuckles lock-on port. Blue Sphere is a collection of Special Stages in the same style and engine of those featured in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. If the cartridge that is locked on to Sonic & Knuckles is the original Sonic the Hedgehog (Sonic Classics, the Nick Arcade and Simon Wai prototype versions of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 will also work), then the full game of Blue Sphere is accessed with all stages. Most other cartridges will allow the player to access only a single stage of the game, based on the cartridge's ROM header and the stage's code in the full Blue Sphere game. Some cartridges with particularly large ROM file sizes (including Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium and Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers) will not load Blue Sphere, but will instead boot Sonic & Knuckles as normal. Locking on Sonic & Knuckles to another copy of Sonic & Knuckles will also load the game normally.
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also something about the song that plays fills me with immense amounts of serotonin
For every other Sega Genesis game though, there are no other special kinds of bonuses that you can get from placing them on top of S&K, but that doesn’t mean you get nothing at all. When you place any other Genesis game on there, you can get access to more levels of the special stages from Sonic 3, which is pretty cool if you are a big fan of these levels. Of course though, they don’t give you anything other than just the satisfaction of doing them, and there are a gargantuan amount of these that you can access, so unless you have absolutely nothing better to do, then there is no reason to check them all out.
“Game” #508
In Blue Spheres, Sonic is automatically running forward. The aim is to turn all the blue spheres into red spheres by running into them – but running into red spheres will end the game. If you create a rectangle of red spheres, then they and all the spheres inside it will turn into coins. If you manage to collect all of these you get to skip levels.
There are other kinds of speres, such as bumpers and bouncers to help or hinder your movement. As time progresses, the game will get quicker and quicker. It gets extremely manic.
There are an immense amount of levels – 134,217,728 (or 128,016,000 distinct layouts) so it’s pretty much a “play until you get bored” kind of game. It’s a lot of fun for a quick blast, though.