This theme first appeared in Spring Yard Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog and later in Sonic the Hedgehog 2’s Casino Night Zone. Levels with the carnival/casino theme feature bright lights, carnival rides, and casino games. Let's stop pretending otherwise.Casino Night Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is an example of the carnival/casino theme Those are all fundamentally problematic examples of puzzle design. It will never cease to amaze me how it's recalled with the same hostility as the car keys puzzle in Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, the goat puzzle in Broken Sword or the moustache puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3. Now, comical hubris aside, people clearly did get legitimately stuck on the thing, which is why it came up in the first place and erroneously entered the annals of Bad Game Design History. For the purposes of the brilliant point I'm making, it will be considered a puzzle. Not that it is actually a puzzle, as a barnyard animal (for example a cow, or a rooster) could figure it out. I don't see why in a game with an otherwise consistent difficulty curve like Sonic the Hedgehog 3, they can't throw something like that in at the halfway point as a 'puzzle' of sorts. Second - and directly contradictory - I have no problem with games having one or two 'what the hell do I do now' sequences or gimmicks in them, because they always end up being interesting and memorable. They match the up and down symbols on the Mega Drive D-pad. Also - crucially - there are triangles (or 'arrows') pointing up and down, printed right there on the barrel. I managed it at the age of six, and I was a cataclysmically stupid child. When it's going up and down, nobody tried pressing 'up' and 'down' on the D-pad? The effect is instantly noticeable. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a game that uses the D-pad and one button - when your one button doesn't work, you'd think you'd try the only other thing on the controller. Let's give him two paragraphs and see if he can figure it out.įirst, it's incredibly simple to get past. But I can absolutely chastise you all for ever struggling with the thing. Those aren't really questions I'm equipped to answer.

What is the barrel? What does it stand for? And why? My own feelings about the barrel are complex.

People enjoy the ' actually, Sonic was never good, actually' line. It creates a nice sort of 'myth' and gives people another reason to dump on the series. The thing with Sonic the Hedgehog 3’s Carnival Night Zone barrel is that a lot of people on the internet like to exaggerate how difficult it is to figure out and traverse.

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