Mania is reminding me how much of Sonic 3 & Knuckles was the devs just straight-up showing off

Stuff like the spinning record-platter platforms is just ridiculous. "CHECK IT NERDS we drew an entire 360° spin anim for every character"

Nearly every single tile in Carnival Night and Death Egg is animated. Whole screen's pulsing and moving even when you're standing still

The psuedo-3D tricks for the bonus stages stand out ofc but even the parallax effects in some of the backgrounds are absurdly sophisticated

Game used vertical parallax in addition to horizontal; the camera moves *through* the water plane in Hydrocity and Launch Base

Except the Genesis couldn't do affine xforms so instead of SNES's Mode 7 stretching, they faked a 3D plane with just TONS of parallax layers

Launch Base has a whole 3D world in the background made entirely of 2D parallax. You see different parts of it based on camera altitude

There are a million other tiny details that amount to just totally unnecessary polish for its own sake

Like: All the zones have a clear spatial relationship to one another. You never just teleport to the next level; there's always a transition

(I mean, with the exception of the literal teleporter to Sky Sanctuary, lol)

Knuckles knocks you off waterfall from Angel Island to Hydrocity, geyser then shoots to Marble Garden, boss fight flies to Carnival Night

Death egg falls out of the sky at the end of Launch Base, eventually Sandopolis > Lava Reef > Hidden Palace leads you to its crash site

whole thing's just incredibly detailed along so many axes

Oh hey for a visual example, Mania's version of Hydrocity uses the same parallax trick for the water surface:

The water isn't a textured plane, it's a huge number of rows of narrow parallax sprites, sorted back-to-front

Plug Without Shame: Aerobat's bg art uses the exact same trick bc I wanted to do this ever since I played Hydrocity:

Making art out of stacked parallax layers like this is SUPER fun. Basically paint a level & then set all the PS layers to appropriate depths

Took forever but found some gameplay that shows what I meant re: Launch Base Zone's background. Same trick as Hydrocity taken even further:

Transition from sky to cliffs/horizon to underwater is handled entirely via parallax. Note the clouds all sit at diff parallax depths too

Not shown in this clip: There's a whole section of world further underwater too. Go down far enough and there're a bunch of building ruins