A suitably space-like and very foreboding musical intro accompanies your entry, which is abruptly halted completely when you walk forward into the main room, where it is replaced by the boss music. First of all, you'll find yourself in a narrow corridor surrounded by light blue (Chemical Plant scenery art re-used) and brown coloured walls of technology and stars whizzing past in a window behind you. Eggman's massive mechanical spherical satellite of doom, poised to unleash deadly death rays on all living things from space, and it's up to you to bring down his evil schemes, save the planet and somehow survive the fall back down to home, eh? Well, we'll worry about that fall in a minute.

It's been found that in the planning stages of the game, many more levels were considered, and you can find out a bit more about that in the Sonic 2 Beta section. Scenery graphics are improved and more detailed, and brand new environments are visited such as tall mountains and the caves within them, more varied factories and our first visit to the Death Egg space station. That's certainly not all you can expect from the stages though, as many of them continue the tradition with plenty of, or perhaps even more multiple routes, hidden shortcuts and secret areas, as well as varied and diverse traps and enemies. These kind of experiences are more common than slower paced, trap-filled corridors, as seen in the Marble or Labyrinth Zones in Sonic 1. One of the key selling points was that Sonic 2 is generally faster than its predecessor, and this is partly thanks to the level design, where stages such as Chemical Plant Zone feature long, twisting and looping stretches of ground to run along at great speed, creating some of the fastest experiences of the early Sonic world. You'll fight the boss at the end of each second act, and as with Sonic 1, Eggman strikes again in all new contraptions, each requiring eight hits to defeat. They're long enough to enjoy them properly though, and somewhat easier too. Admittedly most of them are quite brief, and except for the later ones, each is divided into 2 acts, while Sonic 1 carried 3 acts per level. Sonic 2 is probably the biggest single 2D Sonic game so far, with a whopping ten levels (final boss stage not withstanding), as opposed to the average number of six or seven.

Sonic cd mugen stages