Emerald Hill Zone

The first zone for this bootleg is Emerald Hill Zone, with a rough version of Hill Top's background and palette. Near enough the opposite from the other copies which is pretty interesting if you ask me. In terms of enemies and rings, there's some stuff in here that's just completely missing. No three rings at this part of the stage in the screencap (although a ring monitor is in place of the shield monitor as compensation) and there's zero badniks in the first half of Act 1. The music here is of 2P Emerald Hill but missing the main melody of the song.

For the second act, the level design was relatively the same as usual. Only difference being that the background had become legitimately near nauseating for me. It became like that once I accidentally lost a life due to falling into spikes, I was unfortunately unable to get a screencap of that moment. The only other changes was that the music went from 2P to 1P Emerald Hill. At this point of gameplay, I got much too invested in looking at the general visuals for the game. Thinking none the wiser, I decided to go into a special stage that was close to the boss battle.

...And as you can see here, that was the biggest mistake I could've made. The emulator was frozen for a good while before I decided to do a hard reset and get back on track to where I was. Since I now had a proper handle on the gameplay and knew where that spike pit was, I got back to where I was without the background getting all glitchy.

Moving on, the checkpoint near the EHZ boss was replaced with rings this time, which i found weird but not too much. The boss on other hand...

The end boss for Emerald Hill Zone could only be described as laughable. It was just Mecha Sonic with Coconut's head shoved on top of it. The only thing it could even do was fly above the ground and it died in one hit. There's no transition for moving from this zone to the next zone but you'll learn all about Winter World Zone in the next entry.