Quote Originally Posted by Sephex View Post
On phone so this will be a rough reply.

The Chaos Emerald stages work like this: Collect rings to increase your time. Collect blue spheres to gradually increase speed level. The track is a loop like a race car track. So collect both while avoiding obstacles and you'll eventually catch up to the UFO. When you get close enough you'll automatically collect it.
I don't remember seeing rings, I don't think. Just blue spheres. I'll need to replay.

There is a point to the blue sphere mini games. Get all the rings and clear the stages to unlock stuff.
Ah. Okay. I did like, seven of them, and was then like "what is the point of these". Glad that there is something to them, but I think they could convey that better.

That boss may seem annoying at first, but all you have to do is hit one of the fat, blue missiles. You can even roll into it. Just avoid the red missiles. Depending on the arc, your jump does get affected, but you can easily time it so that you can jump when the surface is flat, so your jumps aren't messed with. In between most segments you can get more rings, so that makes the boss easy to deal with too. I like the boss because it uses speed as a theme which is usually reserved for end game stuff or special bosses.
Avoiding the red missiles is the hard part. You can only jump over them at full speed. But the problem is, when you land, your speed is reduced. Since he always fires two with a blue missile, avoiding the first one is usually pretty easy, but the second is much more difficult. You don't have enough time to build speed back up before you have to jump again, and you'll frequently miss. It involves learning a lot about how your momentum changes when landing from jumps, information that (thus far) hasn't been used or even useful anywhere else in the game, so it was a very annoying boss fight. Especially since if you get hit once, your rings fly off stage before you can recover them, and there is only one set of bonus rings (between phases one and two) in the whole fight.