Big Icedus

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

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Big Icedus

Big Icedus
Game: Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Level: IceCap Zone (mini-boss)
Hits to defeat: 6

The Big Icedus (ビッグアイスダス) is the fifth mini-boss of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, fought at the end of IceCap Zone Act 1. It is a small machine that looks a little like a gray snowman that summons eight ice balls to swirl around it.

Strategy

At the beginning of the fight, the Big Icedus is, alas, out of hitting range (even when using the Insta-Shield) unless Sonic has a Lightning or Water Shield, or Tails is present.

After it surrounds itself with ice balls, it swoops across the screen twice; if the player stays in either corner, they'll be safe. The player should then stand below it and wait for it to release its ice balls, then jump and hit it, preferably twice, before it moves up out of hitting range. Then comes the tricky part; five of its ice balls fall from the sky once, and the player must slip in between them to avoid getting hit. They fall quickly and without warning so they must react quickly. After this, it repeats the pattern from the beginning, sometimes swooping across the screen once instead of twice. The player should keep hitting it after it releases its ice balls. Six hits does it in.

Aside from the variations to the attack pattern, this boss is very reminiscent of Flying Eggman from Sonic 2 in that it protects itself with a barrier made of several "spheres" (in this case: its ice balls) while trying to ram into the player.

Oversights

Sonic and/or Tails can get into Knuckles' boss arena by using the glitch with the vertical scrolling to go beyond one of the walls which can be destroyed only by Knuckles. Once the mini-boss is defeated, the background in the beginning of Act 2 will be using a weird palette (which will get eventually fixed by itself at a later point in the level). This is due to the sunrise palette change being applied to the cave background when it shouldn't.

• 

  Why hello there

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  Wow, there is a lot of light in this cave

It should be noted that the mini-boss appears only in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, as its object hadn't been placed yet in plain Sonic the Hedgehog 3; because of this, and since the boss arena is actually part of the Act 2 layout, Sonic and/or Tails can effectively use Knuckles' path to skip the mini-boss fight altogether.