Big Icedus

Big Icedus (ビッグアイスダス), the boss at the end of Icecap Zone Act 1, is a small machine that looks a little like a gray snowman who summons eight snowballs to swirl around him. At the beginning he is, alas, out of hitting range (even when using W Kaiten Attack) unless you have a lightning or water shield.

After he surrounds himself with snowballs, he swoops across the screen twice; stay in either corner and you'll be safe. Then stand below him and wait for him to release his snowballs. Then jump and hit him, preferably twice, before he moves up out of hitting range. Then comes the tricky part; five of his snowballs fall from the sky once, and you must slip in between them to avoid getting hit. They fall quickly and without warning so you must react quickly. After this he repeats the pattern, sometimes swooping across the screen once instead of twice. Keep hitting him after he releases his snowballs. Six hits does him in.

Aside from the variations to the attack pattern, this boss is very reminiscent of the Metropolis Zone boss from Sonic 2 in that it protects itself with a barrier made of several "spheres" (in this case: it's snowballs) while trying to ram into the player.

Trivia

Sonic and/or Tails can get into Knuckles' boss arena by using the glitch with the vertical scrolling to go beyond one of those walls which can be destroyed only by Knuckles. Once the miniboss is defeated, 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).

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  Why hello there

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  Wow, there is a lot of light in this cave

It should be noted that the miniboss appears only in Sonic 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 miniboss fight altogether.Template:Sonic3&KOmni