No, you don't quite understand the issue. The game didn't save at Ice Cap Zone, then I got to Mushroom Hill Zone and it never updated for Launch Base or Mushroom Hill; The game never saved to begin with. The only save I do have is a save state I manually took at the beginning of Ice Cap Zone, and if I open the game's menu, all the available files claim a New Game.

Let me tell you, I tried buying this game on Steam through the Sega Master Drive and Genesis collection, but it had this horrendous lag to it. I could play the game alright, but it had about a quarter of a second lag between running, stopping, and jumping. The Blue Spheres minigame was completely broken, unable to corner properly and pretty much forcing me into reds. What was really strange is that even on my Gamecube version from Sonic Genesis Collections, the lag was present on my wireless controller, even though I don't remember it being there before. Speaking of controllers, the package did not allow controller support, so I couldn't use my Madcatz controller without the aid of a third party support system.

Fortunately, I found this site, and I must say, this copy works like a charm. I still kind of feel like there is the slightest lag in controller input on Blue Spheres, but it's hardly game breaking, especially with the support of save states. Why is it that I can't buy a good copy of the game for my machine, but I can stream the game off a website no problem?

The only complaint I do have is that I got to Mushroom Hill Zone, the opening level of Sonic and Knuckles, and I turned off the game. I thought the game autosaved like it did on my original copy on the Genesis, but I came back to find no file, though my save state at the beginning of Ice Cap Zone was still present. Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong?

Well, there are a lot of topics to go through, and the site receives a lot of traffic, so if the servers had to support over a hundred forum searches at any given second, that would probably cause some heavy slowdown and crashes... Still, that makes things rather inconvenient. Nobody likes to answer a question more than once, and I may end up looking like a twit due to technical difficulties.

Oh well, people will get over it.

Sorry to drive the topic off course, but I kind of wish Sega kept Shadow evil for a few games. Would have been interesting to see how Sonic would have reacted to having a real black hearted counterpart running around, as well as the usual threat from Dr. Eggman.

Anyway, back on topic... That's a difficult question, since I was all about Sonic in my childhood. I'd have to say it remains the blue rodent himself, Sonic.

I've been playing a few games on the site for a few days now, and I am having a slight problem with one of them. Before I bother to mention it, I want to do a search and see if it's been mentioned before, but unlike most forums I visit, there doesn't seem to be a search function in clear sight. Am I missing something? The interface is a little busy, and is a little difficult to find anything for the first time at first glance.