Sonic Colors: Ultimate — How to Get Super Sonic
By
Stefan Miguel Lopez
Like most Sonic games, Sonic Colors: Ultimate gives players Super Sonic once they collect the seven chaos emeralds, but finding them can be tricky.
Sonic Colors: Ultimate has recently dropped, and despite a few unfortunate glitches on Sonic Colors: Ultimate‘s Switch version, It still provides a faithful re-creation of the Nintendo Wii classic. The game features blazing speed, precise platforming, and plenty of hidden collectibles.
Like most Sonic games, Sonic Colors: Ultimate lets players transform into Super Sonic, giving them invincibility and unlimited boost in exchange for rings. Like most other Sonic games, it requires that the player collect the 7 Chaos Emeralds.
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But that’s where the similarities end. Sonic Colors: Ultimate‘s Chaos Emeralds aren’t directly hidden in the stages. Finding them is a bit more involved.
Sonic Colors: Ultimate’s Red Star Rings
Instead of hunting for hidden emeralds, players will be hunting for red star rings. Almost every level has 5 of them, for a total of 180. The exception is the final level, which has none.
Players will most likely speed past these on their first go-around. They tend not to be on the main path, and many of Sonic Colors‘ hiding places require the player to have a specific wisp. The player will likely not have access to the right wisp their first time through the level, so it’s best to save this for repeat playthroughs.
The player won’t immediately get Super Sonic after getting 180 red star rings, however. Collecting those just unlocks the next step.
Sonic Colors: Ultimate’s Game Land
Players can find Eggman’s Game Land in the top right of the world map. It looks like a floating Metal Sonic head.
This is where they can play Sonic Simulator, a series of retro-styled bonus levels they can tackle in single player or multiplayer.
There are 21 levels split into 7 sets of 3. Each one corresponds to one of the main game’s stages, and players unlock them by collecting all the red special rings in a level. Once the player beats a level set, they get one of the Chaos Emeralds. Once they have all seven, then they can transform into Super Sonic at will.
Is Super Sonic Worth It?
Playing as Super Sonic does make the player feel powerful, but most probably won’t bother unlocking him. This is basically a completionist reward, only available for players who have already know the game inside and out.
That being said, it might be useful for Sonic Colors: Ultimate speedrunners, who want to trim down individual level times. Super Sonic mode also provides an optional challenge, where players try to collect rings and stay in that mode for as long as possible.
Sonic Colors: Ultimate is available now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
MORE: Sonic Colors: Ultimate’s Major Improvements Explained
How to Unlock Super Sonic in Sonic Colors: Ultimate
By
Sky Flores
Sonic Colors: Ultimate has Super Sonic as an unlockable character. To achieve this, players will need to put in a lot of time and effort.
Super Sonic makes his grand return in Sonic Colors: Ultimate. This title originally released back on the Nintendo Wii is being remastered for an entirely new generation of consoles. Not only are the visuals improved due to new hardware, but new game modes have also been added such as the Rival Rush mode, where players will face off against Metal Sonic in a 1-on-1 race. Super Sonic himself has been a staple in the Sonic The Hedgehog series for years, and is the best version of Sonic available.
Harnessing the power of the Chaos Emeralds allows Sonic to run at even faster speeds and dash through enemies without taking damage.
Although, in Sonic Colors: Ultimate, unlocking this character is different than other entries. In the past, players needed to either wait until they defeated the final boss or collect the Chaos Emeralds through the game’s special stages. Super Sonic is amongst one of the most difficult unlockables in the game due to how time-consuming it can be.
Related: Sonic Event In Phantasy Star Online 2 Charging $100 For Cosmetics
In order to unlock Super Sonic, players will need to complete every Game Land stage in Sonic Color: Ultimate. Game Land is an additional area in the game where players can participate in the «Eggman’s Sonic Simulator» game. Although, each stage in Game Land needs to be unlocked first.
In order to unlock Game Land stages in Sonic Colors: Ultimate, players will need to collect every Red Ring inside of the main stages.
Each level within each world has its own set of Red Ring collectibles to find. If players grab them all within a single world, this will unlock access to its corresponding stage in Game Land. Players will then need to complete the Game Land stage to grab a Chaos Emerald. With over 6 main worlds to complete, each with a handful of stages within them, it’s a bit of a grind to grab every Red Ring available.
Attempting to grab every Red Ring in the game should really only be done after completing Sonic Colors: Ultimate‘s story. At this point, players will have access to every Wisp ability, and a handful of Red Rings will require specific Wisps to unlock. Regardless of the player’s completion, grabbing every Red Ring itself is a challenge all on its own due to how well hidden they are within each stage. Once completed, players will then be able to play older stages with Super Sonic from the very beginning and experience his true raw power.
More: Sonic Colors: Ultimate Physical Release Has Been Delayed
Sonic Colors: Ultimate is available on September 7th, 2021 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, and PC.
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About The Author
Sky Flores is a writer and game player based out of New York City. His hobbies consist of creating content on YouTube and streaming video games on Twitch. His online alias is @SkywardWing.
What is white noise and why is it not used in sound masking systems? Often these complexes are confused with white or pink noise generators, which can be found in private homes and hotels. Acoustic engineers at Soft dB make the difference between the two as simple as possible.
You must have heard the term «white noise». This phrase is often used in a figurative sense when they want to talk about the flow of useless information that hides the true essence of what is happening.
You may also have read that white noise helps you fall asleep faster or concentrate better, because it hides loud sounds in the room — «masks» them. In articles devoted to acoustics, the concept of «white noise» often coexists with the terms «pink noise» and «sound masking». Many consider them equivalent and refer to sound masking systems as white/pink/red noise generators. This is a big mistake, the price of which is the wrong choice of equipment to eliminate unwanted noise in the office. Why? We will try to explain the difference between different noises as simply as possible. nine0005
What is «white noise» and why is it «white»?
Let’s start with white noise. Why is it called «white»? Can sound have color? Of course not. It’s a matter of analogy. Any student knows that white light is a combination of all the colors of the spectrum. By analogy with light, white noise is a “mixture” of sounds reproduced simultaneously at all frequencies that our ear perceives. Of course, an engineer would say otherwise: white noise is noise whose spectral components are evenly distributed over the entire range of frequencies used, i.
e. the power spectral density of which is the same or slightly different in any considered range. But we agreed to explain the topic as simply as possible, so for simplicity, let’s say that an example of white noise in nature is the characteristic sound of a waterfall. nine0005
White noise is similar to the sound of a TV that is not tuned to receive TV channels.
Pink and red noise is also a combination of sounds with certain characteristics. An example of pink noise is the sound of a flying helicopter. And in sound masking systems (noise curtains), specially “designed” noises are used. They are used to even out the acoustic background in offices and increase the confidentiality of conversations — to make unintelligible words spoken at a distance from an involuntary listener and not intended for his ears.
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All “colored” noises are called broadband: their energy is distributed over the entire audio frequency range. In other words, these are continuous chaotic noises that sound simultaneously at low, medium and high frequencies. The color of noise is determined by the proportions in which the noise energy is distributed over its frequency range. Sounds that we meet in life are similar to colored noise: the sound of a rainstorm, a waterfall or wind, the hum of a ventilation system, or the noise of a large stadium. White noise is most similar to the sound that a TV makes when it is not tuned to receive a TV signal, and we see “snow” on its screen. nine0005
What is the difference between broadband noise
White noise, pink noise, and the masking sound of a soundmasking system (noise curtain, sound masking system) are broadband. But, by and large, this is the only thing that unites these noises. Moreover, if pink noise in some sense can be considered a derivative of white noise, then the sound of the soundmasking system (sometimes called “masker”) is not.
It is also incorrect to consider it a combination of white and pink noise. As we have already said, this is a specially “designed” noise. Moreover, it was created with the sole purpose of effectively masking unwanted noises (the sound of extraneous conversations, loud and harsh sounds in a quiet room) that distract office workers from work. nine0005
Among the strongest distracting noises, especially in noisy open-plan rooms (“open space”), are primarily the conversations of employees that are conducted at a distance from involuntary listeners — colleagues sitting at neighboring tables. A person is involuntarily distracted by fragments of phrases uttered by colleagues, and does this unconsciously. Depending on the task the worker is performing, it takes him one to ten minutes to refocus.
A noisy office is not the best place to work. But a too quiet office is also bad: in complete silence, employees can even be distracted by the sound of a pencil falling on the floor. The task of the sound masking system is to even out the acoustic background in the room, as well as to make extraneous conversations unintelligible.
And she does this with the help of noise specially calculated by engineers.
Fight noise with other noise? It seemed like a strange idea. But that’s how a good sound masking system works. nine0005
Why is a specially calculated masker noise needed? Isn’t white or pink noise enough to mask unwanted noise? Indeed, to some extent, harsh sounds can be leveled with the help of any broadband noise. This is why white noise is believed to help you fall asleep faster. But unlike other broadband noises, the noise screen masker is designed to eliminate common office noises, especially in open space offices. The difference will be especially obvious if, for the sake of experiment, a household white noise generator is installed in the office. Then you will immediately understand that white noise in the office is absolutely useless. nine0005
How white noise differs from pink noise
If you ask an acoustic engineer to explain the difference between white noise and pink noise, his story will be short but obscure: white noise has about the same power spectral density at all frequencies, and pink noise has about the same power spectral density in all octave frequency bands.
If we try to explain it in a simpler way, then both white and pink noise include sounds at the same time of all frequencies distinguishable by the human ear, i.e. 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. But the energy of these sounds is distributed over frequencies in completely different ways. nine0005
Pink noise is like rain, isn’t it?
Spectrum of white noise
The main cause of confusion when comparing white and pink noise is their spectra. The confusion is mainly due to the fact that the graphical representation of these noises is completely different depending on the type of spectrum analyzer used.
For example, a white noise spectrogram presented in narrow bands looks like the figure below. See how even the spectrum is? It is such that the noise energy in all frequency bands (in the graph, the frequencies increase from left to right along the X axis) is distributed approximately evenly.
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White noise spectrum in narrow bands
1. Spectrum of white noise shown in the graph in narrow frequency bands. The noise energy is distributed approximately equally in all bands. It looks like a wall, doesn’t it? Therefore, sometimes white noise is compared to an impenetrable wall.
And now look how the same spectrum of white noise looks not in narrow, but in one-third octave frequency bands (Fig. 2). A completely different picture compared to Figure 1. The spectrogram is no longer flat: the energy increases with increasing frequency. nine0005
White noise spectrum in one-third octave bands
2 White noise. Its energy is evenly distributed over all frequencies, but the farther to the right along the frequency axis we move, the higher frequencies are grouped into octave bands, and the more intense the noise.
If we analyze white noise in one-third octave bands, then the higher the frequencies, the more powerful the noise.
But we have already said that at each individual frequency (100 Hz, 200 Hz, 1000 Hz, 5000 Hz, etc.) the noise energy should be approximately the same. Why are we seeing it rise? Indeed, white noise components have the same energy at every single frequency, but not in every octave band. And to understand why this happens, let’s look at what octaves are. nine0005
What are octaves?
Simply put, octaves are groups of frequencies that help quantify how we hear different frequencies. Each octave represents the total energy level of the noise in a particular frequency range. An important fact: the higher the frequencies, the wider their range is collected in octave bands. This is explained by the fact that human hearing more easily picks up the difference between individual low frequencies, but as frequencies increase, we are less and less able to recognize each frequency separately, even if they are spaced far enough apart. nine0005
Therefore, the octave bands are narrower in the low-frequency ranges than in the high-frequency ones.
The table below lists the octave bands and their frequencies. The numbers speak for themselves: many more frequencies are combined in the 8000 Hz octave band than in the 63 Hz octave band.
Octave bands and their frequencies
|
OCTAVE BAND CENTER FREQUENCY (Hz) |
LOW FREQUENCY |
HIGH FREQUENCY |
OCTAVE BAND (NUMBER OF FREQUENCIES) |
|
63 |
44 |
88 |
44 |
|
125 |
177 |
89 |
|
|
250 |
177 |
355 |
178 |
|
500 |
nine0002 355 |
710 |
355 |
|
1000 |
710 |
1420 |
710 |
|
2000 |
1420 |
2840 |
1420 |
|
4000 |
2840 |
5680 |
2840 |
|
8000 |
5680 nine0099 |
11360 |
5680 |
Mathematically speaking, an octave is an interval in which the ratio of sound frequencies is one to two.
For example, as shown in the table above, there is one octave band between 88 Hz and 177 Hz, namely the 125 Hz band. Between the frequencies of 177 Hz and 355 Hz there is an octave band of 250 Hz. This band contains 178 individual frequencies, while the 125 Hz band contains only 89. Those. the 250 Hz octave band is wider than the 125 Hz band.
Octaves — logarithmic measure of frequencies
Let’s go back to fig. 2. Why are the octave bands indicated on it as having the same width, although we explained above that this is not the case? In reality, the width of the bands is different, but for simplicity they are often depicted on the spectrogram as equal in width, as in Fig. 2. We call this format «octave band display in logarithmic scale».
In this case, what are «third octave bands»? This is one strip under consideration, divided into three equal parts. With this division, the acoustic engineer can more accurately analyze the noise components. nine0005
The higher the frequency, the louder the noise is perceived by the ear.
Another interesting fact is that white noise is perceived by the ear as sharper than one would expect from a graph of a relatively flat frequency spectrum. The reason is that the human hearing system perceives sound on a logarithmic scale—i.e. octaves, not on a linear scale (i.e. narrow bands). In other words, it seems to us that high-frequency sounds are louder than low-frequency sounds of the same power. Therefore, from a perceptual point of view, white noise sounds louder and has hissing notes in the high-frequency octave bands. More specifically, the power of white noise increases by 3 dB for every octave up the frequency range. nine0005
How to create pink noise
What happens if you take the spectrum of white noise, displayed on a logarithmic scale (see Fig. 2), and flatten the rising power curve? You will get octave bands, the noise power of which will be the same. Remember the definition of pink noise? This is noise whose components have the same spectral power in each octave.
In other words, we will turn the white noise into pink.
1/3 octave pink noise
Fig. 3. To put it very simply, pink noise is white noise with high frequencies cut off. That is why it is perceived as softer and more pleasant than white noise. Indeed, the noise of a TV not receiving a TV signal (white noise) is less pleasant to most people than the soft noise of a light rain (pink noise).
Now remember that in fig. 1 the white noise spectrum looked flat on a linear scale. Based on the knowledge gained about pink noise and how it differs in power distribution, let’s answer the question of what its spectrum looks like in narrow frequency bands, and not in one-third octaves. nine0005
If the spectral power of white noise is uniform at all frequencies, and its spectrum in octave bands shows an increase in power (ascending straight line on the graph), then the power of pink noise is evenly distributed over octaves. This means that the power curve will decrease on a narrow-band spectrogram, (see Fig.
4)
Pink noise spectrum in narrow frequency bands as the frequency increases. nine0004
White Noise Versus Noise Curtain Sound Masker
At Soft dB, we develop sound masking systems that increase the privacy of office conversations and help employees focus without being distracted by background noise. We are often asked: “You sell a white (or pink) noise generator, right?”. Our answer is no. It is enough just to look at the masking sound spectrogram of the noise curtain in one-third octave bands (on a logarithmic scale), and compare this graph with the spectrogram of white noise. You will immediately understand that they are different. nine0005
If you look at the spectrogram, you can see that the sound of the noise screen is the exact opposite of white noise. As the frequency increases, the power of white noise increases by 3 dB per octave, while the masking sound of the noise curtain, on the contrary, loses 3 dB per octave in power.
One-third octave noise masking noise spectrum
Unlike white noise, the typical sound of a masker loses power as the frequency increases.
Less power at high frequencies makes the sound masking system sound much more pleasing to the ear. nine0004
Which sound masking system is best
The goal of any manufacturer of sound masking systems is to equalize the acoustic background in the office, increase the privacy of conversations and eliminate the distraction of extraneous conversations of employees. By and large, all vendors are fighting for a single «magic» parameter: the masking noise spectrum. And everyone claims that in this parameter they are the best on the market. We Soft dB engineers are no exception.
But the operating settings of the noise curtain are not performed by the manufacturer, but by the system integrator or equipment installer who installs the noise curtain at the end customer. And this is where not only the spectrum comes into play, but also the flexibility of system settings for the needs of a particular client. nine0005
SoftdB Sound Masking System
As acoustic engineers, we confirm that the noise spectrum of the SoftdB Sound Masking System more accurately than competing systems matches the ideal spectrogram calculated by the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).
But one more indisputable advantage of our system is that it adapts the spectrum in real time to the constantly changing noise environment in the office and even in each of its zones separately. And it does it very accurately. nine0005
The sound of the Soft dB noise curtain does not disturb employees, it is soft, pleasant and barely audible. And most importantly, it effectively masks conversations that are conducted at a distance from the involuntary listener. And all this thanks to the fine tuning of the masking sound spectrum in real time, taking into account the constantly changing noise environment. It took us years of research and field testing to achieve maximum efficiency. Their result is several patents and a sound masking system that is unique in its effectiveness. nine0005
The noise curtain is a whole system, not just one machine
With a good sound masking system, employees will immediately notice that the office has become quieter and calmer. Moreover, unlike white and pink noise generators, the sound of the masker is almost inaudible, and it is difficult to understand where it comes from.
This is partly because the noise curtain is a whole set of equipment, and not a single white noise generator, standing, for example, at the bedside table in a hotel. nine0005
White noise generator not useful in offices
The sound masking system includes many specialized speakers of different shapes and sizes for installation in small groups that cover certain areas of the office. It doesn’t matter how many such zones are allocated: the management of individual groups of speakers (most of which are hidden behind a false ceiling, and some are open) is performed through a single user interface. And it’s very convenient. Imagine how much time you would spend moving around the office and tweaking the settings for each speaker. Therefore, one of the main advantages of Soft dB sound masking is the network control of the entire system. nine0005