One thing's for sure… you do exist

If you've picked anything up from my blogging style is that I like to first explain a topic in relative detail, and then follow it up with a practical example that illustrates what I'm talking about. Case in point, Icecap Zone 1:

When you break through one of these large walls as Knuckles, more often than not you'll come to a complete stop, and Knuckles will switch over to his pushing animation. I say "more often than not", because if your position happens to line up so that you're right next to the wall but not actually touching it, the wall will break before it kills your speed.

All of this happens because the breaking wall object in this stage does none of the things I mentioned before. This was fine in standalone Sonic 3, since the only thing that could break those walls was a sliding ice block.

Actually, here's a fun exercise: if you use debug mode to place one of those sliding blocks and then push it towards the walls guarding Knuckles' routes, you'll find that they'll break just fine. There's actually only one kind of breakable wall in this stage, and they prevent you from breaking into Knuckles' routes by simply not placing any ice blocks nearby.