Is it possible to get a Perfect Score on this Chaos Emerald Bonus Stage?

Question

In the Chaos Emerald Bonus Stages, you can get a 'Perfect' score by obtaining all the rings in the level.

Some rings only appear after you've gone around the edges of a square/rectangle shape, leaving blue spheres in the middle. This turns the entire rectangle into rings.

Over the years I've managed to work out how to get a Perfect score on every level but one - the Red and White checkered level, shown below:

This level has a series of 4 rectangles in a kind of flower-petal arrangement (not sure how else to describe it), where each rectangle shares two of it's corners with two other rectangles. Here is a map of the level, courtesy of Sonic Retro

As you can see, if I were to complete one rectangle, I'd be left with a rectangle missing a corner sphere.

Completing as many rectangles as possible, I'm still eventually left with two or more extra blue spheres - which I'm guessing should've turned into rings, as there's nothing else in the level that I've could've missed that will.

So in summary, is it possible to get a perfect in this level? What am I missing?

Answer 1

The trick here is that you don't have to make a rectangle, you just have to enclose blue sphere's to make rings. So, if you go around the edge of the 'flower' pattern they'll all turn into rings.

See this awesome picture below (original source, SonicRetro):

On this level I typically jump over the last blue sphere on the route, then complete this sequence, then go back and get the last one. If you don't leave a blue sphere then when you complete the sequence they'll all turn to rings, but you won't have a chance to get them.