Submission #3378: Aglar's Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog "no zips" in 17:36.58

This is a run of Sonic the Hedgehog where no zipping mechanism is abused. It's by no means a glitchless run, mainly because defining what is a glitch and what is not a glitch isn't really trivial. By choosing to not use zipping it means (as defined by me) that what's not allowed to do is gaining a big speed boost (16-32 pixels per frame) from being inside terrains. Something which might seem similar to zipping and is allowed is terrain-ejection and sprite-ejection where the character doesn't gain any speed but instead gets directly shifted to a certain position.

By setting up a goal like this it pretty much forces you to actually play the game like the programmers intended, and you'll never see the screen scroll through the levels without Sonic on it (except when he's above the screen), which more and more have been the case with the Sonic games for Genesis. In this game zips have been found in 13 out of 19 levels (that sometimes basically skip entire levels) meaning that a run without zips looks very different as a whole, which was also a big reason why I made this run.

Normally improvements to Sonic games have been the result of slighty better precision added to the run but mainly by finding more places to zip through thus taking away more and more normal gameplay from the run. When reading through submission threads for many of these improvements it's clear that there's interest for a so called "glitchless" run without anyone really specifying what they mean by that. It might seem like a simple thing to do but if you spend some time with the game learning the physics and everything that comes with it, it'll be clear that it's not so simple - especially when you also need to consider everyone's own opinion of what a glitch is, what a zip is and what an ejection is. As I don't consider ejection a glitch (it's the result of normal collision detection) and pretty much all other things that could be interpreted as glitches besides zipping isn't really noticable by the eye and unintendedly happen frequently when playing the game unassisted. I thus went for only disallowing zipping.

Most criticism has been pointed towards the ejections that skips parts of the levels in the acts SBZ2 and SBZ3. Believe me, I'd be very glad myself if those maneuvers weren't possible as I always wanted to take the intended route. But if I'd disallowed those then the question would be why I didn't disallow other slighty less obvious ejections as well. And then if I'd ban those too, I'd be wondering whether I'd give up even less obvious ejections, and so on until I'd gotten to the kind of ejection that occurs when normally landing on ground which is impossible to not abuse. So rather than setting an arbitrary standard for how "big" the ejection can be in order to stay in the run I simply allowed them all. Of course, I probably just could've skipped using the ejections in SBZ2 and SBZ3 and Final Zone and not mentioning the ejections in the submission text at all, and almost nobody would've noticed the other ejections in the run even if they're there, if I'd just wanted to have this run published as easy as possible, lying is an easy way to get love from people. But then I'd end up with a run that doesn't follow my goals which not how I make my TASes.

Took use of lots of down-slopes to speed up the jumps, attacked enemies to minimize air drag(1) and jumped an extra time in the loop.

Executed the ejection process better and again minimizing air drag.

Faster boss fight

I got under the first frame rule based obstacle one frame rule earlier, but then I had to wait to get it right with the platform that goes in and out of the wall.

Just better execution for every situation

Only optimizations

Took the speed shoes in a faster way and using a different route in the middle part of the act.

I gained 3 frames before the second spike ball in the tunnel which just allowed me to pass under it for a big improvement.

Optimizations and a new boss strategy

Optimizations and strategy changes

Took the invincibility to not have to stop and wait for obstacles under the water.

Just lots of optimizations and strategy changes

Gained more speed pretty much everywhere.

Gained much more speed and tackled the end better.

Major shortcut and route change together with a new boss strategy

Took the only route that doesn't force you to wait for the blocks that go in and out of the wall.

Used the, by now, famous trick to skip down a level plus a much more optimized last room.

Optimizations and the other famous trick.

Pausing in the beginning will increase the counter for when the boss fight will start, while not costing any ingame time.

(1) Air drag occurs when your jumping velocity is between -1024 and 0, and takes away 1/32th of your speed per frame.

marzojr for all the help during the making of this run. And thanks to all the previous TASers and contributors to this game, I won't mention any names since I'll probably miss out quite a few, but you know who you are.

Enjoy!

feos: HD Encode.

adelikat: Judging.

adelikat: Accepting for publication as a new category for this game. See this post for my comments.

OmnipotentEntity: Encoding underway.