I think everyone's already familiar with Sonic 2, or if they aren't, they should be. I hadn't intended to work on this since Quietust was working on a redo, but I suppose you can blame AngerFist for this submission. It didn't take as much effort as some of the other runs I've done thanks to the existing run (and what little was said about the redo). Going by in-level time units, this turned out to be exactly 2 minutes faster than Quietust's v1. I used Sonic + Tails and (unlike the first run) controlled both of them directly, although a good deal of the the improvement did not involve using 2 characters. The largest improvements came from using new shortcuts and glitches, a couple of them to which I can't claim credit (Chemical Plant 2 and Hill Top 1), with a lesser amount of improvement from playing with more precision.
LevelTimeUnits Improved
Emerald Hill 10:171
Emerald Hill 20:351
Chemical Plant 10:170
Chemical Plant 20:3318
Aquatic Ruin 10:172
Aquatic Ruin 20:362
Casino Night 10:241
Casino Night 20:496
Hill Top 10:2811
Hill Top 20:444
Mystic Cave 10:253
Mystic Cave 20:352
Oil Ocean 10:233
Oil Ocean 20:3117
Metropolis 10:4410
Metropolis 20:437
Metropolis 31:0822
Sky Chase2:060
Wing Fortress1:348
Death Egg0:402
Total13:49120 seconds
Sky Chase is a fixed-length autoscroller, so I got 100% of the rings and killed 100% of the enemies to try to keep it entertaining. Everything else is faster than the previous run, although for Chemical Plant 1 it isn't by enough frames to save any full time units on that level.
Tails is really smaller than Sonic, thus he interacts with the levels differently and I couldn't simply copy all of Sonic's controls to make Tails keep up. Sometimes that means it is impossible for Tails to keep up, as he can't get going as fast on some types of curves. And Tails can't get items, so can't possibly keep up with Sonic when he has Sprint Shoes. But sometimes Tails lags behind simply because he wouldn't be useful and it's more of a stylistic choice to have Sonic always be the faster one.
I confirmed that lag frames do not count toward the in-level timer, so I did nothing to avoid them, as my goal was to minimize in-level time (even the part of it that isn't displayed). Almost anything different to avoid the lag would have been much slower, anyway.
General movie making: Some of the places where I controlled Sonic and Tails at the same time were just getting too tedious to record (especially Mystic Cave 1), so I modified Gens to let me record the Sonic and Tails parts individually, and merge them. Also, as I've gotten used to having a Sonic speedometer available in other runs (for other emulators), I added that too.
Chemical Plant 2: The door for the huge shortcut opens because Tails is lagging behind just enough for him to open the door exactly as Sonic is about to hit it.
Casino Night 1: I was nearly able to improve the end by at least another full time unit by jumping over the last flipper, but it wasn't possible to get going quite fast enough to make it across that gap.
Casino Night 2: Some collision-related glitches here saved a decent amount of time (going through flippers and skipping a stopper).
Hill Top 1: Getting Sonic to zip that far was really hard, I don't know how Quietust found it so quickly. After hundreds of failures I wrote a simple random input generator and it happened to find something that worked, eventually.
Hill Top 2: Those platform jumps are difficult and would not have worked if I had lost any frames anywhere else earlier in the level.
Oil Ocean 1&2: I was pleasantly surprised at how nicely these worked out. Oil is better than solid ground in some ways...
Wing Fortress: I duck at the optimal time at the end to make the barrier sprite disappear so I can dash through it before the camera goes back, ending the level without waiting for it to fade away. Those sliders let you perform or store spindashes while on them. I found a related bug that lets Sonic hover across almost anything in the level (including over or under or into the boss fight), but it disables spindashes and only works at a location most of the way into the level, and so couldn't save any time.
Metropolis 1: Sometimes it's faster to let Tails fly to catch up with Sonic than it is to slow down Sonic enough to keep Tails onscreen, especially after double-jump slope speedups which Tails is too small to do.
Metropolis 2: The trick at the start is the same concept as the Hill Top 1 trick. It saved about 2 seconds.
Metropolis 3: Finally, a conveniently-located crusher. I exploit the way that Sonic can't usually be crushed right after he starts jumping. Normally, doing this trick drops you into the spinning tube/cage, which is slow but still worth the large shortcut, but I found a way to zip past that before falling.
Death Egg: The back-and-forth dash between the doors before Eggman actually saves time. The third hit against Eggman is almost impossible to replicate. The running through the tunnel after the movie ends is faster than normal because of hitting the ceiling in a spindash jump at the last moment that Sonic has control.
  • No death
  • Aims for fastest (primarily in-level) time
  • Ignores delays caused by bonus effects
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Abuses programming errors in the game
  • One player controls two characters
  • Emulator used: Gens Movie Test 9h (works with 9f, etc.)

Truncated: Well, no sense in waiting here, this is accepted for being a first-class movie.


Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1310)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
Nibelung wrote:
But just one question: Why you don't made the Aquatic Ruin's boss glitch? (Make sonic stop in air) It's very easy to do. You just need to stay in one of the pillars, and make Tails do the final hit. Quietust don't do this because he's not controling Tails, but you was. :)
Oh, that's a funny glitch. Acts like a variation of the one I found in Wing Fortress, but not as permanent. Well, I never encountered that one, and had not much reason to hunt for glitches there where it clearly doesn't save time. I did find a way to go through the pillars in the boss fight to outside of the screen, but all that did was make Sonic die.
Former player
Joined: 4/13/2006
Posts: 150
Location: Caratinga - MG - Brazil
I Agree. I just asked because Tails give the 7th hit on the boss. I really think that you'll do this glitch.
Not more working on: DKC3 105% < Needs modified Nitsuja Snes9x+9, with reset recording.
Joined: 7/29/2005
Posts: 31
Ahh, gotta love this movie. Super fast bouncing around. I never knew about that glitch in Oil Ocean where you could skip to boss battle at the end of oil sea. Gotta try that one soon. Very nice job.
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1310)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
chewan wrote:
Super fast bouncing around.
I never thought that was a particularly accurate description, yet so many of the Sonic movies get it.
chewan wrote:
I never knew about that glitch in Oil Ocean where you could skip to boss battle at the end of oil sea. Gotta try that one soon.
It's hard to do, even assuming you can get there alive going under the oil so many times in a row. But it works because the game suddenly changes the oil's level to be far above you, yet only determines that Sonic should die based on how far offscreen he is instead of how far under the oil he is. Since you can jump repeatedly in oil and the game doesn't kill you immediately because the camera takes time to move up, you can jump all the way up to the boss fight.
Editor, Experienced player (734)
Joined: 6/13/2006
Posts: 3300
Location: Massachussetts, USA
I agree that you should do S+K3, Sprint God makes that game look redicolous but if there's anyone that can obsolete that it's you
Homepage ☣ Retired
Editor, Expert player (2073)
Joined: 6/15/2005
Posts: 3282
Certainly 160K rerecords is a lot but I believe SprintGod did most of the movie at 6% speed (judging from the submission text of the movie it obsoleted). If anyone could somehow find a way to glitch Sonic into Knuckles' routes, that would be cool.
Active player (304)
Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
There's a couple of instances where you can. Marble Garden 2 is of course well known, but lesser known is that you can do the reverse (Knuckles into Sonic's route). Actually, a Knuckles TAS would be pretty fun to watch. I did a bit of a test run on Launch Base 2 a while ago if anyone wants to see it.
Emulator Coder, Skilled player (1310)
Joined: 12/21/2004
Posts: 2687
mike89 wrote:
Actually, a Knuckles TAS would be pretty fun to watch.
You mean like this one? You might want to offer your feedback on it.
FractalFusion wrote:
Certainly 160K rerecords is a lot but I believe SprintGod did most of the movie at 6% speed (judging from the submission text of the movie it obsoleted).
He must have been using frame advance for most if not all of his second version, unless he was somehow more efficient at using 6% speed to approximate frame advance than he was at using frame advance.
I wrote:
That run is at a different level than the one this was improving, and would be much more of a chore to improve.
On second thought, that S3&K run can probably be improved by several minutes, especially if Tails comes along. That game has more glitches than SprintGod found...
Banned User
Joined: 12/23/2004
Posts: 1850
I removed the acmlm.org mirror, as we're moving servers and... well, it's already going to be a huge transfer, so I'm cutting back old files that we can't really afford to transfer right now. It had 623 hits for a total of 28135187kBytes transferred in the time it was up (roughly 26.8GB), so it had a pretty good run in the while it was online. Sorry about the inconvinience, though.
Perma-banned
mklip2001
He/Him
Editor
Joined: 6/23/2009
Posts: 2227
Location: Georgia, USA
Sorry for the bump, but the DailyMotion encode associated with this publication is for Sonic Advance 2, not Sonic 2 for the Genesis. Just an FYI.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Joined: 6/4/2009
Posts: 570
Location: 33°07'41"S, 160°42'04"W
mklip2001 wrote:
Sorry for the bump, but the DailyMotion encode associated with this publication is for Sonic Advance 2, not Sonic 2 for the Genesis. Just an FYI.
You were right. I removed that DailyMotion link. Thanks!
Joined: 2/26/2007
Posts: 1365
Location: Minnesota
Bwahahaha, Stanski beat this run by a full minute and a half single segment. Added to that, he ran down 15:22 IL time. And here I thought nitsuja was god ;(
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Joined: 6/4/2009
Posts: 570
Location: 33°07'41"S, 160°42'04"W
Sticky wrote:
Bwahahaha, Stanski beat this run by a full minute and a half single segment. Added to that, he ran down 15:22 IL time. And here I thought nitsuja was god ;(
Now, you can't compare the 15:22 IL because that doesn't keep count of the score tally. The 0:19 of Emerald Hill 1 for example is followed by 50000 points of time bonus. And so on. So the 15:22 isn't comparable. The 18:12 is the one that makes me think instead. I am downloading the SDA as I type this, and I wonder, how much this TAS is unoptimized today, maybe someone should obsolete this with a new TAS? Look at the SDA for ideas: http://speeddemosarchive.com/Sonic2.html
Skilled player (1326)
Joined: 9/7/2007
Posts: 1354
Location: U.S.
Those times count for in-game time. The only one we need to worry about is Metropolis 2. But marzojr & FuzZerd got that covered.
Joined: 2/26/2007
Posts: 1365
Location: Minnesota
Nothing like pissing on my lol. You guys are real jerks. Edit: Holy shit! I had no clue that the Sonic 2 movie was that old! I thought it was obsoleted months/years ago.
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Player (51)
Joined: 4/10/2009
Posts: 226
this movie is in bad need of an obsoletion. there's at least a few frames of improvement in EH1 alone. and I think all of metropolis can be improved. there's also a ~1 second improvement to CN1. I've hardly even looked at the other levels so I suspect there are other improvements as well.
Joined: 2/20/2010
Posts: 209
Location: I'm in space
Old though it may be, I don't understand why this doesn't have a star. It's friggin awesome, the entertainment is nonstop.
Oh, play it cool. Play it cool. Here come the space cops.
NESAtlas
He/Him
Player (57)
Joined: 7/4/2010
Posts: 115
Location: Gales Ferry, CT
Atlas Video: Wing Fortress Zone Link to video Also have a high quality torrent up (1080p @ 60fps): http://ajmjd.com/SegaAtlas-Sonic2-WingFortressZone-Xvid.avi.torrent
Joined: 6/4/2009
Posts: 570
Location: 33°07'41"S, 160°42'04"W
Nice video, but you used the "psg high quality" option, that should not be used for any reason, as it makes the jump sound to sound retarded.
Former player
Joined: 11/25/2009
Posts: 77
I was shocked to see that you bypassed the Sega logo in the beginning, although spamming the start button wasn't a pretty way to do it in my opinion, so I actually tried all frames, and found out that the exact frame to bypass it at is at frame 245. Hope that helps those who like clean inputs (like me). Either way, I wanted it to be "documented" somewhere, lol.