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.
| Level | Time | Units Improved
|
|---|
| Emerald Hill 1 | 0:17 | 1
|
| Emerald Hill 2 | 0:35 | 1
|
| Chemical Plant 1 | 0:17 | 0
|
| Chemical Plant 2 | 0:33 | 18
|
| Aquatic Ruin 1 | 0:17 | 2
|
| Aquatic Ruin 2 | 0:36 | 2
|
| Casino Night 1 | 0:24 | 1
|
| Casino Night 2 | 0:49 | 6
|
| Hill Top 1 | 0:28 | 11
|
| Hill Top 2 | 0:44 | 4
|
| Mystic Cave 1 | 0:25 | 3
|
| Mystic Cave 2 | 0:35 | 2
|
| Oil Ocean 1 | 0:23 | 3
|
| Oil Ocean 2 | 0:31 | 17
|
| Metropolis 1 | 0:44 | 10
|
| Metropolis 2 | 0:43 | 7
|
| Metropolis 3 | 1:08 | 22
|
| Sky Chase | 2:06 | 0
|
| Wing Fortress | 1:34 | 8
|
| Death Egg | 0:40 | 2
|
| Total | 13:49 | 120 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.
