Submission #1508: nitsuja's Genesis Sonic 3 & Knuckles in 34:22.02

Here's another Sonic run, and an S3&K run at that. This time it's more of a cleanup run for the glitches I wasn't aware of than an actual redo, but at least the improvements were more than I expected (over a minute of in-game time).

Hydrocity 2: The new glitch was hard to execute even when I knew about it (and it always fails if the subpixel position is in the wrong range). It had a couple of seemingly negative side effects: It made several downward slopes intangible, and it put some timed objects in the most inconvenient places... but the former made a new route possible and the latter forced me to find it. 12 seconds were saved in this act, unfortunately enough to cross a bonus boundary and lose most of those seconds in real-time.

Icecap 1: This is the only improvement that doesn't result from a new glitch. Instead I save time by taking a more direct route, which is much more difficult than the old route because Sonic is moving through the level (and can collide with its obstacles), not teleporting past it. I had given it up as impossible before, but found just the right angle and speed to pull it off. The jumping at the end was just to be annoying (and to manipulate Tails to not vanish before the boss fight).

Lave Reef 1: Like the Hydrocity 2 glitch, the new glitch here was picky about working and hard to do optimally with both Sonic and Tails. Also like in Hydrocity 2, the remainder of the act after the glitch had to be redone, but there was less that could be done differently here.

Lave Reef 2: At first I was stuck here for a long time because the change to the previous act put the timed objects in the wrong places for me to match the previous act 2 time without waiting enough to nullify the time gained. Then I saw the 100% Knuckles TAS use Hyper Knuckles' invincibility to get pushed into the ground by the Lava Reef 1 boss, and I continued to be stuck here for a long time trying to reproduce that without Super/Hyper form. After not thinking about it for a while, I suddenly had an idea on how to do it, and it worked, so (hours of hex editing later) I finally had an updated run that still beats the game.

This is actually the first time I have ever submitted an improvement to one of my own published runs. I'm honestly not sure if I like it more than the previous one. My favorite improved part is Hydrocity 2, and my favorite part of the run remains Carnival Night 1 and 2. Because it's not a complete redo, the rerecord count continues from where it was in the last version, although I believe many rerecords weren't counted due to reverting to previous movie files several times and making a lot of changes by in-level hex editing.

Since most of this run is the same as the previous one, please refer to that run's comments for further information.

Thanks to Eredani, Mike89, and Upthorn for info about the new Hydrocity 2, Lava Reef 1, and Lava Reef 2 glitches, respectively.