Submission #6646: THC98 & Malleoz's GC Sonic Heroes "Team Sonic" in 36:01.23
| Console: | Nintendo GameCube |
|---|---|
| Game name: | Sonic Heroes |
| Game version: | USA |
| ROM filename: | Sonic Heroes (USA).iso |
| Branch: | Team Sonic |
| Emulator: | Dolphin 5.0 |
| Movie length: | 36:01.23 |
| FrameCount: | 388637 |
| Re-record count: | 193625 |
| Author's real name: | Tales & Sean Owens |
| Author's nickname: | THC98 & Malleoz |
| Submitter: | THC98 |
| Submitted at: | 2020-03-07 00:06:16 |
| Text last edited at: | 2020-03-20 19:26:24 |
| Text last edited by: | fsvgm777 |
| Download: | Download (47309 bytes) |
| Status: | published |
| Click to view the actual publication | |
| Submission instructions | |
| Discuss this submission (also rating / voting) | |
| List all submissions by this submitter | |
| List pages on this site that refer to this submission | |
| View submission text history | |
| Back to the submission list | |
Author's comments and explanations:
Sonic Heroes - Team Sonic TAS in 36:01.23 by Malleo and THC98
For other encodes, including an input viewer, commentary, and a widescreen hack, please see the video description.
Table of contents [expand all] [collapse all]
Game Overview:
Released in early 2004, Sonic Heroes is a 3D platformer that sees four teams of characters seeking to take down Eggman’s army of robots. In this game, the player can switch between a team’s three characters, which each have unique abilities, to overcome various parts of each stage.
This TAS focuses solely on Team Sonic, for entertainment purposes.
To sync the run:
- Emulator used: Dolphin 5.0
- Idle Skipping Off
- Dual Core Off
- DSP HLE Emulation
- No Memory Card
- Delete Memory Card sram.raw File
Objectives:
- Aims for fastest time
- Manipulates luck
- Takes damage to save time
- Genre: Platform
About the run
This run aims to complete the Team Sonic story and reach the credits as fast as possible. Following TASVideos's standards, the TAS timing begins on game startup and ends on last input. We also provide a final time using the In-Game Timer (IGT) as that's the standard timing method of this game in regular RTS speedruns.
- Time based on TAS timing: 36:01.23
- Time based on IGT: 30:39.56
About the Emulator
We used a custom version of Dolphin 5.0 that allows for the use of lua scripts, including functionality for an on-screen RAM Watch. The build can be found here: https://github.com/SwareJonge/Dolphin-Lua-Core
Through the use of scripts, we were able to automate certain processes, such as kick acceling. In addition, we often used a go-to-position script which calculates the most optimal analog stick input to maintain a constant angle as we approach a set position.
Game Mechanics
Each of the three characters of Team Sonic has their unique set of abilities. Essentially, Sonic is the speed type character, so he is mainly used for building speed. Tails is the flight type character, so his main use is to reach high platforms with his flying ability. And Knuckles, as the power type character, can destroy blocks and kill enemies more efficiently. The abilities of each character are listed below.
Sonic
- Kick
- While on the ground, pressing B with Sonic active causes him to kick. This causes Sonic to gain speed.
- Rocket Accel
- With Sonic as the active character, holding B for a variable amount of time will cause Tails or Knuckles to kick and propel Sonic forward. This is a great way to build up speed in a scenario in which we don’t necessarily need to cover a lot of distance. A great example is 8 seconds into Mystic Mansion, where we need to clip through a door but do not have enough speed to do so. Performing this rocket accel allows us to quickly gain enough speed to perform the clip without having to cover a lot of distance to build that speed. If Sonic is upgraded to level 3, performing a rocket accel near vertical poles makes Sonic attach to that pole.
- Light Dash
- Pressing B with Sonic when approaching a set of rings causes Sonic to lock onto and follow the path of the rings at a high speed.
- Jump Dash
- If you press A while in the jumping state, a jump dash is performed. This makes Sonic do a dash in the direction that he is facing, starting at a forward speed of 5.
- Homing Attack
- If a jump dash is performed while Sonic is near a target (such as any enemy or item capsule), Sonic homes in on said target while jump dashing, performing a homing attack.
- Blue Tornado
- Pressing B while the in jumping state will make Sonic start spinning in a circle, creating a tornado (hence the name Blue Tornado). This technique can stun enemies, activate vertical poles, and even give Sonic speed in very specific instances if cancelled.
- Triangle Jump
- Performing a jump dash against a wall with a proper angle will allow Sonic to stick to the wall and jump back and forth between walls.
- Team Blast
- After filling its meter by performing diverse actions, the Team Blast can be activated by pressing Z. After activating it, a cutscene is played and Sonic destroys all the enemies within a certain distance from him.
- Light Speed Attack
- For a short duration after performing a Team Blast, Sonic is able to execute a Light Speed Attack. This technique makes Sonic “blast away” towards surrounding enemies until all of them are destroyed.
Tails
- Flight Accel
- By jumping and pressing A as Tails, he will start flying, where each time A is pressed, Tails does an upward boost. However, Tails has a height cap based on when you start the flight, so there are limitations to how high you can get
- Thundershoot
- While midair in flight formation, pressing B causes Tails to shoot out one teammate at a time. Their movement can be influenced by moving the analog stick. While thundershooting, Tails’s flight meter doesn’t go down, allowing you to extend flight distance a bit further than usual.
Knuckles
- Punch
- Pressing B with Knuckles active causes him to throw a punch. He can also move while throwing the punch, but he will slow down from the player’s starting speed down to 3.5 units/frame.
- Triple Punch
- Level 1 Knuckles and above will slam the ground after punching three times in a row. This will deal damage in a certain radius. The radius increases between levels 1 and 2. On level 3, Knuckles additionally shoots out fireballs that deal extra damage if they explode near enemies.
- Triangle Dive
- Jumping and pressing A again with Knuckles causes the team to go into the triangle formation. This formation limits our speed loss as a result of not kick acceling. In addition, it is useful for traversing long gaps while preserving most of our speed for a time.
- Fire Dunk
- Jumping, pressing B to spin Sonic and Tails around, and then pressing B again results in Knuckles shooting a teammate towards a nearby enemy.
- Fireball Jump
- Jumping with Knuckles and pressing B results in Tails and Sonic spinning around Knuckles in a circle.
Tricks, Mechanics, and Exploits
With the described game mechanics, it is possible to exploit them into new tricks. The main tricks used in this TAS are described below.
- Analog Stick Movement
- The magnitude of analog stick inputs is restricted as you stray away from the four cardinal directions. As a result, if we need to make slight angle changes, it’s faster to hold up on the analog stick and rotate the camera with either the shoulder buttons or the C-stick. Here is a visualization of the magnitude of analog stick inputs: https://imgur.com/qfL8pIK
- Kick Accel
- One of the fastest methods to gain speed is by pressing B to kick with Sonic, however there is a 32 frame (60fps) cooldown in between kicks. This cooldown can be removed by switching to Tails, and then back to Sonic after beginning a kick. In order for this to work, Knuckles must be close enough to Sonic, such that Knuckles snaps to Sonic’s position (because Knuckles is the base of the Tails formation). This sequence of inputs is performed 2,028 times throughout the TAS, and would not have been easily possibly without the use of Lua scripts to automate this sequence. The repeated sequence of inputs is:
| Frame | Input |
|---|---|
| 1 | B |
| 2 | |
| 3 | Y |
| 4 | X |
- Flight Accel Jump
- When in flight mode, should you do a Flight Accel on the same frame you land on the ground, Tails will bounce upwards as the vertical speed from the flight accel gives you more height than a standard jump, and, when combined with flying at the peak of the Flight Accel Jump, the extra height gain allows for traversing areas of stages that would otherwise require you to take detours or defeat enemies, such as 21 seconds into Power Plant.
- Flight Accel Boost
- Normally, while performing flight accels while in flight formation, there is a height limit that you can’t fly over. However, if the flight accel is timed right as the flight meter runs out, it is possible to go over that height limit. This happens because the vertical speed is kept when the flight mode is over, and the height limit no longer exists.
- Catch-up Flight
- If the flight mode is initiated with the full flight formation (all the 3 characters in their positions), Tails’ forward speed is reset. However, if Tails has not caught up with the formation and the flight mode is initiated, the previous forward speed is maintained and is redirected to the angle between Tails and the rest of the formation.
- Geometry Abuse
- A great example of this technique is throughout Seaside Hills. A lot of the stage’s walls are not entirely flat. As a result, we can jump or glide against them to get pushed upwards and gain a lot of height.
- Light Dash Cancel
- Starting a light dash causes Sonic to instantly jump to a speed of 15 units per frame. If Knuckles is close enough to Sonic (just like with kick acceling), we can switch to Tails and break out of the light dash. This allows us to instantly jump to a speed of 15 and then begin kick acceling afterwards to preserve the speed.
- Thunderboost
- If a thundershoot is performed at the moment that the characters are landing on a platform, the flight formation will detach for a moment and that will result in a forward boost. However, this trick is very specific in terms of where it works.
- Loop Speed
- The automated section that surrounds a loop path has a special property that pulls Sonic if he performs a jump dash while in its area. However, if Sonic is not above the loop’s platform in the moment this happens, the game fails to pull him to the loop and keeps pulling him down (relatively to his gravity) while the jump dash is still active. The speed that Sonic is pulled down grows quickly and allows him to cover great distance with it. As there are a lot of different spots that the game tries to pull Sonic into, the trajectory that Sonic goes looks quite random.
- Bop Boost
- Normally when a teammate is hit while in the flight formation, they will be knocked out of the formation and fall on the ground. However, if the player performs a flight and gets Sonic hit on the first frame that Knuckles touches the ground, a weird state occurs. Sonic will be knocked out of the formation and fall on the ground, but performing another flight will cause Knuckles to attempt to latch back onto Sonic, as if he is still in the flight formation. Within this bop boost, there are several different mechanics that allow us to save time.
- Instant speed - After getting Sonic knocked out of flight formation, performing another flight and holding A will cause Tails and Knuckles to warp back to wherever Sonic fell. Once they are teleported, Tails’s vertical speed is translated into forward speed. This can be used to more quickly navigate to a setup for the next component of the bop boost.
- Wall interference - As was mentioned, performing another flight will result in Knuckles and Tails warping back to Sonic’s position. However, if there is a wall in the path between Sonic and Tails that is interfering with Knuckles and Tails warping to Sonic, then an unusual behavior occurs. Tails will begin to move away from Sonic perpendicular to the wall of interference, proportional to the distance between Tails and Sonic at the start of the flight. Tails will stop moving once Sonic is no longer stunned on the ground. This means that the distance that we can get Tails to move is limited, however it can be extended even further.
- Multiple wall interferences - If we perform a bop boost and get a second wall in the path between Tails and Sonic, the aforementioned proportionality will reset, and the new wall will be used to calculate how fast Tails moves. In other words, we perform a bop boost and Tails moves at a certain speed; causing a new wall farther away from Sonic to get in the way causes Tails to begin moving faster and therefore farther. This is used in a few stages to skip much more of the stage than is normally possible with a single wall.
- Sonic&Knuckles bop boosts - Causing both Sonic and Knuckles to get hit on the first frame that we land on the ground causes certain behaviors to change. It’s important to note that this aspect of bop boosting is still not entirely understood. For one, flying after getting Sonic and Knuckles knocked out of formation does not cause Tails to snap to Sonic’s position. In addition, the flight hitbox is smaller, as Knuckles is no longer in formation. This allows us to squeeze through the bottom of a wall at the end of Grand Metropolis. In addition, the Sonic&Knuckles bop boost allows us to instantly translate our forward speed to negative vertical speed upon hitting a wall above the Grand Metropolis goal ring. This variation is only used during Ocean Palace and Grand Metropolis.
- Door Clip
- After building up enough speed, you can kick with Sonic and then swap to Tails to clip through doors. This occurs because Tails just barely goes through the door, resulting in Sonic and Knuckles being brought through the door with Tails.
- Pinball Table Character Switching
- Whenever you switch formations on a pinball table, rather than continuing from your current location, you are instantly warped to the position of the character you are switching this to. We can use this, in addition to a few other mechanics, in Casino Park and Bingo Highway to skip tremendous portions of both stages.
- Rail Acceleration
- By holding B on a rail, the current character starts crouching and boosts forward. By switching back and forth between Sonic and Knuckles while holding B (with one frame of delay so the crouch animation happens), it’s possible to use both character’s acceleration for a greater resulting acceleration. Furthermore, after getting around 9 units of forward speed, the best method to keep building speed is by switching between these same characters with no frame of delay. However, when the forward speed reaches around 13 units, it’s optimal to stop switching characters and crouch as Sonic.
- Triple Punch Cage Clip
- By triple punching with level 3 Knuckles and then triple punching again, you can sometimes trigger a teleporter or cannon within the cage. We believe this has to do with the fireballs landing inside the cage, which seemingly extends Knuckles’s hitbox.
- Death Abuse
- This trick is not used in our TAS. Dying and restarting a boss fight will cause the in-game timer to start later than it originally does. This will result in the player obtaining a lower in-game time for the boss fight when using the same exact movement as with the original timer start. RTA individual level runs abuse this mechanic, however it is not faster for real-time. This trick results in our boss fights sometimes having a slower in-game time, namely the Team Rose and Team Dark fights.
Stage-by-Stage Comments
Seaside Hill
This stage is an improvement of 14.37 seconds over THC98’s previous TAS of this IL. This stage is one of the best examples to see the benefits of kick acceling, triangle gliding, and abusing level geometry. There are quite a few gaps in the beginning of the stage that can easily be traversed by building up speed and then gliding. Likewise, there are several times we need to build more height, which can easily be done by gliding into or jumping into slanted wall collision. We were also able to display the benefits of loop speed to cross the water and to skip the last section of the stage.
We were caught off guard when we were able to skip the first bobsled section by gaining so much height by gliding into the wonky level collision. The bobsled is an autoscroller, so we were able to save several seconds by skipping over this section. You can gain enough height to fly over the second bobsled’s trigger, however the ground collision is not solid. Instead, bobsleds have a set path which is position-based. Therefore, we have no choice but to ride the second bobsled.
Ocean Palace
We initially overlooked using loop speed at the start of the stage, but we ended up going back to the beginning to implement it and save a few seconds. After the first door, we managed to abuse the pillar’s collision geometry to avoid dealing with the falling blocks and flying. For the next section, we were able to use a flight accel jump to quickly get up to the next platform. 23 seconds into the stage, the slanted ground allows us to jump up faster than normal as the gravity vector is shifted sideways. As for the bop boost, we were able to move Tails to one of the turtles up ahead. From there, we were able to get one of the walls surrounding the turtle in the way, allowing us to extend the bop boost further. While dodging a very inconvenient killplane, we managed to land at the very end of the stage.
Egg Hawk
We initially started with the RTA strategy, where we move backwards until the Egg Hawk is lured back to the previous beach. However, we discovered we could simply fire dunk right away and kill him in time. Amazingly, we were able to deal 63 damage in a single fire dunk, assumably due to Tails getting stuck in the Egg Hawk’s hitbox.
Grand Metropolis
About 15 seconds into the stage, we can simply clip through the laser barrier just like with doors. Right before the first bop boost, we can use an inverted bounce to lose height quickly while going inside. From there, we can bop boost ahead. In order to leave our bop boost state quickly, we can get hit by an enemy. To instantly gain back speed, we can use a light dash cancel. After clipping through the next few doors, we can perform a bop boost. Because we are on the ground when Sonic is no longer invulnerable, we instantly jump to a speed of 32 units/frame, though it’s short-lived due to the spring pad. To cancel our height after the spring pad, we can do a triangle jump and cancel it. Instead of using a blue tornado with Sonic to get onto the pole, we made sure to get level 3 Sonic, which allows us to simply jump dash to activate the pole. To get off the top of the pole, it’s fastest to perform a jump dash, as the normal animation is slow. At the end, we performed a bop boost with Sonic and Knuckles. This allowed us to squeeze underneath the bridge wall, allow that wall to get in between Sonic and Tails, and make it to the goal ring. In addition, as was mentioned in the bop boost details above, we were able to turn our forward speed into downward vertical speed.
Power Plant
To skip the small spherical sections of the stage, we can glide off of the ramp and use inverted bounces to land back on the ground. To skip the looped paths, we can glide and bounce off of the top of the loop to maintain our height and speed. As we flight accel jump our way throughout the rest of the stage, we also want to reach level 2 Tails before the elevator sections. Level 2 Tails can one-shot the elevator enemies, allowing us to clear them out in just enough time without the elevator slowing down. The elevators were fun to work on because we could mess around as much as we want, including seeing how far below the elevator we could fall and still get back up. At the end of the elevator sections, we use thunderboosts to get back up to a fast speed. At the very end of the stage, we were somehow able to somehow cancel the vertical speed from the spring and instead land on the floor right away.
Team Rose
Well, this didn’t take long to finish… We can simply kick accel forward, use a blue tornado, and stun them off-stage. We also figured it would be funny to fall off-stage right before it cuts to the stage time.
Casino Park
At the beginning, we can quickly jump dash to bounce off of the top left spring rather than the top middle. This allows us to avoid landing on the first platform and instead immediately land below near the first pinball table.
Explanation for the first pinball table: We first let Tails fall for a bit of time. We then punch forwards with Knuckles, bring him onto the pinball table. By punching, Tails begins to travel upwards towards Knuckles. By walking onto the table, Tails does not stop moving upwards, resulting in him travelling far above the table. We can then switch to Tails and move towards the next pinball table in the stage.
Explanation for the second pinball table: This setup is similar to the first one. We let Tails fall for a bit, then we jump with Knuckles and press B right before landing. This causes Tails to very briefly spin around Knuckles far out-of-bounds. Punching then allows Tails to continuously fall at an incredibly fast rate. Jumping then causes Tails to spin around Knuckles in a circle, with one caveat: Tails is snapped to Knuckles height, and the radius of Tails spinning around Knuckles is proportional to the distance between Tails and Knuckles right before the jump. Since Tails was incredibly far below the map before the jump, Tails spins around Knuckles in a circle of radius ~7258 units. Once we land on the pinball table, Tails stops spinning. Thus, we timed the jump such that Tails is in a position that is very close to the goal ring, such that we can simply land right on top of it.
Bingo Highway
To first get Tails to start falling, we had to switch to Sonic right before hitting the spring. Though Knuckles lands on the ground earlier than Sonic, we need Sonic to be near Knuckles in order to start a triangle dive. Otherwise the triangle dive will not start for quite some time. Once the triangle dive has started, then Tails will be brought towards Knuckles. Then he can begin to fall downwards. This skip is very similar to the second table of Casino Park, however the goal ring is much farther away, and as such we need to account for that when setting up Tails’s rotational radius. Tails will only fall for about 1400 units before ceasing falling. To compensate for this, we can remain on the pinball table, which allows Tails to continuously fall until we land on a platform. Once he is far enough below, we again translate his difference in height into rotational radius and fall onto the pinball table to teleport to Tails. With all of this set up, we can simply fall straight to the goal ring.
Robot Carnival
Essentially, this boss is an autoscroller. Our main goal is to finish off each wave as quickly as possible. For the first two waves, our fastest strategy is to perform a series of jump dashes such that Tails and Knuckles follow behind Sonic to finish off each enemy. After manipulating two Tails level-ups, we can just use a thundershoot to one-shot each enemy in the third, fourth, and fifth waves. By this point, we’ve now manipulated level 3 Knuckles, so from this point onward we can triple punch to kill all enemies in each wave. Towards the end we got out-of-bounds of the stage, but sadly we couldn’t fall off, as the boss fight would reset.
Rail Canyon
After using rail acceleration at the beginning of the stage, we were able to glide and hit a slanted invisible wall to drastically bring down our vertical speed. Thanks to one-sided collision, we are able to glide towards the first bop boost spot. We were then able to chain bop boosts back to back. Interestingly, we didn’t have to go into a flight for the second bop boost. Seemingly, a bop boost state can be obtained without flying because Knuckles rejoins the flight formation on the frame that we touch the ground. From there, we can bop boost directly to the goal ring.
Bullet Station
When we got to this stage, humorously JustLemres said that they would look into a theoretical bop boost that they thought about, and lo and behold it works! This bop boosts allows us to quite literally just skip to the end of the stage. The bop boost setup takes a small bit of time, as we need to lure to egg pawn close enough to the edge of the platform to allow Sonic to fall below onto a lower platform. Only then can we cause a wall to exist between the path of Sonic and Tails. Unfortunately, the cannon is cycle-based, so this stage can’t be optimized very much.
Egg Albatross
This boss is pretty straight-forward. We can start with a series of punches to end the first phase. Then we kick accel backwards to lure the Egg Albatross backwards. This allows us enough time to repeatedly fire dunk and knock off the second phase. Lastly, with just one jump and a fire dunk we were able to finish off the last phase.
Frog Forest
We were able to start the stage off with loop speed, which segued perfectly into a bop boost. Because we got part of the sloped wall in our way, we were actually able to build height throughout the bop boost, since the normal vector between the wall and Sonic is upwards. This height wasn’t completely necessary, but was a nice touch to make it to the goal ring. Aside from that, we also needed to make sure we activated the bop boost in a position that barely made it still work. This makes the game think that we landed back on the platform where the bop boost was initiated, preventing the flight state from activating.
Lost Jungle
Right off the bat, we were able to abuse level geometry to skip a small platforming section. We were then able to perform loop speed. We’re not quite sure how, but we managed to clip straight through the floor of the loop to perform this. We then spent several days trying to land on the next platform to skip a few vines. When the gravity vector is shifted, you have to maintain a speed of 5 units/frame, or else the gravity vector resets to normal. We had to do precise movement midair to maintain this speed long enough. After gliding through a portion of the stage, we were able to set up another bop boost. We angled the bop boost such that we can land inside a tunnel up ahead. From there we can set up another bop boost that lands us inside the vine section. This bop boost took a few days due to avoiding invisible walls and to get a good landing spot.
Team Dark
Much like the Team Rose fight, this fight can be finished incredibly fast. Thundershooting Team Dark while they are in flight formation causes them to all get stunned, fly backwards, and plummet into the water.
Hang Castle
There’s a possible bop boost at the start of the stage, but due to the amount of falling after the bop boost, it’s faster to just take the teleporter. This stage is interesting in that to allow for the teleporter stage-flipping mechanic, there are actually two parallel versions of the stage. We can take advantage of this and bop boost through normally unexplorable portions of the stage to land back on an up-right portion of the stage. 25 seconds into the stage, we can use a fire dunk right before approaching a rail to instantly cancel our vertical velocity. From there, we can glide and use an inverted bounce to reach the next teleporter. Afterwards, we can use a thunderboost and glide off the downward-slanted path to maintain a pretty fast downward velocity into our next bop boost. We had a theoretical bop boost angle that would allow us to skip the tunnel before the end of the stage, but the bop boost drops us off very far away from the stage such that we fall for too long to save time. Approaching the downward section, we can latch onto the rail last minute to avoid falling away from the ground. We were able to clip through the first quarter-pipe to save a few frames, however after days of work we were not able to clip through the remaining two quarter-pipes. These pipes seem to have identical collision, so it’s theoretically possible to clip through those too.
Mystic Mansion
This stage is pretty straight-forward until the bop boost. We were able to reach the next teleporter immediately after this bop boost. It was theorized that we could reach the Team Chaotix section from this bop boost, which would allow us to reach the last section of the stage right away, however that room cannot even theoretically be reached due to the angle that the bop boost sends us. However, we were able to clip through the next few doors to reach a room not normally accessible to Team Sonic. It drops us off right before the bobsled, saving a few seconds over the normally intended route. After the rail section, it was faster to switch to Knuckles and rotate Tails around to trigger than bobsled than to take the rail normally. At the end, we can use a triple punch cage clip to activate the teleporter much earlier than intended.
Robot Storm
For the first wave, we had to simply jump dash to kill all the enemies. This was a bit tedious, as it was a bit harder to control Tails’s and Knuckles’s movement due to there being so many enemies in close proximity. For the second wave, a simple triple punch is enough to kill them off. For the third, we initially thought that a triple punch would work best, however jumping on top of the cage and then fire dunking ended up being substantially faster. The turtles were quite tedious to deal with, as a triple punch won’t take them out. Instead, precise jump dash movement allows us to take out each of the turtles instantly with level 2 Sonic. For phase 4, we had to do several fire dunks since the egg pawn spawns are staggered. We were able to finish the wave a bit earlier by flying up and hitting the last pawn with Tails. The next few waves can be quickly finished with triple punches. Once we take the last teleporter, we can one-shot all enemies with precise thundershoot movement. Afterwards, we can do a triple punch with some jump dashes while riding the rail to take out all enemies. For the wave before the final cannon, it ended up being faster to use a team blast than to repeatedly triple punch. This is because the egg pawns spawn very high up in the air, and a team blast is able to reach the last egg pawn earlier than a triple punch does. After taking the cannon, the team blast cooldown allows us to do a series of jump dashes incredibly fast to damage all enemies of the next wave, thus ending Robot Storm.
Egg Fleet
We begin Egg Fleet by performing a quick bop boost to skip the first airship. We then chain this with another bop boost to reach the first autoscroller section. After the autoscroller section, we can press B to disengage from the flower. This allows us to land on the blue airship a bit earlier. From there, we can abuse level geometry to make it to the top of the ship. Kicking along the perimeter allows us to avoid having to flight accel jump above the door. After the first fan, we were able to jump before gliding to gain a bit more height than normal, allowing us to reach the next fan a bit quicker. From there, we can bop boost directly to the end of the stage. We finish off by using team blast the frame before the ship blows up, resulting in the stage going black. This was done to be entertaining, but it also reduces the in-game timer by 2 seconds since team blast freezes the IGT during the animation.
Final Fortress
The first bop boost allows us to save a few seconds over kicking and falling for a while. After making our way above the first wall, we can bop boost much further into the stage, and chain that with another bop boost that takes us directly to the end of the stage.
Egg Emperor
We first dash far enough ahead to induce Egg Emperor to dash first, while also getting level 2 Tails. After going backwards, we can thundershoot him. With level 2 Tails, Sonic and Knuckles can get locked onto Egg Emperor’s hitbox and deal damage to him at an incredibly fast rate. Because this TAS benefits from end-of-input timing, it was faster to abuse a bug that allows to still complete the boss fight while plummeting to our death. If we fall out-of-bounds but the Egg Emperor dies while Tails is falling, the death sequence is interrupted and we can reach the credits. We both feel that this is a pretty silly and satisfying ending to the TAS as a whole.
Theoretical Improvements
- We imagine that better manipulation of Sonic’s and Knuckles’s movement during thundershoots would result in some time being saved in killing enemies quicker.
- About 12 frames can be saved in Hang Castle if we were to clip through the last two quarter-pipes at the end of the stage.
VI: 97148
