Sonic goes hunting for the Chaos and Super Emeralds in order to truly defeat Dr. Robotnik. The powers obtained from the Chaos Emeralds make him slightly faster in general; the powers obtained from the Super Emeralds break the game so horribly it stops being funny.
Warning: The awesomeness of Hyper Sonic may hurt your eyes or trigger seizures on susceptible people.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: Gens 11a
  • 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 (a lot)
  • Manipulates luck (a little)
  • Grabs all Chaos and Super Emeralds
  • Avoids underflowing the horizontal position (see comments, below)

Comments

After grabbing all Chaos Emeralds, most levels benefit slightly from the Super Sonic transformation: Super Sonic accelerates faster, jumps higher, has a faster spindash and a higher top speed, and this usually translates to a lower in-game time for the level.
After grabbing all Super Emeralds, almost every single level benefits from the Hyper Sonic transformation. Hyper Sonic has the most broken abilities ever: his hyper launch. This allows getting into walls and floors in places where other characters can't (although some can be replicated with Sonic and the bubble shield -- if you can find it), and wall zipping ensues.
This run uses almost all of the known glitches and abuses: the only exception is the underflowing of the horizontal coordinate; this is the technical form of saying "teleporting from the start to the end of a level" for this game. The reasoning behind it is to show more of the game, and to better showcase the abilities of Super Sonic and Hyper Sonic. The drawback is that this restriction costs dearly on a few levels in terms of time.
For the same reasons, Sonic goes solo on this run -- a fact that also costs dearly in terms of time on a few levels.
The special stages use the same input as the Knuckles 100% run by Upthorn, and are used with permission.
A few levels are similar to the existing Sonic and Sonic + Tails runs; a few levels (Hidden Palace and Sky Sanctuary) are carbon copies of the other runs.

Timetable

LevelTime
Angel Island 10:56:20
Angel Island 21:23:55
Hidrocity 10:45:27
Hidrocity 20:58:42
Marble Garden 10:39:30
Marble Garden 20:58:35
Carnival Night 10:41:24
Carnival Night 20:42:53
IceCap 11:19:34
IceCap 20:41:18
Launch Base 11:36:41
Launch Base 21:03:33
Mushroom Hill 11:02:07
Mushroom Hill 20:58:54
Flying Battery 11:20:42
Flying Battery 21:16:48
Sandopolis 11:33:57
Sandopolis 21:02:47
Lava Reef 10:57:14
Lava Reef 20:47:42
Hidden Palace0:26:52
Sky Sanctuary0:55:49
Death Egg 10:57:03
Death Egg 22:08:46
Doomsday1:34:36[1]
Total26:51:09
The table shows the in-game timer values. The value after the final colon indicates the in-game frame counter, and is restricted to the 0-59 range. It is updated every frame (except during lag frames), and increments the in-game second when resetting to zero.
[1] The Doomsday timer stops at this value; the last hit (i.e., the point where the movie ends) is at time 1:30:40. Moreover, the last time visible on-screen is 1:33(:57).

Stage by stage comments

Angel Island 1

At the end, in the crumbling platforms before the mini boss, it is possible to save 5 frames with a spindash; but these frames cost a lot more time in Act 2.

Angel Island 2

The swinging wine at 0:15:08 is left in an inconvenient position if I arrive here earlier. I decide to grab the fourth emerald here, despite the loss of time, in order to have Super Sonic as early as practical.

Marble Garden 1

There is no convenient place to lose the shield after I grab the last emerald; thus, becoming Super Sonic in this level loses more time than it is worth.

Marble Garden 2

Losing the shield at 0:23:34, however, is faster than waiting for an opportunity to go around the spiked ball. Especially since I quality for Super Sonic transformation after grabbing the 6 rings right after it. At around 0:30:00, I am slightly faster than I would be if I were to hit the red spring.

Carnival Night 2

New wall entrance at 0:20:00 allows me to skip a large section of the level then run around at very high speed right until the end, saving 26 seconds compared to the current Sonic + Tails run.

IceCap 1

Super Sonic shows up to do some snowboarding. Lots of vertical screen wrapping abuse, I reach the boss. The 3 ring monitors from the flag really speed up the next act.

IceCap 2

Super Sonic glitched transformation at 0:12:00 -- I am on the ground and manage to transform anyway! This saves a good deal of time. Sadly, it is impossible to reach the ledge at around 0:22:50 as Super Sonic, meaning I lose about 2 seconds at that point.

Launch Base 1 & 2

The fire shield I grab on the way at the start of Launch Base 1 serves only to get me faster to the first giant ring in Launch Base 2. At around 0:45:40, I go slightly higher up to have slightly more speed at 0:47:00; this way, I can glitch past an invisible wall at about 0:47:55 and kill the middle boss unhindered.

Mushroom Hill 1 & 2

Lots and lots of emerald grabbing. In act 1, grabbing the second emerald determines the rest of the way -- all other paths to the end are slower. I grab the fire shield and ring monitors after the boss to speed up act 2. In act 2, I lose the shield at around 0:36:30 so I can turn into Hyper Sonic as quickly as possible; since I would have to wait for the giant ring to form anyway, I lose no time in the process. At 0:44:14, I hyper launch into the ground for a large speed boost.

Flying Battery 1

Lots of ring grabbing at the start for earlier Hyper Sonic; the fire shield is very useful at this start too.

Flying Battery 2

Using the anti-gravity glitch to get inside the ground, I zip right until about 0:14:00, where I cancel the glitch. Hyper Sonic makes short work of the level then. I lose the rings on purpose after the boss is killed to make for a faster score tally.

Sandopolis 1

At about 0:16:00, I loiter around a bit: the next timed object is in the way however fast I get to it. The ring monitor and fire shield monitor are grabbed to manipulate the placement of timed objects in the next act.

Lava Reef 1

A bit of loitering at 0:14:40 to wait for the rings. After that, the shield is lost. The ring monitor and fire shield after the boss are essential to the next act; I push myself into the ground to gain a large speed boost at the start of the level.

Lava Reef 2

At 0:20:27, the fire shield loses its usefulness and I drop it. At about 0:33:00, I take the way around because the timed objects are in a very bad position. I then skip the boss, which would be about 2 minutes of dull, repetitive gameplay.

Hidden Palace & Sky Sanctuary

Basically identical to SprintGod's Sonic solo run. But with all emeralds in the former, and some luck manipulation in the latter to get the boss to use the same attack pattern.

Death Egg 1

This is the fastest route to Hyper Sonic. The level is broken after that, and the boss is a breeze.

Death Egg 2

Again, fastest route to Hyper Sonic. Staying in the ceiling is faster than being on the ground in the mid boss; hyper launch from anywhere hits the shield and makes a noise. The egg robo is identical to SprintGod's.

The Doomsday

Both bosses are incredibly annoying: they are liable to desynch on any changes to earlier levels due to differences in the RNG. The first boss is easy to abuse as his missiles move strangely when you are moving around the screen: you can cause a hit much faster simply by moving appropriately. I had to delay a couple hits in the second because a 1 frame delay in the hit caused a much faster recovery time. Last hit happens with only 13 frames of Hyper Sonic left on the clock.

Other comments

You may want to download and use this LUA HUD for Genesis Sonic games. It has a lot of useful information for a TAS, including a jump predictor for Sonic and for Tails (in Sonic + Tails games).
I want to thank Nitsuja, Upthorn and SprintGod, without which this run would not be possible. Orkal also helped indirectly with a couple tricks in his S3&K glitch videos.

What could be improved

It might be possible to improve Doomsday by a few frames in the mid-boss fight, but it isn't easy.
Switching to Sonic+Tails would save a lot of time, as would eliminating the "avoids underflowing the horizontal position" restriction. Also, allowing death as a shortcut would save some time in a couple of levels. I am not aware of any other improvements that don't require these changes.
Suggested screenshot:

mmbossman: Replaced the submission file with one which better conforms with goals at the request of the author; please note that Lava Reef zone has changed. If you believe this will change your vote, please rewatch.

adelikat: Popular vote wins. I accept this submission (as a new category for this game).

Raiscan: Encoding. What should the new category be called, though?


marzojr
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Solon is absolutely correct: I boost at every single frame at Doomsday, thus keeping maximum speed throughout the level.
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Thanks for the encode, Raiscan! And wow, it makes a huge difference to not have the music change whenever Super/Hyper mode is activated. Nice run! I could wish for less zipping, but oh well. Your decision in Doomsday to avoid as many rings as possible was a good one.
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I have mixed feelings about this run. For one, it doesn't really seem less glitchy than Nitsuja's first movie — and certainly more glitchy than SprintGod's more recent one. As such, there wasn't that much original content with this goal choice because it's like a mix between SprintGod's Sonic solo and Upthorn's Hyper Knuckles for pretty much the entire duration. I didn't take much time to figure out what exactly horizontal position underflow is, because I still saw you zipping in pretty much every direction, except more rarely. For me, that looks very arbitrary. I can't say I didn't enjoy the run — I did, and much so — but I don't consider it a good goal choice for the third movie slot for S3&K. Completely glitchless non-hyper Sonic solo would likely be a much better choice, because it actually shows as much of the levels as possible in a TAS, and in way more original (I'd even say hard) ways as well. This movie is entertainig and well-made, but I vote no. :\
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I didn't take much time to figure out what exactly horizontal position underflow is...
It's when you zip off the left side of the level and come out the right side of the level. Examples from the current Nitsuja/Upthorn any%: Hydrocity 2, Marble Garden 2, Carnival Night 1, Launch Base 1, etc.
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I totally agree with everything moozooh says. It pains me to vote no on a TAS that's so well made and entertaining, but I don't understand the goals at all. For those in the know of exactly what the underflow glitch is, maybe this is an important distinction, but it seems pretty odd to avoid it and still use other glitches that have the same basic function. For a while I really enjoyed how you zoomed through each level without glitching. Then you started glitching through walls like crazy and I kind of lost that feeling. I still enjoyed the glitches--Golden Sonic tearing through walls at super speeds was pretty cool. I just felt like it should have been like that the whole time or avoided altogether. This should either be a glitchfest, or glitchless. I'd be all in favour of a 100% run of either. I just don't see why it should have some zip glitches and not others.
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Heisanevilgenius wrote:
For those in the know of exactly what the underflow glitch is, maybe this is an important distinction, but it seems pretty odd to avoid it and still use other glitches that have the same basic function. ... I just don't see why it should have some zip glitches and not others.
They aren't both "zip glitches". Zipping gives you high speed, whereas horizontal overflow doesn't change your speed at all and it simply teleports you to the far right side of the entire level. (I'm just clarifying that, not bringing up an argument to your main point.) I guess I was the one that suggested making the distinction in the first place, and to not bring Tails along, both of which people are complaining about here. I suggested those mainly because they would force this run to be different from the existing Sonic+Tails run, not because I thought it would please people that wanted a glitch-free run. TASes that are largely identical to other TASes (that they are not attempting to obsolete) tend to be poorly received, after all. And I was curious as to what a run that has Hyper Sonic going all-out through the levels would be like. By the way, I was somewhat joking about that script to "remove boring things". Certainly I don't think that all parts where Sonic is even slightly offscreen should be excised, and you'd probably miss out on significant parts of the run by watching through it with the script as I posted it. EDIT: I checked at an arbitrary place and found 6 frames were lost at the end of FBZ and another 30 or so at the start of Sandopolis Zone. It's quite possible that neither of those adds up to any overall time lost (due to "frame rules" from timed objects) but I get the feeling that this run could've been more precise. On the other hand, I was impressed by several things in it and it does improve on certain things from the existing Sonic+Tails run. I don't know what to think about how it turned out as far as being entertaining. There were some unique moments (like skiing Super Sonic) and Hyper Sonic was indeed very fast in the last 1/3 of the movie.
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I'm giving this run a yes vote. I'd been wanting to see a 100% Sonic run for this game, and this did not disappoint.
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I can see where people take umbrage with the run's goals, and there's also been plenty of good responses to that, so it's hard to add anything to the discussion. All I can say is that, ultimately, I have enjoyed this run more than any other Sonic game TAS I've seen before, even with the boring emerald-collect-a-thon. Voting yes.
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klmz wrote:
Raiscan wrote:
upthorn wrote:
With the help of this lua script nitsuja wrote to remove boring things like special stages, score tally, and the super sonic music, I have finally watched this
Any chance that the lua script could be modified to also include hyper sonic screen flashing? :)
I can't believe that I watched the whole movie without tthe help of the script to remove those boring things. I need to rewatch it again with an improved lua script in order to vote for it. And I demand this movie be published using that script.
The idea of voting on something based on watching it with boring stuff removed irks me. Even more so at the idea of publishing it in such a state. If a movie needs a lua script to remove boring content, that sounds like a good candidate for rejection, not special modification.
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adelikat wrote:
Even more so at the idea of publishing it in such a state.
I strongly agree with that statement: please sternly reject any suggestions or "demands" about chopping up the run like that for eventual publication. Edit: A clarification: I'd rather that the run end up not being published than see it published chopped up with that script; the main publication should, by all means, be the entire uncut version of the run.
adelikat wrote:
If a movie needs a lua script to remove boring content, that sounds like a good candidate for rejection, not special modification.
The main issue in this case are the special stages: they comprise about half the run's length (some 25-27 minutes all told), and they are boring no matter what is done to make them fun. However, there is nothing that can be done about it other than not doing a 100% run... which is a goal of the run, hence cannot be done in this case.
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I watched the video with the Lua script. I honestly didn't like the cuts. I wanted to see the "boring stuff" just because of how I am. All videos should be published as they appear in the game unless it would be very beneficial to the viewer to make a modification (solid magnet beams in Megaman 1, for example). Speed ups and slow downs are not. Any modern video player would have a speed up/slow down button. Come on!
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I don't like the "come on" part. I watched the video with the script because I don't fancy the idea of pressing ctrl+right a few times every couple minutes. I've already seen the score tallies and special levels from other runs. These parts were factored in my appraisal of the run. I really don't see how it's wrong to publish two encodes with this in mind. That is, in case it gets published at all.
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moozooh wrote:
I really don't see how it's wrong to publish two encodes with this in mind.
Having two encodes, one of which uses the script, is entirely different from having it published as a single encode using the script (as klmz suggested). I object to the latter (as does adelikat and Kles, if I understood them correctly): the published version should be uncut. Having a secondary encode, that removing the special stages (and maybe score tallies), being linked to at the run's page is a different matter. Even then, I would prefer to modify the script so that it removes only special stages, (possibly) the score tallies and (maybe) the Hyper Sonic flashing.
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It would be the exact same thing as the Cam Hack from another Sonic game. There's two encode, one with and one without the Cam Hack.
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ZeXr0 wrote:
It would be the exact same thing as the Cam Hack from another Sonic game. There's two encode, one with and one without the Cam Hack.
in the case of the cam hack it was because without it, the game would have been renamed " moving screen advance 2"
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I'd view this as being like the "no cutscenes" Super Metroid encodes: they're a nice bonus for the people who watch the forums, but they shouldn't be part of the official publication, and whether or not a game gets published should not be predicated on their use. Alternate encodings in publications should be used to make movies more understandable, not more entertaining.
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I liked the scripted encode more, to be sure, but I can't see any reasoning that the published encode would have any content removed or edited; the "main" or "primary" version should be the game, exactly as it is. I think providing a more entertaining encode as a secondary option is certainly a good idea, though.
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I'm still mesmerized by the special stages, perhaps only because I think these songs sound similar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub9-Vrzwq4w#t=31s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6UspBkzMag#t=47s
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marzojr wrote:
adelikat wrote:
If a movie needs a lua script to remove boring content, that sounds like a good candidate for rejection, not special modification.
The main issue in this case are the special stages: they comprise about half the run's length (some 25-27 minutes all told), and they are boring no matter what is done to make them fun. However, there is nothing that can be done about it other than not doing a 100% run... which is a goal of the run, hence cannot be done in this case.
Well, this isn't a good argument for the boringness though. We don't have to put up with something just because it is part of the goal choice. Because we don't have to put up with it at all. However, that wasn't really my point but instead that the yes vote for the cut versions should instead be no votes.
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So if I'm finding the run acceptable based on a cut version I should automatically find it unacceptable based on the uncut one? You're probably constructing this argument wrong. What I think you wanted to say is "if you only find the movie acceptable when you're watching the cut version, it can't be counted as a yes vote".
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I don't really get why everyone seems to want the scripted encode...like I said, it's horrible, and instead of just smoothly jumping between the points, it ends up as some wacky loading or wait screen with irritating, out-of-place choppy "music". Even the music and flash removal isn't too much to justify it. And regardless, I totally agree with the "tolerable only with cuts = no" version. Even without that, like I said, this movie knows its goals, and yet, it doesn't know them. There's still a lot of level skipped that could've been showed off in instead ("to better showcase the abilities of Super Sonic and Hyper Sonic"), and it overall felt like an old version of the movie, just with emeralds and a couple new tricks related to them added.
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System Error wrote:
I don't really get why everyone seems to want the scripted encode...like I said, it's horrible, and instead of just smoothly jumping between the points, it ends up as some wacky loading or wait screen with irritating, out-of-place choppy "music"
I'm considering making another encode that just skips the emeralds and removes the hyper sonic music/flash. I would also like to have it skip the score tallys too, but not the stage title screens as it makes the audio skip around a bit more than I'd like. I haven't looked at the script to see if this is possible though.
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moozooh wrote:
So if I'm finding the run acceptable based on a cut version I should automatically find it unacceptable based on the uncut one? You're probably constructing this argument wrong. What I think you wanted to say is "if you only find the movie acceptable when you're watching the cut version, it can't be counted as a yes vote".
Yes this, apologies for not making it clear.
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So now that this has been accepted, the question is simple; what exactly does this run have as a category? No level skips?
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Why do people so hate watching the bonus levels, anyways? Again, I don't like the potential precedent on skipping parts just because they seem boring to some people. Even the long as hell level up sequence in Circle of the Moon should be left as it is, because it's part of the game and part of the run.