This is an improvement of 7041 frames (1m57s) over the previous submission. Many nice new skips have been found by real time runners of this game, prompting a long overdue improvement to the any% run. We can now skip three of the four major levels, leaving Lava Powerhouse as the main barricade for a sub 5 minute run. This run has now been completed on Bizhawk rather than Gens, which does cause the occasional difference in loading times unfortunately, but nothing too significant.

It may be short, it may have been TASed many times before, but it's nice how there are still improvements to be found. A better exit after the sewer pipe allows better speed preservation getting to the barrel, so we can take the regular route down. The climb to the boss room has now been reduced to only two bounces, which now definitely is as few as it's ever going to be. The boss itself also gains a small improvement, by starting the destruction along the tail immediately, rather than travelling through to the opposite side first.

Currently the only level we need to do properly. A nice ricochet off the first enemy saves a second getting to the upper chamber. Proper bouncing off the nearby bumper gets us to the first cook loop a bit faster, and then super spinning down the central pipe is faster than just falling. These savings mean that when trying to drop into the upper right chamber, we're too early to squeeze underneath the farron, so we need to ricochet around to go over instead. For the boss, unfortunately there is faster loading which prevents triggering the heads early, as it would not give us enough time to wedge ourselves in before they fully appear. This means that the boss has been done slightly slower, but that's offset by a new glitch. For some reason, the final sequence managed to be triggered without needing to wait for the fourth head be destroyed, which provides a huge saving.

The first of the two new glitches allowing for major skips. When Sonic is grabbed by a contraption which halts his movement, it does so by teleporting him into position and negating his X and Y velocities. It also negates his Y sub velocity, yet not his X sub velocity. This means that by holding L or R as we enter, there is still a tiny truncation of speed which is acted upon, allowing for a slight deviation to the left or right while inside. Now, the rotating cages are such a contraption, but normally the connecting tubes thrust sonic upwards which overrides movement, and so we enter without any sub velocity. However, certain setups on how we choose to enter can stagger the path a bit, which does allow enough time to regain control just before entering, allowing movement and thus the glitch to be activated. This allows us to now fall into the boss room, or bounce in for a faster method. Other such contraptions include the spawn pod at the start of Toxic Caves, or the steam powered vertical shafts on Lava Powerhouse.

And now the second major saving, allowing the majority of this level to be skipped too. The walls and floors are far from perfect in this game, and even the blocked entrance to Robotnik's ship still has a little lip sticking out which Sonic will happily land on. We still need to destroy the first blocks though, or else there will be clucks blocking our access to the upper chambers. The lack of perfect symmetry of the level means we can't do the same glitch on the right hand side sadly, even though it would be ~100 frames faster to access if we could.

All three get improved, including an 18 frame saving on the third minigame, but it sadly loses 28 frames to loading for some reason.

ThunderAxe31: Judging.

ThunderAxe31: Great job! Accepting as improvement over the current publication.

feos: Pub along with Samson.