Sonic Adventure 2 - Security Hall - m5 - 0:18.45 SadisticMystic 2024-10-13 | Sonic Adventure 2 - Security Hall - m5 - 0:18.45
Pokémon USUM - How to Let Your Puppy Take Half a Million Damage and LIVE! SadisticMystic 2018-05-08 | Good thing they're not making any more games in the series on 32-bit platforms, huh?After a bunch of digging, I managed to find a few different setups that caused monstrous amounts of damage to "overflow" and wrap around back to comparatively small values. This latest such setup is the most striking of them all, both because of how quickly it's possible to get to the point of the battle, and because it doesn't rely on the newly discovered mechanic that led me to search for these things in the first place--indeed, a very similar setup should be possible (with the same result) going all the way back to generation 5. Plus you get to hear me talk for 15 minutes to provide background on this whole thing, in case you're into that for some strange reason.Credits:Battle originally played by myself and EisenherzVideo ripped to PC by DaWoblefetThe various games in the Pokémon franchise are produced by Game Freak and published by NintendoThis video contains the "Record Scratch" sound snippet made by Luffy from freesound.org, and licensed under CC-BY
Finale: vs. Red - Pacifist% SadisticMystic 2017-06-16 | This is an unabridged video dump of the final battle of my revisitation playthough of Pokémon Gold version, chronicled at nuzlockeforums.com/forum/index.php?threads/18041 and made to accompany the 29th update to that run. You probably don't want to watch the whole thing, let alone in one setting.Due to issues holding the video in memory while recording, the sound cuts out for good starting about a third of the way through, and the video framerate often goes through some stutters where some portions play in slow motion, followed by a rushed few seconds where it speeds through frames in an attempt to catch up. I'm aware of these problems, and while they certainly don't look good, like I said, this isn't really intended for actual viewing.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Hinder Time Trial - 0:44.860 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | Yes, even with all that wall running over lava, the fastest route is to play this level for zero deaths.With the hallway 12 to 15 seconds in positioned almost directly above the home stretch, some of the geometry there looks eminently breakable. But it was not to be, and so we must settle for a long route, at least in comparison to most other maps.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Hawk Time Trial - 0:19.247 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | Ah, the shortest of all official time trial maps in the game, at least judging by completion time.It would be much easier to follow what's going on here if I had a way of showing the material boundaries, in particular the kill zones that need dodging on that launch reversal over the ring (it's not just the ring itself that's deadly, but a good chunk in front of and behind it, even extending out over the lip of the hallway that you have to enter). But those are only visible while editing the level, so you'll just have to take it from me: yes, this is a poorly designed level, one of many maps by TristamK with a similar theme, and similar verdict.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Test Chamber Time Trial - 0:19.772 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | Test Chamber may be a short stage, but that doesn't stop it from being annoying to optimize. The late wall jump, the checkpoint reset, the double spike with so little space to work with on the last platform...a lot can go wrong, sometimes in nearly imperceptible ways. I had racked up about 100 swordless laps in the 20s, including a 20.003, until finally breaking through with the one good lap here.Because everything's so quick on this level, I deviated from my normal habit of restarting the demo if it gets more than one or two bad runs, so there ended up being almost 3 minutes of bad runs before it, and I fast forwarded through those during playback.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Relax Time Trial - 0:28.560 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | What's this? A trial stage where you can't die except by suicide? And bright, semitransparent rainbow colors everywhere?Clearly, as the name implies, this was designed to be a relaxing stage. But even with no risk of dying, the curved wall climbs can get you if you're not careful, wasting all your boosts and costing time to build that meter back up. Those three spots are the main points to optimize, and spinning the field of view around fast enough to get up with minimal boosts and minimal hesitation can be far from a walk in the park.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Neodrive Time Trial - 0:35.990 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | "Dare.""Double dare.""Physical challenge.""Okay then, hope you enjoy taking a plunge into a slime pit. Or that you can make U-turns on a dime and run on uphill tightropes."
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Steel Rat Time Trial - 0:27.486 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | What, oversized checkpoint resets in Steel Rat? Why would I use _those_, when something far more potent is available?Running on invisible walls. Standing on invisible floors. And then warping right to the end of the level just for the hell of it. Enjoy these things while you can, because I've fixed the version of the map that's going to appear in RE 1.5. (Yes, the checkpoint issue is fixed too.)
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Purge Time Trial - 0:59.862 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | There are some people out there, no idea who, but they'd be satisfied with skipping 1:13. As for me, I prefer being able to skip 1:00 on the same level.Compared to 1:03, I now hit the third checkpoint reset (by far the biggest one) with the spectate button, instead of waiting a tiny bit longer to move over to the derez material and die that way. Also, at the ensuing wall climb, it's possible to get up with just three boosts after the launch instead of 4, leaving more energy for the next section and making it unnecessary to crouch there.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Decomposition Time Trial - 0:47.159 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | This map is actually newer than the 1.4.5 milestone tag, but it's a solid piece of construction, even serving is the first exhibit for a new texture pack, and it's going to be included in the 1.5 release so I figured I'd go after that one too.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Cyanide Time Trial - 0:39.612 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | As solid as the old 41.458 was, it still had a lot to give. The main improvement to the route here is that both of the wall runs on gap 3 go forward, to avoid having to do a wall kick straight up that wastes time to gain no lateral distance, but the rest of the route was marginally faster as well, particularly the smoothness of the first "warped wall" climb. It's still zero-death, and still zero-crouch except for the automatic crouch under the first tube, after both warped walls.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - War Depot Time Trial - 0:29.276 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | Do not try this at home. And especially don't try this at your local "war depot". Not only do they probably fall short in the departments of "ceilings you can phase through" and "invisible floors", but if they caught you trying to mimic the feat anyway, they'd just shoot you for trespassing. And no one wants that, except maybe your insurance beneficiaries.This map is going to be a new addition to 1.5, or rather a fixed version is going to be such. A version that doesn't stick a pipe so close to the ceiling, making this route obviously impossible.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Absorption Time Trial - 1:09.545 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | Like Amplification, this is a map by the same (anonymous) author, which wasn't released until well after the 1.4 update. And again, it makes use of "crazy floor", this time in the starting room and in one avoidable spot right before the end. But the stage is a lot more orderly here, so this map is going to survive and be included in future releases.It is the longest of the official maps, though--in fact, the only one that can't be completed in under a minute with default settings. There's just too much climbing and gap-crossing for that.
Red Eclipse 1.4.5 - Amplification Time Trial - 0:32.133 SadisticMystic 2014-10-22 | Amplification is a map that was added after 1.4 and was briefly going to be in the official rotation, but was eventually taken back out because it's annoying to most players. The fact that a route like this exists, probably doesn't help its case either.Normally you're supposed to go circling the stage, hopping between platforms and making a gradual descent, but that's really, really slow. For the "huge jump" route, there is a kill zone that starts 20 meters below the top of the wall here. Before I fall down that far, I have to cross a 60-meter gap with just a wall jump and a double jump. It took a good while to work out that a jump like that was possible even with the help of slow motion and the coordinates available in edit mode, but knowledge is a wonderful thing, and armed with that possibility, I was able to replicate it in full speed. Sure, it's no longer the most annoying single jump in any official RE map, but only because Amplification is no longer an "official RE map", as previously noted.
(OLD) Red Eclipse - Steel Rat Time Trial - 0:38.891 SadisticMystic 2014-02-07 | Red Eclipse is a high-speed FPS that focuses on freedom of motion, including such things as double jumps, sliding, and wall running.It also features a time trial mode where there are no enemies and you simply race to the end of the course, which is what I'm after here. Steel Rat has a peculiar distinction; it was added in the most recent (as of this writing) 1.4 release with the intention of being an official time-trial map, but never got included in the appropriate variables for setting the map rotation. Many players, then, might not even be aware that it exists. But it does, and if you're reading this and interested in taking up RE (assuming you haven't already), it's out there to race on!About 15 seconds in, the intended route for the level is supposed to take a sidetrack through a cramped, twisting air duct. However, the checkpoint just beyond that section has a pretty large bounding sphere, to the point where I can *just* touch the edge of that sphere from in front of a solid grate, then go in and out of spectate mode to warp through the grate and continue on. Fun stuff.
(OLD) Red Eclipse - Purge Time Trial - 1:12.785 SadisticMystic 2014-02-07 | Red Eclipse is a high-speed FPS that focuses on freedom of motion, including such things as double jumps, sliding, and wall running.It also features a time trial mode where there are no enemies and you simply race to the end of the course, which is what I'm after here. Purge is among the longest of the official maps, and a lap time of 1:30 is generally pretty competent. I'm not after mere competence, though, but total mastery, and for that it helps to know some things like...some of this level's checkpoints are rather oversized, and by intentionally dying as soon as I hit the best estimate of their edges, it's sometimes possible to not only refill the boost bar, but move slightly forward upon respawning as well, in some cases eliminating the need to jump over obstacles.There are a couple failed runs at the start, which only get about 2 seconds in before dying, and then the attempt which would eventually succeed. The starting sprint is definitely the most involved part of this route--becuase of that first checkpoint I might as well use up all my boosts to speed up before getting there, and I end up hitting the jump button a total of 12 times in just that opening straightaway. Making sure you land in the right spot each time, at those speeds, isn't the easiest thing, but fortunately a failure doesn't cost much since you'll just spawn back at start which is right there.
Red Eclipse - Escape (Hard Version) Time Trial - 1:11.543 SadisticMystic 2014-02-07 | Red Eclipse is a high-speed FPS that focuses on freedom of motion, including such things as double jumps, sliding, and wall running.It also features a time trial mode where there are no enemies and you simply race to the end of the course, which is what I'm after here. Escape is a map that's still unofficial for now, and comes in two versions: first, the "easy" mode that features fewer obstacles, more footholds to stop and catch your breath, and most importantly boost rings that can fling you forward past several of the challenges.Needless to say, the "hard" version gives you none of that. Especially in the blue section, the challenges can be downright brutal, and just trying to get through all 8 sections of the level on the first try is practically enough to go insane over. At least it's not 10 sections, as it would be if not for my choice of route in the beginning.Each time I hit a checkpoint, I quickly go into spectate mode and back, effectively committing suicide to refill the boost meter, and that does save time but it unfortunately introduces even more fidgety factors that can go wrong. Just crazy, I say.And yes, before I set this time, my previous best on the map was a 1:16.482, so I did skip 1:13 among other benchmarks.
(OLD) Red Eclipse - Cyanide Time Trial - 0:41.458 SadisticMystic 2014-02-07 | Red Eclipse is a high-speed FPS that focuses on freedom of motion, including such things as double jumps, sliding, and wall running.It also features a time trial mode where there are no enemies and you simply race to the end of the course, which is what I'm after here. Cyanide is a fairly simple map once you get used to it, and completion times of 45 to 55 seconds are fairly routine. On this route, however, the movements are so tight that I never even have to wait for the boost meter to refill: its natural rate of recovery, even while running, is enough to budget for all the moves I need. (The meter refills faster while standing still, and even more so while crouching, but that's just slow, so why wait if you can help it?)
RocksnDiamonds - Snake Bite Levelset in 56:30.08 (TAS) SadisticMystic 2012-11-02 | (SHOW MORE FOR TABLE OF CONTENTS)I don't know if you've heard of Rocks'n'Diamonds before; it's an open-source game with a long history (first released in 1995, and one of its _raisons d'etre_ is to act as an emulator for the 1984 game Boulder Dash) found at http://artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds . It easily encompassed Supaplex, Sokoban, and similar games in that vein; there are some quirks with teleports and a few other tiles that prevent it from recreating Chip's Challenge, but it's similar to that.Of course, the engine is capable of so much more, and that's a big reason why the game attracted much of its following. The high point may have come in 2005 when a guy named Alan Bond created Snake Bite, a custom level and graphics set for the game that turns it into a variation on the Snake game (albeit with a lot more elements to work with), which is generally seen as the most well-built add-on for the game. The same guy also created a couple "Zelda" levelsets, which are quite thorough and complicated overhauls as well, but they just don't have the same solid feel to them, especially considering the name they're trying to live up to.RnD comes with a "tape" system so you can save replays of your best completions of each level, and it even allows you to turn on "1-Step" mode, where you can play in slow motion and plan out your moves ahead of time, as a primitive TAS framework.1-Step is nice to have, but there are a few other features I wanted in order to make high-level optimization so much easier. The author of RnD, Holger Schemel, seems to have disappeared without a trace, and the game's forum has been "temporarily down for maintenance" for the last two years, so I did what any self-respecting open source user would do and hacked those features into my own personal copy of the codebase. Most notably from the standpoint of this video, you'll see a timer with subsecond precision, which is something you won't get from the stock installation.Level authors can include premade tapes as demonstrations for their levels, and Alan included a set of tapes that made use of 1-Step mode for what he thought was an optimal completion; altogether those tapes yield a total time of about 99:47 for the 30 levels, and he challenged anyone to beat that. Needless to say, I took up the challenge, making better use of luck manipulation, monster movement, frame-by-frame analysis of elements, and even a few glitches (most notorious is one that I've nicknamed "God Mode", which allows you to get rid of the control objects making up the snake, and play the rest of the level with just the disembodied head, which greatly improves your mobility and renders you immune to several hazards). All in all, it adds up to over 41 minutes of savings, and something that should probably differentiate itself a lot more compared to unassisted play. Levels 8, 17, 23, 29, and 30 are particularly worth watching.And now that I'm finally working from a machine that was put together more recently than 2003, I can finally record the game in its full quality to make it worthy of putting up here. There was one more hurdle I had to clear (several of the tapes desynced at first, because Holger somehow thought it was a good idea to declare variables of type "long" to hold reproducible random state information), but hey, this hacking thing goes a long way, and now you can finally see the results.If you have any questions about the routes, whether you've played RnD/Snake Bite or not, go ahead and ask!Table of Contents (with quick-jump times): 1. (0:07) "entrance hall" in 0:26.582. (0:42) "red and green should never be seen" in 1:17.963. (2:09) "rollerballs" in 1:27.584. (3:45) "spit it out" in 1:37.665. (5:33) "door mania" in 0:55.246. (6:37) "intermission 1" in 0:28.147. (7:14) "round and around" in 1:46.048. (9:08) "r-r-rebounders!" in 1:09.429. (10:28) "gyro" in 2:39.3810. (13:14) "demolition training 101" in 2:27.7411. (15:51) "deflectors" in 1:19.8412. (17:18) "intermission 2" in 0:40.3013. (18:08) "level 12a" in 1:32.5614. (19:49) "rattus norvegicus" in 1:41.3215. (21:39) "driving range" in 2:41.1816. (24:28) "your move, creep" in 1:39.9217. (26:17) "i got a crush on you" in 2:36.7018. (29:01) "intermission 3" in 0:15.1619. (29:26) "calipso" in 2:03.6420. (31:40) "hunted!" in 2:00.3821. (33:49) "keep on rollin'" in 0:57.3622. (34:55) "mad footy skillz" in 2:59.3223. (38:02) "room 101" in 3:19.1824. (41:27) "baker street" in 2:56.0225. (44:32) "intermission 4" in 0:11.5626. (44:53) "a trick of the tail" in 1:36.2627. (46:38) "rooms of doom" in 1:58.3828. (48:44) "necropolis" in 2:56.5029. (51:47) "rumble in the jungle" in 3:40.8230. (55:35) "intermission 5-20" in 5:07.94
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Cosmic Wall - 0:41.42...wait, what? SadisticMystic 2012-07-18 | It's time for another installment of Leftover SA2B Mysteries!I don't normally pay much attention to the 2P mode at all, since there aren't really any stats to track there, and it has nothing at all to do with the unlocks. But this one is too good to pass up.In some cases (especially Sonic/Shadow levels), the 2P mode reuses the same stage as 1P mode, just overwriting the object definitions with its own specialized set. Other times, they construct a new level (including geometry), possibly copying over some or most of the polygons from the 1P level, and write new object definitions from scratch.And still other times, they're just lazy. As you've probably grown well-accustomed to over the years, that opens the door for me to shine.The 1-player version of Cosmic Wall is level ID 43. Almost all of the walkable ground in the level consists of two types of platforms: long rectangles, which are hardcoded into the level geometry of the model file, and squares, which can be placed as an object (ID 65). The start of Cosmic Wall has several rectangular platforms stepping up but adjacent to each other, which won't work for the type of battleground they had in mind. And since they can't dynamically erase those platforms depending on mode, having the 2P Cosmic Wall battle take place in level 43 was a non-starter. They ended up having to create a new level for it, giving the new level an ID of 53.And then, for some reason that I can't even begin to figure out, they started off its object file (set0053_s.bin) by simply copying over what was in set0043_s.bin. The whole point of starting a new level was that it wasn't supposed to have the relics of the old one, so since they ended up having to nuke all the object entries from the file that would have been visible from around the starting point for aesthetic reasons anyway (leaving 23K of totally useless objects), why bother leaving anything there? All that does is allow someone to unearth your tracks and make some crazy video about it 10-plus years down the line.Considering how much space Cosmic Wall spans, the 2P fight is meant to be contained within a rather small bounding box. There are invisible walls on the left side of the arena at the line X = -300, on the right side at X = +300, to the back at Z = -310, and to the front at Z = +150.Now, as it turns out, there's a small gap in one of the corners that you can break out through with a flying start (in fact, even normal-speed characters can break through, but Tails in the red mech is easily the most popular choice for it, and as the fastest character, it works best for my purposes here anyway). Even before me, it's been well-documented that by hovering out to the right place, you can see certain leftovers from the 1P stage, including two parallel lines of 6 rings pointing toward a circle of 8. Those rings are at heights of 407 and 406, and the highest you can get up to is about 375, so they're fated to be just out of reach. And from there the level goes nowhere but up for quite a while. It does eventually take a few dips, but nothing for the rest of the level that puts objects anywhere close to heights of 300-400, or lower.Except.Except Cosmic Wall wouldn't be the same without those symbols of extravagance, the rail rides. Not only are they the highest-scoring portions of the game, they also cross long swaths of the stage at speeds Eggman has no business getting anywhere close to (not since Sonic 2's Death Egg Zone, anyway). Of course, rail 2 concludes in a very long, straight-line downhill segment. The hill starts at a height of about 4300, but it keeps going...and going...and going, crossing well into negative heights, and finally ending just above the goal ring.Needless to say, the goal ring, along with all the objects in its immediate vicinity, is still there in the 2P version. And amazingly enough, it's actually reachable, but you might have a devil of a time getting there.The coordinates for the goal ring are (+3550, -1570, +29690). And unless you're on a trajectory to get at least somewhat close to all those coordinates at the same time (to see either the ring itself or the surrounding platforms or meteors), you have nothing at all to guide you, and little choice but to fall forever (or fall too soon, where there's still a kill plane and you just die). Eggman takes almost 3 minutes to cover a similar distance in the single-player speedrun route, and even there you can see the tunnel descending above you as a landmark to line up with. Red-mech Tails is so much faster, and reckless, in a completely barren landscape (oh sure, why not, "spacescape")...Well, you try it. You can be thankful that kill planes are part of level geometry, not the object file, so they weren't copied over and a route like this is at least possible.
XGRA - Subsonic Warmonger Cup (All kills) SadisticMystic 2011-12-19 | Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's a common dispensation among the transhumanist crowd, but I sure do like me some futuristic racers. As if you couldn't tell. This time it's XGRA, which they didn't call XG4 because...who knows? If I had to guess, I'd say that as part of a sequential numbering scheme, the number 3 brings a feel of excitement, no doubt due in part to a subconscious link to the apocalyptic imagery of a World War 3. Meanwhile, by the time you get to the 4th installment of something, calling it as such just sounds tacky. Anyway, the premise here is that you have 8 riders and 8 teams racing it out in various sponsored cups, but the riders can swap back and forth between teams for each cup. Kind of like NFL kickers, if you think about it. And in addition to the races at hand, there are side goals given by the choice of team ("contract incentives") which don't directly help the standings, but completing them will enhance your bike's capabilities for future cups, or even replaying past cups for a better career score. A perfect profile in the game consists of 1622 points: finishing first awards 10 to 50 points per race, depending on the bike class used in each cup, for a total of 1580. The remaining 42 points have to come from kills, where the two cups played under the Warmonger rules each provide a bonus point for every opponent you can destroy in each race. Somehow they all survive for you to destroy them again next race, but hey--more points for you! The good news is there are only two Warmonger cups in the game. The bad news is that the first of those, at the Subsonic class, is easily the most difficult cup in the entire game to max out, due mainly to the fact that you have only 2 laps to rack up all 7 kills in each race, and have to repeat it for three straight races. This was the last cup I had to max out on my own profile, and now you can watch that process in action here. Bear in mind: If there's infighting among the other racers and they destroy each other, that's a point that doesn't go to me; objective failed. If one of the autoguns on the track deals a finishing blow, no one gets that kill point; objective failed. Heck, if I send a bike up in smoke and it finally explodes in close enough proximity to another bike that the blast destroys that one too, the game fails to award credit for the second kill there; objective failed. My mission is further hampered by the fact that weapons are generally weak compared to the health bars on the bikes, emphasizing that this is meant as a racing game and not an all-out combat game. The best weapon to get kills is the level 3 rocket, which fires of six homing missiles in a row: extremely easy to use and aim even as you go through the winding turns of the tracks. The trouble is that you don't start with level 3 rockets, you start with level 1, and go up a level with each of the first two kills. It's feasible to get kills with level 1, but it requires a sustained effort of 4-5 shots, which is generally out of the question except on long straightaways. Level 2 rockets are just plain bad, since it fires four unguided missiles to use up the ammo that much faster, and there's a delay between each one so good luck keeping them aimed in the right spot even a couple seconds from now. Usually at least 2-3 of those shots will be a complete waste. Actually, scratch that. Level 3 rockets aren't the easiest kill-shot weapon in the game. You have these green hologram power-ups scattered all over the track, and depending on how many you want to save up, you can get different weapons and recharges. At the very top end, cashing in 10 power-ups at once earns a SiNN Deathstrike: SiNN is basically the ESPN of the future, according to the story, and the Deathstrike lets you call up the network executives and ask "Hey, see that guy in front of me? Can't you fire a massive beam down from space to destroy them instantly?" Given how much disregard they have for these supposedly world-class riders who are skilled enough to make the sport so exciting that it brings in such huge ratings, of course they'll oblige that request! Isn't this game great? So level 1 rockets are serviceable but narrow, and level 2 rockets are extremely unwieldy. My plan in each course will be to use a deathstrike as the second kill so I can go straight on to level 3 and hopefully mow down the other 5 bikes in time for the 2-lap race, of course assuming they don't destroy each other and deny me a perfect 27 for the race. And in addition to a a massive slaughterfest, these races even bring some nice scenes with them too. Just wait 69 more years and you can find out if the world really will be like they say!
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle - Final Chase - m5 - All rings (653/653) SadisticMystic 2011-12-09 | Almost two years ago, I recorded Cosmic Wall all-rings (well, all rings on Dreamcast, because that was what I had). It was tough, but I completed it in the nick of time: not three minutes after I finished recording the material for that video, my Dreamcast broke, victim of a bad disc motor. Some months later, I tracked down the internal files that made the game tick, mainly the object definition files. Deciphering them without a working system and game to check with was tough, but out of all people, go figure that I knew the game well enough to undertake such a task from memory. So now I had a deeper understanding of the game, but couldn't do anything with it. Flash forward to October 2010. I picked up a GameCube for my birthday (sticking to last-gen consoles is nice and cheap and you should try it some time). So almost 9 years after its launch, I finally got my hands on Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, despite already being a leading authority on the game by proxy from what I knew of the DC version. I explored it to see what was different, but ultimately I didn't find anything new that merited a video. So the game just sat in its case for a while. Earlier this year, I got hold of the SA2B object files to go along with the SA2 set, so now I could exhaustively scan for differences. Most of it was expected, and/or decorations, but there were a few surprises. SA2B wasn't just a verbatim port of SA2. Among the changes, they sought to take advantage of more powerful hardware by adding detail in many levels. Inevitably, there were ideas that didn't pan out and had to be removed. Normally this was resolved by deletion, but in a few notable cases they "blanked out" such objects. Object entries are 32 bytes long. If all the bytes are zero-valued, it still has semantic meaning: "Place object #0 (a single ring) at the coordinates (0,0,0)." And SA2B has two spectacular examples of this. You may already know Metal Harbor: in hard mode only, you can see a ring floating below the start, and touching it awards 75 rings. That's the result of the game dutifully loading set0010_hd_s.bin, which has a 2400-byte stretch of nothing but zeroes shortly before the end. The origin is fairly easy to reach in that level, and you can't do anything with the rings except die, so that's about as far as the mystery can unfold there. But there's one more level that was the victim of a mass blanking, this one far more obscure (unless and until this video itself shapes public perception). Like Metal Harbor, Final Chase also has a GC-only, m5-only ring stash. This time, it's even bigger: 4192 null bytes, for 131 rings. And this time, the stage is different too... (0,0,0) is a short distance above and behind the starting point. And by happy accident, the starting rail keeps curving back...directly to the origin, beyond which point the rail keeps snaking further up, but it dematerializes as soon as that X-coordinate goes positive. It's a tough camera to fight, but you can get there and see 131 rings floating there as one, just beneath the highest point the rail will take you before throwing you off the edge of the world. And thanks to the light dash, you can grab them and land back on the rail to continue on your merry way. A word of caution. That glut of rings makes for the one and only chance in the entire game to demonstrate an extremely obscure technical limitation: Characters can only process collisions with 128 objects in a single frame, and the light dash sometimes takes you through the rings in just one frame before you land on the rail. In this case the remaining 3 rings are left behind, and you'll have to go back up for the leftovers if you want all the rings. Thankfully that didn't happen here. Getting the rings right away will put you on a good start for 623/623 rings (and getting a shield from the first checkpoint is nice), but is that the best you can do? Of course not! Taking advantage of son1cgu1tar's deceptively difficult backtrack to the first sloped road, I brought two checkpoints into the fold and set out on a mission: as tight as SA2 ring stats were, I had the chance to demolish a record there by 125. Suffice it to say, this is the last time we'll ever see such an improvement to a ring record in this game. Special thanks to "brianpso", who sent me a PM last week asking about weird stuff in the game. I was going to mention the Final Chase rings, but first I wanted to see just what the situation regarding them was, and once I found out that they were in fact reachable, I had to put my response on hold. There was other business to attend to. For the first time in a long time, I saw the chance for a stat that was so jaw-dropping that it would justify my return. It's nice to be back, isn't it?
Sonic Adventure 2 - Cosmic Wall - m1 - All rings (479/479) SadisticMystic 2010-02-07 | This was originally going to come out much sooner, but let's just say the level itself paled in difficulty compared to getting the soundtrack up to par with the precedent set back in the CC4 realtime run. Personally I think the leftover game SFX still sound horrible. It didn't help that my Dreamcast died about 2 minutes after I finished getting what I thought I needed from the sound test. (Emphasis on "thought".) Not much to say about it, except that Dreamcast really gets hosed in this level. If you try this route on GameCube, it yields a 527 because there are extra rings and balloons in the shaft ascents. Also, if it's somehow possible to break out at the entrance to rail ride 2 (something I've never been able to do), the maximum increases to 484 DC/532 GC, but otherwise this is as good as it gets.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Cannons Core - m4 (Realtime speedrun) - 4:06.52 SadisticMystic 2009-09-16 | You've probably seen enough playthroughs of CC from me that aim to minimize the game clock through extensive use of the time switches. You may also have seen one of the two playthroughs I did in 4 that hit no time switches whatsoever, which, while possible, involves getting slowed down by some of the obstacles. So then I decided to see how well I could do when minimizing real time, as opposed to game time, is the aim above all else. In order to have a uniform point of comparison across the different systems and different magnitudes of scratched discs, I'm tracking this such that time played under the influence of time switches obviously counts on top of the game time, but loading times and fade in/fade out don't. This conveniently allows us to say that the realtime value of a time-switch-less run is exactly equal to its game clock. But really, that wasn't the main reason I made this video. I wanted to see how effective a method I had for removing the game music, while leaving the level's other sound effects intact. Why would I ever want to do that? Maybe so I can replace the music with something else. While I'm at it, may as well go all out, right? (Part 4's music wasn't removed, because the song I had planned for this runs out right as part 4 kicks in. Oh well. And if you can't make it out clearly, or just want something to click on, the artist URL that appears on screen in the video is http://signalburst.org/josh .) (And once again a shout out to Kdenlive, a tool that's available at http://kdenlive.org, for making some of the video effects here a lot easier to manage.)
Sonic Adventure 2 - Sky Rail - m4 (with Tails) - why are you chasing the Tornado? SadisticMystic 2009-09-07 | why would you even want to watch this crap I mean, I just did another Sky Rail 4 video and unlike the other one, this one's just a minute of staring at nothing but the background well I guess you could compare them like a race, to see if Tails with hover can beat Shadow without the A button but WHY REALLY (notes: this video was recorded back on January 3, the same time as the Final Chase one. CodeBreaker codes for "Play as Tails" on Dreamcast: 0F0C0D76 00000008 (master); 0124EE6C 00000006 (the actual play as Tails code))
Sonic Adventure 2 - Sky Rail - m4 (A button challenge) - 0 SadisticMystic 2009-09-07 | Sky Rail...home of the shortest mission-4 time limit in the game...played with a mobility restriction that makes it hard to go places. Particularly when those places are "up". Where one bad attempt in any number of places can have you slipping off the edge and into a void. And where you're not done with the challenge even after the goal ring is in sight. But it can't be too hard, can it? I thought not. Let's go!
Sonic Adventure - Casinopolis - Sonic (with help from Tails) - 0:00.96 SadisticMystic 2009-08-28 | You know what they say. First one under a minute, leads to first one under a second. Oh wait, they don't actually say that, but what the hell. Mize. There's a really old glitch out there that if you send a 2P-controlled Tails into one of the pinball warps in Casinopolis, Sonic gets dragged toward the machine as well. Really old, and not particularly useful for much on its own. Less well-known is the fact that when you read information monitors, the clock stops (unlike in the sequel). But beyond that..._you can still move 2P Tails while the message is displaying._ Hm. What good can we do if we can control Tails but not Sonic? Oh right. That. For some strange reason, if Sonic gets dragged into the warp with time stopped, time doesn't restart upon loading the next area. Furthermore, once you're out into the next area, you can scroll through the message with buttons, and time won't restart once you've gone through all the lines! It won't even restart on subsequent area loads either! Good times. "knyght4christ" has the first documented demonstration of this on video, from last year, but it was largely overlooked because the 7.96 in that video didn't even break the record of the time. More recently, "1337Rayman" found that video and improved it to 1.79. But it still could be improved. So here's the level in under a second. Yes I could have been apathetic to rings in the sewer and gone around the back, but I actually find that method extremely inconsistent (about 90% of the time that I get behind the barrier, I just get forced back through it anyway while trying to jump on the capsule) and wanted something I knew would work. Maybe some slight improvement could be had with a spindash to the monitor rather than a homing attack, but given the path involved (a straight beeline just gets blocked by the fence) it could go either way. It's even possible to read the monitor in from of the information booth, right next to start. The fastest timestop I've recorded this way is 0.29, but that ends up being for naught. It's hard enough to guide Tails into a machine that's so far offscreen, but even if you do, there's no way to drag Sonic into the machine from there--if you try to go to the Card table, Sonic will get stuck jittering against another fence that's just in front of the machine, and if you try to go to the Slot table, he'll get stuck jittering against the front right corner of the machine itself. Too bad. Finally because it's likely to be overlooked, spiking the pinball with the flipper like that does cause you to lose 2 balls at once. No idea why.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Cannons Core - m1 - All rings (424/418) SadisticMystic 2009-08-18 | Not really speed-oriented here, but I had this recorded for something else already and I figured mize well.The goal I was going for was to complete CC, with all rings (something that's only possible in Dreamcast), while doing without several character upgrades.-Tails and Eggman both go without the Laser Blaster-Eggman goes without Mystic Melody-Rouge goes without Iron Boots-Knuckles goes without Air Necklace (this is the big one)-Sonic goes without Ancient Light or Magic HandsSonic is probably able to get all rings without Light Shoes too, but that involves about a dozen jumps up and down the Chao ramp, and it was already on the file I was working with so no luck on that front.In addition to going without Air Necklace with Knuckles, I also rationed air bubbles to two. You don't even need any air bubbles to get it done, but it certainly takes a lot longer that way. As far as how it turned out, just watch.The Mystic Melody rings are required to get to all rings, and each of the three shrines in the level does something to make the next one accessible. However, you can actually skip Eggman's and just use Knuckles and Rouge, but it takes a trick in order to complete the all-ring run after playing Rouge's melody without Eggman's...a trick that precludes being able to use mission 4. I've included a demonstration of that here.On GameCube, it's not possible to get all rings according to the completion screen because the ring total was corrected there, and includes new rings that replace Big the Cat but are placed in unobtainable locations. In Knuckles' descent through the laser-filled acid room, there's a new 10 box that's GC-only, and then moving over to the right wall with the lightning shield will attract one ring that's behind the wall.The only other Big ring that's obtainable is with Eggman, and in order to get it you have to skip the checkpoint, hover over the gap, play Mystic Melody to make a shield appear, and hover back over the gap to upgrade the shield to a lightning shield. Then hang along the left wall near the time switches at the bottom of the drop, and pull the ring through the wall.Alternatively you can skip at least 21 rings up to the checkpoint, hit the checkpoint to get a 20-ring bonus, then go backwards to the skipped rings. Of course, that also ups the out-of total by 20, and I didn't think it necessary to do that in this run.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Prison Lane - m3 (with Sonic) - 0:49.62 SadisticMystic 2009-06-25 | Only three things to say here: 1. Magic Hands pwn. Really. 2. Wow, they really didn't test the physics in this level for anything smaller than a mech. Or anything with homing attack even. 3. I would have done this on mission 1 (or 4) but that would be a supreme disappointment: Sonic ends up getting blocked at the very end, by the last door, because you need to clear out all the enemies in that room to get the door open and three of them are far enough away that you can neither use Magic Hands on them nor throw MH projectiles formed with other enemies at them. Too bad. (I guess there's a 4 as well: The first time I tried uploading this video, in MP4 format, YT thought it was a minute and 31 seconds long. It's obviously not, so let's see if an AVI container with the same underlying video codec works.) (And a 5, the usual disclaimer about CodeBreaker videos and the codes in place: 0F0C0D76 00000008 (M/Must Be On) 0124EE6C 00000000 (Play as Sonic) 010DB26C 00000063 (99 lives; not strictly here but certainly helpful) )
Sonic Adventure 2 - Final Rush - m4 (A button challenge) - 0 SadisticMystic 2009-06-25 | First, "finalrush7" wanted to know how low Final Rush 1 (how fitting) could go in the low-A challenge. I pointed out that hey, there's this fairly new trick you should already know about; you can go get a 0, which he did. Except...it was a segmented m1 run with a break at check 4, presumably because that's right around the hardest part of the level when you take that path. Segmented button challenges are almost as bad as segmented low score challenges, so I made a point to get another 0, and mine would be non-segmented. Of course mission 4 is a nice way to guarantee that. (The non-segmenting anyway; it's pretty hard to guarantee overall success in a run when you're doing crazy stuff like this.) Some news for you: you don't have to take that path. Come to think of it, forget just flying high above checks 2 and 3, now you can do the same to 1 and 4 as well. Makes the low-A on the level a lot easier, too. Oh and by the way, pulling "it" off (for certain, obvious values of "it") may actually be a time shortcut now, where the old version wasn't.
Pokémon Stadium 2 - R-2 Little Cup - For Want of a Title SadisticMystic 2009-06-09 | ANNOUNCER CHRONICLES - PART 7 It's the moment you've all been waiting for! Time to find out who the best lightweight tag team in the WPD is! For the first time ever, the score will be settled in a Blitz of Death match, with four teams participating for their shot at the glory! [OOC: Yes, the setting (and announcer style) for this installment are vastly different than the concepts for previous parts of the series, to the point where I can't properly consider this canonical alongside the other six. Fortunately, "Announcer Chronicles" is simply a label and not a canon universe. Ever since I created the concept of the Announcer Chronicles, I've always thought of the character as being quite similar to a wrestling announcer (as in WWE). I just figured why not make the spoof incredibly blatant this time? I knew I wanted Scyther/Cubone to be the "heels," and recorded their section first. The first try with them was just about perfect for building a story around, and after testing the dynamics of other teams with a few practice runs, I ended up going with the first recorded runs for two of the other teams as well. I think the fourth team needed 7 tries to get something that fit in with the storyline. (Which team is that? Just watch the damn video. I'm not going to spoil it that easily, especially not if you don't want me to.) The gameplay footage for this video was actually recorded all the way back in March, but even back then I knew I wanted the visual effects you see now, and I didn't have any tools capable of that at the time. Kdenlive (http://kdenlive.org ) looked like a promising program to do exactly what I wanted, but the release that was available back then kept crashing on me whenever I tried to do much of anything. Only recently was I able to get my hands on kdenlive 0.7.4, with which I could at least figure out what made it crash and then not do that, and everything fell into place shortly thereafter. There are a couple of CC-licensed samples added to the audio here: "Boxing Bell" courtesy of Benboncan "Metal Door Slam" courtesy of ReWired ]
Sonic Adventure 2 - Eternal Engine - m4 - All rings in 3:26.34 SadisticMystic 2009-05-29 | So I was in a discussion recently that brought up the feasibility of the all-ring A in Eternal Engine. Of course it's possible, but how much leeway would it have from a perfect run? At first I had set my goal at 4 minutes, which--if that was all I cared about--probably would have gone down within 20 tries. However, based on the stringent style threshold I had developed shortly after starting, I was throwing away a huge number of runs for style reasons even when they could theoretically be salvaged, and realized that a run that lived up to those standards would probably break 3:30 anyway, so that became my target, and it took almost 600 tries to get a run that met the time target and looked good enough. The 20-ring box at 1:30, which you have to shoot blindly through the closed door (or else play forward to a switch and then backtrack, which I won't consider by virtue of wasting a huge amount of time), takes some getting used to. Practice various angles of approach until you find one that's reasonably effective at shooting the ring box quickly. And if you're stuck on GameCube, you're in luck: there's nothing here that you won't be able to do...except get a perfect (and the all-ring A) from 181 rings. It takes 184 there, but at least all the rings are in the same places; a few of the chains just have more rings in them. There's no shortcut around the final tower, and especially no shortcut under the level and straight to the goal, just a scenic tour...in a sportscar...with no brakes.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Cosmic Wall - m1 (with Sonic) - 6:11.04 SadisticMystic 2009-05-06 | The original Cosmic Wall - Sonic video falls under the "terrible sound" descriptor. So I thought I'd make a new version that alleviates that. For that matter, a time of 7:47 leaves much to be desired. Call it a "terrible time" as well, if you like. In any case, I guess chopping a minute and a half off that isn't too bad. The capacity to be more daring certainly shows. And there's a third "terrible" descriptor in there as well: terrible style. Superbounce accuracy under 70%, and the intentional tank at check 4 to make it a segmented run. Segmenting is fine on pure speedruns where I aim for the game clock above anything else, but in exhibition videos like this it just looks bad and defeats much of the purpose. So I set out to make sure this video would be non-segmented. This would normally lead me to play in mission 4, except for the observation that Sonic can't possibly complete Cosmic Wall 4. No it's not the time limit, it's the fact that Sonic needs 90 rings plus a checkpoint (to reward him with a shield) in order to survive the last drill and its two mandatory hits. Oh well. If you're on Dreamcast and you want to play Cosmic Wall as Sonic, I have the Codebreaker codes for that: 0F0C0D76 00000008 - (M), also known as "Master Code (MUST BE ON)" 0124EE6C 00000000 - override character with Sonic; now simply select Cosmic Wall and you're good to go For the purposes of this video, I also used a third code: 010DB26C 00000063, "99 Lives," correctly surmising that it would take me over 100 tries to record a successful run like this and I didn't want to be interrupted by repeated stops at Security Hall or the memory card select screen. If you just want to focus on the super bounce hell that is Cosmic Wall - Sonic, and not on the fact that you have to hold 90 rings through to the last checkpoint, you can add 010DB270 00000001, which forces your ring count to be 1 at all times, even after you've just taken a hit. (You could also change the last 001 to 3E7 and have 999 rings, securing an A rank on rings, but there's really no need to have more than 1 ring if you never lose it when you take a hit.) If you're looking for a moon jump code, I don't have that one, and I wouldn't use it here even if I did. The whole point of the video is that even a level as vertically sparse as Cosmic Wall can be completed using only Sonic's natural set of abilities, given that we provide a way for Sonic to get into the level in the first place.
Sonic Adventure - Windy Valley - Tails - 0:19.23 SadisticMystic 2009-04-23 | For the first time in over six months, I managed to get my SA disc to boot, so I thought I'd do something with it. Really, this is a lot like the dumb Final Chase 4 I recorded some time back (particularly given the route I use, which is a lot less scenic than the WR route prior to my taking it). The only difference? Playing through Windy Valley as Tails actually counts for something. (The way I came across this path to begin with was by using a Codebreaker code that made the kill planes visible, allowing me to figure out how to weave around them safely. I recorded a test run with it, back in the days when SA didn't have problems booting, and studied that video to help figure out what moves I needed to make at what times, so that I could replicate it without having the kill planes visible--obviously times set under codes like that wouldn't count. The test run finished in 19.43, and for a while I was satisfied with being able to come within .01 of that in a no-codes run: 19.44. I guess satisfaction dies out with time.)
Sonic Adventure 2 - Pumpkin Hill - m4 - All rings in 2:48.59 SadisticMystic 2009-04-10 | For years now, Pumpkin Hill has been an ugly eyesore when it comes to ring runs. Regardless of system, you have a 154 out-of count, and sufficient scouring of every structure in the level will lead to 152 with relative ease. But 152 isn't all rings, and it won't get a perfect. Why has no one found the last 2 rings? Did they even place the rings? Are we faced with rings in two obscure locations outside the level boundaries? Well, I wouldn't say that no one has found them. I remember a post from years ago on Sonic Team's old Japanese BBS that purported to find the missing rings. When I first tried reading it, it wasn't very clear and I couldn't find any rings from it, but at least it sounded plausible. Then just a few days ago, someone else (brianpso on YT) claimed to have uncovered them as well. He didn't say anything about where, but I took it as sufficient cause to go look up the post again and see if I could make any sense of it this time. Still no luck with that, but armed with a general area to search in, I set out scouring a thick, moving fog of black, brown and white for a single stationary glimmer of yellow. Wouldn't you know it, after about 40 minutes, I found just that. So the good news for everyone is that they did place the rings, and you don't have to look for two obscure locations outside the level boundaries. You just have to look for one. Now you want to find them too? Well, let's see if I can explain this: -The easiest way I found to locate the rings starts with one spot, shown in the image http://soniccenter.org/sm/images/phringsguide.png . That's a pillar on the back side of Ghost Train Mountain. Try to mimic Knuckles' position as best as you can. -Now jump and glide off the wall. Don't even touch the control stick; it's a slower glide this way but at least you know you're going in the right direction. -You'll fall down to the updraft plane, amid a sea of emptiness. That's supposed to happen. When you get blown back up, resume gliding, again without touching the stick. -When you fall close to the updraft plane the second time, look to your right. It's a ring! (Actually it's two rings in the same spot, but all the better for you I guess.) If you've followed these steps, you've found the missing rings. The next step is to actually get them, which is no easy task considering that they're below the kill plane. There's yet another step, which is to not die, but that's left as an exercise to the viewer. Suffice it to say you'll need a lightning shield to pull that one off. And when you've done that, maybe you can try incorporating the new rings into the mission 4 time limit like me! It "only" eats up 10 seconds of travel time over a giant, nondescript void each way! And it would be even longer except I chose a path out to the rings that's pretty much completely blind with respect to the stage! How much of your 3 minutes do you really need? (Oh, and don't forget that you have to find the pieces in that time too.)
Sonic Adventure 2 - Meteor Herd - m5 - 0:39.22 SadisticMystic 2009-03-07 | It turns out that Meteor Herd 5 is the only hunting hard mode I hadn't uploaded a video for to this site. I made a 39.47 a long time ago, but I didn't like it (particularly the ending), so here's a stopgap that's a bit better. It's still 49 frames short of the WR, but it's something.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Meteor Herd - m3 - 0:27.32 SadisticMystic 2009-03-07 | Not really much to this one. There was some activity going on with Meteor Herd 3 elsewhere, so I decided to give it another try myself. Besides, the old 27.50 is disproportionately loud compared to my other videos, and I figure if you're looking for the speed route on this mission, you probably don't want your ears to explode when it's least expected. For those of you who have the route down, or plan on getting it, the only real improvement here compared to 27.50 is a much better second dismount and turnaround to grab the wall. I'll just tell you now: the route simply doesn't work if you're playing on GameCube. The midpoints of the container walls were patched up in that version so you can't just do this.
TrickStyle - USA race 1 - 0:58.27 SadisticMystic 2009-03-07 | And this is what race 1 looks and sounds like when I don't convert to WMV, and when the recorder doesn't drop entire frequency bands. Oh, and I don't give up a 60-second head start to the opponents either, but that's not something to be concerned with.The first bail here is intentional: boosting off of that ramp leads to the fastest speeds you'll get in any race, and you can overshoot the track by a huge distance as it veers left and have to hover back over the pond a long way. The absolute best thing that can happen there is I bounce off the tree and shoot into the next corner perfectly, but I'll take a straight down rejection, especially since there's a boost pad right there to get back up to speed.The second bail isn't planned but I don't care either way: if I make a crash landing on the ramp, then I start the next S curve with an inside line and pick up a boost pad. Otherwise I get to keep more momentum down the straight, but that making having to steer outside on the next turn and you can't get the boost that way. Either one seems like a wash.And then there's a third bail on the long straight that's completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter how I land there, I'm just going to bounce off the track and cross the finish line in midair anyway.When you give the racers here a minute head start, they're so slow that even the fastest one takes almost 2 minutes to finish (and everyone else would have timed out if the time limit actually ran down in that video). On the other hand, if the player racer decides to be less like Chaclon and more like Usain Bolt, the rest of the field magically seems to get a lot more motivated. Of course they still can't come close to a 58, but then what were you expecting?
TrickStyle - USA race 3 - 1:09.11 SadisticMystic 2009-03-07 | So I figure I might as well do some more of these. Eventually I may even have videos for all 18 races, but that's by no means a given.Race 3...that's going to take us backward through the ending of race 4, the middle of 5, and then the start of 2. I don't have 2 or 5 recorded yet, but with pretty much every track sharing some parts either forward or backward, I should have a good chunk of it down when I do.The first bail is one I plan the race on taking, and don't even try to avoid it. All that matters is I hit the side of the chute and whip around the corner on speed pads, and then manage to line up for the trick from 27-29 seconds into the race.The second bail...not really, and may be worth a small time loss. At least a bail into the sign there leaves me just enough room to recover with a katana board through the next straight, and then turn just soon enough to avoid a high-speed crash into the last real turn.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Death Chamber - m4 (No joystick + Cruise Control DOWN) - 4:32.39 SadisticMystic 2009-01-30 | If Egg Quarters is where you first learn the joy of playing no joystick, cruise control down, then Death Chamber is where you throw away all the joy and replace it with something else. I don't really know what, just probably not something very nice. For one, the stage itself is twice as big, while you only get another 2 minutes of time on mission 4. Sure you don't have the patrol robots getting in your way, but neither do you have a predictable linear circuit that you can just keep going around until you find the keys. Oh, and you also have hourglass doors, which put on even more time pressure. And did I mention Death Chamber is a lot less flat than Egg Quarters? Some way or another you're going to spend some time climbing up things, and of course when the cruise control is on down, that's a lot harder than it needs to be. The camera also has a penchant for not wanting to squeeze in between you and a wall when you get some short distance away from the wall, so just grabbing it can be troublesome. There's even a few places where the camera won't respond to L or R at all! Close to the end, with about 1:00 left on the clock, the entryway to the red room is just such a place, and in addition Knuckles just wants to push against the boxes right there rather than punch them down, which was nearly a run-breaker until I got the right timing. Only a few layouts are realistically completable within the 5:00 limit, and then there's the matter of actually making good on one that is. To hell with quality, you just take whatever you can get when trying this stuff. Good luck.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Egg Quarters - m4 (No joystick + Cruise Control DOWN) - 1:33.74 SadisticMystic 2009-01-30 | It's the latest from the crazy challenges department. As you may know, I've done a no joystick challenge in Egg Quarters before. However, that was mission 3, and it took 3 minutes just to go a quarter turn around the level. This time I'll be in mission 4, meaning I'm truly limited to 3 minutes, and the keys will be a lot more scattered than just one quarter of the level. To offset this, I'll be using "cruise control": preparing the controller so that it thinks it's being pushed in one direction even though I'm not touching the stick at all. This allows L and R to essentially serve as movement buttons (that is, as long as I can fight against the camera's built-in efforts to reposition itself). To offset THAT, the direction of choice will be...down. In other words, Rouge will constantly try to run toward the camera (so that I can barely even see where I'm going), and if she ever grabs on to a wall, she'll immediately start climbing back down the wall--the only way to climb up is to repeatedly jump back on the wall gaining a small amount of height each time. I like to think of this challenge as being like dizzy mode, but even crazier. And since it's Egg Quarters, we have those beetle robots to deal with too. Just suffice it to say: this is one of the better key layouts you can get in the challenge. A good chunk (probably between a third and half) of the 101 key locations aren't even worth trying for in no stick, cruise control down. You just start over and hope for a better layout next time.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Cannons Core - m4 (No timestop) - 4:43.82 SadisticMystic 2009-01-28 | So 5:30.04 looked somewhat bad. Sounded bad, too. All the more reason to make a better version, and cutting 46 seconds from the no-timestop run isn't too bad.Notes:-Yes, Tails does run out of health after firing the final shot. No, that doesn't lead to loss of life. There's not enough time to process the death so he gets off scot-free.-Because this is m4, and thus not segmented, I decided to leave the interstitial black loading screens in for their full duration. If I had chopped them out like I do in other CC videos, this one's real-time video length is a scant 5:10, a time you'd probably get a good challenge out of beating even when you are allowed to use timestops.-If you die in CC4, you don't get a save point at the start of the most recent section--no, you have to go all the way back to start with Tails. However, if you die (or restart) in any section other than Tails', this doesn't cause you to lose a life!-Eggman doesn't quite run out of health. At its most dire, from 5:01 to 4:57 left on the clock, Eggman's HP bar has a single point remaining, due entirely to that one ring recovered at 5:37. (For comparison, Tails' HP bar maxes at 70, and Eggman's armor lets his bar go up to 80.)-Rouge takes a seemingly random hit out of nowhere, right as the invincibility wears off (even though it's a cutscene at that point!) Sounds like a case of acid poisoning. It obviously can't hit through invincibility, but it lingers around, delaying its effect to take place immediately once it can. Try experimenting with other sources of acid too, and see what it gets you. Wait a minute...no, not THAT kind of acid. You know what I mean.-Wow, Knuckles' part sure is easy now, and will remain so for all time. I don't expect to hear anyone having problems getting through it.-And finally, I was a lot faster at getting into the right position to sneak under Sonic's last barrier. Yes I know I'm supposed to get 50 rings at the end to fulfill my trademark, but speed comes first here.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Final Chase - m4 - WORST COMPLETION EVER SadisticMystic 2009-01-16 | This video is dumb. You don't want to watch it. Really, just turn back now because there's nothing in here worth watching. Wait, you're still here? How? Why? Oh, never mind. CodeBreaker codes for Dreamcast: (M) - 0F0C0D76 00000008 Play as Tails - 0124EE6C 00000006 Strategy overview: -Final Chase, as an open level, needs some skip guards (or so they thought). There's a huge "default" kill plane that spans practically the entire length of the level, except for the path you're supposed to travel on. About 23 seconds of free fall will get you there. -Fortunately, this kill plane has a limit to its rightward extent at least. I angle toward that side (holding L+R while hovering, to make it easier to stay in the same direction) and through extensive trial-and-error I've found that low 8 is a good time to release hover. -After releasing A, I still hold forward, and I still hold L+R, but now I'm just in free fall. As I said, it takes 23 seconds to hit the default kill plane, so I let myself fall for that long, and then when I know I'm clear of it, I can move on to the next phase. -Unfortunately, while I had to go right to go around the kill plane, I need to reverse back to the left in order to get where I want. It's a good 20 more seconds of freefall until I get to the height I want, but even pressing full on in the direction the goal ring is at, I still don't get enough distance on it without breaking freefall and going back to hover. You'll eventually see two inverted towers distinct from the background, and as you get closer the final drum and the goal ring platform will make their unmistakable presence clear. Of course there's another "default" kill plane just below that, so don't drop too low.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Cannons Core - m1 (Low score) - 1580 SadisticMystic 2009-01-16 | Now this...is more like it. Finally the level is where it belongs for low score. Even with the 2780, I was scrolling enemies out of draw distance after they were marked for destruction, so as to achieve that destruction without getting any points for it. However, there were still a few more places to put that to use, which I either deemed not feasible at first, or didn't even see. Tails' part ends up a lot harder this way now that it can go down in 1100 rather than 1500: the Chaos isn't too hard to scroll out, but the Hunters are further forward so you have to go further out over the void to kill them for no points, and it's just barely possible to make it back. Oh, and then you have to do it a second time. Eggman still doesn't have any leeway to take more than 3 hits, and his new strat makes it that much harder to avoid the fourth hit: that rapidly moving platform can mess you up, leaving you stranded over the acid. Oh, sure, you can fire a volkan shot into the health balloon up ahead if you're fast, but you're still going to have to take 200 points for it. And knowing that I have to delay the finish until 9:20, I though I'd try something a bit different this time.
(OLD) Sonic Adventure 2 - Cannons Core - m1 (Low score) - 2780 SadisticMystic 2009-01-15 | Well now. I haven't touched CC lowscore in a very long time--all I really knew was that the last time I did, I ended up with a 4480. That predates so much of what's known about the level now, I figured there was at least a small amount of give. But 1700 points? Didn't see that one coming. Right as I was on my way, I remembered a trick that would help in the early parts (and where the majority of the points come from, by design). If I can lock onto an enemy, fire a shot, but make it leave draw distance before the shot hits, then the enemy is destroyed and I get no points for it! Even if the enemy wouldn't normally be destroyed by a simple lock-on shot! That alone counts for saving 800 points. The lowscore route with Eggman takes three hits. These are all deliberate, but since Eggman can't survive a fourth hit without picking up a ring or chaos drive first, that means I have no damage leeway through the rest of that part (now you know how the other characters feel to be on 0 rings!) That doesn't stop me from playing around, though, to include quite possibly the coolest Eggman punch in the history of the game. Come to think of it, the other parts have their fair share of reckless playaround too.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Dry Lagoon - m4 - All rings in 2:27.42 SadisticMystic 2008-12-27 | Just as I did for Aquatic Mine a while back, I decided to improve the DL4 all-ring run, this time with the target set at 2:30. I knew it would be possible, but like Aquatic Mine, I was expecting it to be anything but easy. Again the route of choice involved digging up a lightning shield. The sooner I got it, the better, but I really only needed it by the time I arrived in the main open area of the huge oasis. So I gave myself a threshold of 3 digs at the start, the 1 dig that's required to go under the turtle, and 2 more digs in the huge oasis, after which time I'd throw the run away. Wouldn't you know it, on the very last allotted dig... That last dig means I get the lightning shield within range of the treasure scope rings (and yes, it ends up causing a brief spurt of lag). It's impossible to actually get the rings until you put on the treasure scope, but in the meantime they'll follow you perfectly well if you have a lightning shield, at least as long as you don't take any warps. Thanks to all these wall clips, I don't have to take a turtle warp anywhere in the run, but the dig warp would cause the rings to stop following me and go back to their starting position, so I need to briefly put on the treasure scope as the last thing before going through the dig panel. GameCube players: -The first trip out of bounds (under the turtle) will work for you. Actually scratch that: "will" may be the wrong word. It _can_ work for you, but be prepared to botch that clip a lot. Especially after you've already cashed in an early lightning shield. The second, brief trip out (up and out of the oasis prison) doesn't work for you, at least not there. There is another trick you can use with minimal time loss: grab the wall at the corner, and climb down behind that pot. You'll now flicker in and out of the wall, and if you keep jumping, you may eventually jump through the ceiling. Good times. The third trip out (climbing up into the underside of that platform) doesn't work. Fortunately, you're not up a creek without a turtle: besides the horribly slow underwater turtle to return you to that second breakout spot, you can just head down the stone face apartment walkway to the lonely statue, and then get inside the head of that statue and get out of bounds from there (search term "0:14.90" for the trick, except you're doing it at a different statue, and you want to go back toward the screen and left). GC players have 142 rings instead of 141; the 142nd is where Big the Cat used to be. If you use that statue clip to get to the corner of the underwater tunnel (near where I get swept away briefly), the lightning shield should give you enough reach to get there.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Final Rush - m5 (Low score) - 0 SadisticMystic 2008-12-01 | (Better quality downloadable version: http://tinyurl.com/fr50p ) This video started when I found a fun new trick in Final Rush. I couldn't quite get what I wanted to do with it, but I still wanted to unveil the trick somehow, so I decided to run an updated FR lowscore, this time moving to hard mode, and implement a variation of the trick. As it turns out, the trick is very well suited to FR5 lowscore: the spiral rail has a ring box right in the way on that mission, and lots of Chaos enemies patrol it to shut you down if you're not going very fast. No it's not a time shortcut, at least not at the highest levels. In a way, this video is like the Mad Space 5 42-flat: getting an update to an older video and in the process getting better sound, and technical problems delayed the ripping process. Fortunately it didn't mean having to clean up a hard drive filesystem, but this one will put a temporary damper on further videos for a while. It looks like all my DVD-RWs have hit the end of their lifespan right around the same time, one right after I had finished recording a 0 score. It couldn't be saved, so I had to record another try, this time on another disc that was on its last legs and which took a good deal of manual interference to get to a point where it could be ripped. It struck me that I haven't played Final Rush much, so I don't really have a signature path through the level yet. Maybe I'll adopt this one; it offers lots of fun times. Right before the end, I appear to take a path that slows down and strays out of the way for no reason. In fact, it's because if just go straight up the middle there, I get hawk enemies incoming, and they descend right on the chaos enemy, destroying themselves immediately and giving me 500 points. Probably not a very good idea. Also, far too many runs ended by inadvertently grabbing one of the rings on that platform.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Radical Highway - m1 (A button challenge) - 3 SadisticMystic 2008-11-23 | First off, allow me to say that I believe the low-A for Radical Highway is a huge letdown. Of the three As I find to be necessary, two of them look oh-so-close to being skippable.-After seeing two cancelled light attacks up the stack of boxes, the second of which clears two boxes at once, and especially given the knowledge that you can still charge another light attack from atop the triple-box stack and have it zoom in on that same enemy, doesn't it seem like you should just be able to get up to the ledge without the jump at 0:25? Unfortunately, the vantage point you have now makes you shoot at the enemy at a different angle, and you can't get the height.-And then we have another jump at 2:12, this one used for something as mundane as jumping over a police barricade. Shadow can't destroy these things (unlike Tails), there's no ramp to launch off for the first barricade like there is for the second, and while it is possible to jam up against the edges and get partially embedded in the wall, it's just too wide, and covers up any possible line of attack.The third jump at 3:18 is clearly not going to end up skippable. Speaking of that area, the bad synchronization of that fourth platform to the rest makes the run look even worse, eating up an exorbitant amount of time to the point where I was going to consider using mission 4 if not for that timing mismatch.At least I have something down for Radical Highway now. The lowscore on the level, which is cake except for the two run-breaking corkscrews at the end, is still on the todo list.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Cannons Core - m3 - 1:09.95 SadisticMystic 2008-11-14 | This just gets crazier and crazier. Note that for all practical purposes, as long as you can pull off the last jump without a ring trail and with time stopped, Cannon's Core 1 and 3 are the same. For one you go down at the end, and for the other you go up, but it's not like time is ticking or anything. That said, the previous unified 1-3 record (1:15.94) was set just under a year ago, and I decided I wanted to try another run at the level, this time using the new trick I unveiled in the A-button challenge video for CC1, with the goal of getting closer to (or possibly under) 1:15. After a short bit of experimentation, I found out that unfortunately, the new route wasn't going to be good for saving any time. But since I already had a personal record through three parts, I wasn't just going to throw that much of the run away. Instead, while I still had the old route available as a backup plan, I thought I'd spend a bit more time just looking around to see what was possible, and...the rest is history, they say. While it's still true that the break out at the top is, on its own, no faster than breaking up through the acid room, that fact that you start higher up leaves you in better position for another timesaver. The "normal" path for Knuckles' CC starts: dive down to stop time, get back up to go past a laser wall, hit a switch to kill another set of lasers underwater, then dive down again, go past where the laser wall used to be, enter a room...That room has a time stop switch on its diagonal wall; somewhat relevant here is the fact that it's the longest-lasting switch in all of Knuckles' part, and extremely relevant is...the fact that you can activate this switch from OUT OF BOUNDS. Just get close to where the switch would be, on the other side, and you can stop time without getting sucked back in the wall! This lets you keep the time stop going all the way to the security door switch, cutting several seconds at once. For those of you who want to try this at home, I will tell you that Knuckles' part alone took in excess of 4 hours to get right during this recording session, and the repetitive read-write-erase stress ended up killing two DVD-RWs from my rotation. And for the first time in all my experience with Cannon's Core, I'm now truly wondering just how low a TAS of the level would be able to go. I can imagine as low as 1:02 might be possible, but I may not even be ready to try for as much even if the tools were available to me.
Sonic Adventure 2 - Hidden Base - m1 (Low score) - 30 SadisticMystic 2008-10-24 | As far as low scoring, there are 12 stages that can be 0'd (plus Green Forest if and only if time bonus doesn't count). Of the remaining stages, Hidden Base has the lowest positive threshold for points required in a no-death run through the level, a threshold that was lowered even more by a recent discovery. The recent discovery was, of course, the cascade hover jump, for truly getting the shortest time between jump and hover, and therefore the most height out of hovers. The only place in this run it's actually crucial to do that is also the only place where points are required: the pulley ride up through the chain on rings. The cascade jump lets you ditch the pulley after only 3 rings, just before you would rise up into the 4th, and still carry enough upward momentum to make the ledge. Of course, this low-score video wouldn't be mine without some extra applications of that technique. Through the whole run, I go over stuff, around stuff, and yes, even through some fake walls just because that's the way I play Hidden Base. (Actually I don't normally take that second fake wall, near the end, but it happens to be right in the middle of a line I can take to prevent the Kikis from throwing bombs for no distance and blowing themselves up. Yes, I would get points if they did.) There's one important detail to keep in mind for low-scoring this level: you need to do it on a save file that _doesn't have the Laser Blaster collected_. The Laser Blaster gets you residual damage on your lock-ons, meaning there's no way to take down that last pillar without the explosion engulfing the Kiki guards there. And yes, it is quite silly that this is the only level in the game that has dynamite packs worth 0, as opposed to 100. I'll still take it.
