Sonic & Knuckles - Boss Run - No Damage - Sega Megadrive / Genesis (Part 2)
422You know you've improved upon an original video time wise, when you are able to include the ending credits which where cut from the original video for going over 10 minutes... and still keep the NEW video under 10.
Oh, and I included the entirety of Doomsday Zone this time as well. I have no freakin' idea why I thought it was a good idea to cut that from the original.
Hell, without the ending credits... this video is SHORTER than the original. By like 20 seconds. Guh?
I could've saved a lot of time on the Death Ball boss, as pointed out in the comments, but it's a little too late for that.
The only real spot I can see getting improvement is Egg Missile. Short of TAS'ing there's not a lot you can do to get that fight consistent. You are at the mercy of the Missile's erratic rotations and behaviours.
Couple of Notes:
Sonic's insta-shield is BROKEN. Robotnik doesn't even stand a chance against Sonic in this game. In fact, that's the entire point to this video! People have requested a version of the Sonic 3 boss run without the shields - so here it is!
a) The insta-shield renders Sonic invulnerable for a split second. This.. for a gamer is all the time you need. That split second insta-shield allows you to bypass boss armour, spikes, all sorts really! Want to see how broken it is? Check out the Red Eye fight. Yes those orbs are supposed to hurt you. And yes, I dodged it using the insta-shield.
b) In case you were wondering about the crazy ring counts? Er.. you know that Casino Night zone inspired bonus stage? Well, let's just say, I got crazy lucky in some of them, and in others I was simply stubborn as hell. I suspect I spent more time in bonus stages than playing the game. I don't think 900+ rings is quite possible in vanilla Sonic and Knuckles mind, mostly due to the aforementioned Super Sonic button being mapped to a separate command. Getting 50 rings per Special Ring soon adds up.
c) As mentioned at the start, I took the game very slowly. Very slowly. I even hunted for Special Stage rings every so often when the fancy took me. Aside from the bosses, this is probably the slowest I've ever played Sonic and Knuckles. It was fun, I even found places in the game I didn't even know existed.
e) This is played using the rom hack, Sonic 3 Complete. The only reason this hack was chosen, was due to the fact that Hyper Sonic's transformation was assigned to a different button. The hack otherwise just fixes up some minor glitches, none of which had any effect on the bosses.
I am planning a Part 3 which includes the bosses that Sonic isn't supposed to fight. This may even include any of Knuckles' fights that are a significant difficulty increase over Sonic's variations. We'll see how that goes.
In the mean time, there should be some modern game footage coming up, followed by the rest of X5.