Game:

Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

Duration: 1:01

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457

Come on... don't act like this is a surprise.

So since this is totally broken, it might be neat to give you guys some insight into how I approached sequence breaks with this mod. If you've tried looking for them, you might've noticed it is incredibly easy to find ways to skip parts of the level and get to places you're not "supposed" to. I never intentionally built sequence breaks into the stage, but there were plenty I found out about and decided not to fix. I developed the stage with the full understanding that there would be sequence breaks no matter what I do, and I think it's better/more fun to embrace that than to try desperately to stop breaks just to fail in the end. That's why I ended up building in a little bit of extra detail to "unreachable" sections - every area has the proper footstep noises, for example, even areas that you're never able to reach normally.

Now that doesn't mean I wasn't going to try to fix anything ever, but coming up with natural ways to fix some of these breaks just wasn't happening. For example, a minor sequence break that's pretty easy to do is on the second island; you can skip over to the left to get straight to the checkpoint. I could have blocked that by adding an invisible wall or something to the left; but I decided not to do that, because I wanted to make a level that felt open and gave you some freedom, rather than constantly trying to railroad you onto the intended paths. Adding arbitrary barriers would have hurt that; in fact, invisible walls were something I tried to avoid using on this stage as much as possible. Most of the breaks are a similar situation; I didn't fix them in instances where there wasn't really a good non-arbitrary way to do it (or where they were too cool to fix).

Making the level play well for regular players is a lot more important than making sure speedrunners can't break it, so that's what I focused on. The orca (SsH Giant Chomper) is a good example of this. When I first decided to add it to the level, I didn't have a full understanding of how the Seaside Hill exploit worked, and figured the same thing would be possible in Wave Ocean. And if it turned out that HAD been the case, that would've been fine, because the Giant Chomper would've been a fantastic mechanic for pretty much everyone except speedrunners, and I wouldn't have left it out just because it was possible to avoid it. And luckily, it turned out designing like that worked in my favor, because the exploit was completely fixable. Who'da known?

That being said, I think I kind of underestimated how fast Sonic can move while drifting on water, especially with Acceleration; I didn't realize it would be so easy to outrun the whale. The reason this route works is because the orca collision around the cave had to be lowered, because there was a bug where the orca would activate while you were going through the spring chain in the cave. If I knew it would let you skip that entire section, I probably would have adjusted it better so it would still activate on the water, but not in the spring chain.

Anyway yeah! Sorry for the wall of text, but hopefully it was interesting to someone. I'm sure this time can be improved further, because I found some better strategies after I finished this run, but couldn't manage to get another completion. Enjoy the video!

More Sonic Generations speed runs: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL429B1AB9CA5246F1
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Paraxade0

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