All the S@nics - the end

[warpio]

going back and forth between 2 checkpoints

no can do! Star Posts are "used" once they've been touched once, and in fact earlier checkpoints get marked as used if you use any later checkpoint - especially notable with the last two in EHZ Act 2.

yeah I must have misremembered. Then in that case I guess my ideal way to play a Sonic 2 all-emeralds run would be to go through enough non-emerald focused runs, where I vary my paths through the levels each time, until I get good enough at every level that regularly having 50 rings at every checkpoint is a common enough thing that I'm not too worried about the annoyance of missing out on tons of special stage attempts.

[Ivy]

In Fleetway comics, Sonic has no known parents. Also he was originally brown.

Jesus Hell, this canon really is something.

[Heavy Sigh]

Fun Sonic Facts!

With Sonic Team being nothing less than ambitious, the original plan for Sonic 2 was to make a sprawling, 18-zone epic, revisiting the unique ideas Sonic Team had created for the first game to put their own spin on traditional platformer environments like deserts and glaciers, along with areas that would be totally new. Emerald Hill, Dust Hill and the never-formally-titled Winter Zone were some of the first levels worked on, with the concept of time travel bandied about in early production meetings. However, it became obvious early on that if they were to have the game ready for Christmas 1992, they could not keep every world on the drawing board. The time travel concept was dropped almost immediately, and Dust Hill and its winter counterpart were the first zones on the chopping block, much to the chagrin of Brenda Ross, the artist responsible for them.

Though the two sides of STI tried to work together throughout the tight development period, the language barrier proved a severe obstacle to cohesion. Most of the meetings for Sonic 2 were done in Japanese (as Mark Cerny was fluent in the language), leaving the American side in the dark and without input. Trying to mesh two cultures and work ethics became a challenge in itself, with some American team members unable to get along with Yuji Naka's infamously intense personality. Another point of friction was the stark disconnect between what hours the American staff saw as normal and what their Japanese coworkers saw as acceptable, with members like Yamaguchi and Yasuhara being extremely passionate with the quality of the work, to the point where Yamaguchi would often stay all night to fix errors he saw in the American artists creations.

LEVEL FACTS!

In the original plan for Sonic 2, Chemical Plant Zone was set to appear as Zone 11 of 18. Although there would be fewer Acts compared to Sonic 1, it soon became obvious that there simply was not enough time in development to have each zone stand out and still fit in the story in a sensible way. In the end, the team was forced to trim their vision down to a mere 11 zones, and Chemical Plant was placed as the second stage.

[Grounder]

[Awoo]

Hehe.

I used to work at a literal Chemical Plant

[Sebby19]

So how many save posts did rao skip today? I saw two.

[Awoo]

So how many save posts did rao skip today? I saw two.

As many acts as he played?
I'm not admittedly as familiar with Sonic 2 as I am Sonic 3 (not Knuckles) in terms of Chaos Emerald getting points (though I have been able in the past to get Hyper Sonic by the end of Mushroom Hill in (&Knuckles). I'd always just do the cheat because I didn't particularly care for Sonic 2's special stages, but I'd meticulously go through Blue Sphere in 3.

I remember my brother always did the level select code and manually unlocked the emeralds through replaying the heck out of Emerald Hill 1's goalposts because lol 90's and internet wasn't nearly as much a thing so lol gotta go fast.

Metropolis is really the thing for at least this game dictating the "by-act" guideline, isn't it? If it weren't for Metropolis being a thing, maybe it wouldn't be a thing?

really can't wait for raocow's playthrough of Sonic Chaos. It was always my favorite Game Gear game that we had back in the day. It's so different from Sonic 2 for it that I hope raocow has a good experience with it :3

edit: guideline

[Leet]

"this is not a regular lp where i just do whatever"

[DinnerSonic]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was scared of the rising water/chemicals/Mega Mack section only to return to it as an adult and clear it with ease.

I couldn't find any conclusive evidence for if the ducking trick with the CPZ boss was intended or a bug, but there's another neat thing about the boss I do know of: An unused animation!

(source)

[Awoo]

"this is not a regular lp where i just do whatever"

AF 3H17 MBAD! SLEEP TOO LATE

[Ashan]

How come Robotnik sucks up the pink bubblegum juice but when it fills up the tank it's blue?

[Katazuki]

I...had no idea that duck exploit exist.

Good find!

[Arctangent]

honestly the fact that the ducking thing makes a lot of sense makes me feel as though, if it wasn't outright an intentional design decision, it's at least a little easter egg that a programmer snuck in

if it wasn't specifically programmed as to not work on tails, even as player 1, then it'd feel a lot more like it was some weird glitch based on a faulty memory check or something ( i.e. the projectile was programmed to ignore the player in certain contexts, but the check points to the address that holds player 1's ducking state by mistake or other code shifting around ). i suppose it'd still be possible for that to be the case, especially if the tails object is actually internally hardcoded as "player 2" and tails-only mode just makes him controllable by player 1, but eh?

if it's intentional, it's easily like a two-condition if statement. probably a bit more since we're talking about the days before object-orientated programming was popular, but it still fundamentally boils down to changing "for each player object, then check if this projectile is overlapping it and if so, deal damage" to "for each player object, check if it's sonic and whether or not he's ducking, and if not then check if this projectile is overlapping it and if so, deal damage"

like, you can actually just skip the collision detection for sonic if it's set up like that, since you already know the projectile won't inflict damage. somehow i doubt that's any real concern when the only objects that have have collisions processed are the up to two player characters, eggman, his one-at-a-time projectile, and maybe the flippy platforms at either end, but saving on processing time is almost never a bad habit, especially when you're working with hardware this old

i say this knowing full well that it's entirely possible that that check comes after collision detection due to either how the collision detection system is set up or because it's a dumb little easter egg and the programmer wasn't concerned with efficiency when the fight already runs at max fps anyway

( i realized partway through writing this that what i've seen of the sonic hacking community means that there's likely a good chance i could not only easily find a disassembly, but it'd also likely be commented in such a way that the asm-only-slightly-literate like me could decently understand what's going on in it, but i started this post as a ramble about theorizing old towards programming and i'll finish it as only theorizing old towards old programming, damn it )

( ( if i do dig up something that seems to point either way from the disassembly i'll post about it afterwards unless someone beats me to it ) )

[KobaBeach]

19 years i've been playing sonic and i had no idea of that ducking glitch

[Nast]

19 years i've been playing sonic and i had no idea of that ducking glitch

Same here! I never expected to learn something like that on a raocow video, of all places.


Also yeah Chemical Plant Act 1 is notoriously short, though it's still pretty large from what I remember, due to all the alternate paths you can take.

[10204307]

So how many save posts did rao skip today? I saw two.

There are three total breadpoints in Act 1 and five in Act 2. The first one is actually fairly obscure because you have to take the lower route at the start of the level, continue until you come across two moving blocks, drop down, and then go backwards. It's such a weirdly specific route that most people probably won't even take unless they know it's there.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this level was hellish as a kid, only to realize as an adult that it's actually not that hard. I had so much trouble with those submerged moving staircase jumps at the end that my mind ended up exaggerating it into "oh no, Chemical Zone Act 2, there's so much water in that level!" when in reality it's basically just that one section. There were only a few times where I actually beat it and was able to see what came after it.

[Arctangent]

boy howdy sonic 2's source code is not something i can read at all

[KobaBeach]

boy howdy sonic 2's source code is not something i can read at all

Which disassembly are you reading

[T-A-C]

The climb in Chemical Plant 2 is, to my knowledge, the cause of the first of my video game related dreams/nightmares.

Most replays of the game I do nowadays use the hidden route to skip it; I don't think I've ever done the speedrun trick with the spindash.

Another fun fact: In earlier prototype builds of Sonic 2, Chemical Plant's loops had diagonal slopes on the top corners; in the final version, they are changed to being completely flat. I'm wondering if the change was made for gameplay reasons or for optimization because the graphical pieces used for the old corners weren't used anywhere else in the stage's tileset

[Arctangent]

boy howdy sonic 2's source code is not something i can read at all

Which disassembly are you reading

that would be the s2disasm on github

[SAJewers]

https://www.nintendoenthusiast.com/2019 ... -hedgehog/

[KobaBeach]

guess there's just gonna be a dry spell between every 5 years then

[Bean]

So how many save posts did rao skip today? I saw two.

The thing is most of them are all really out of the way in Act 1 or come too soon to have 50 rings in Act 2. Act 1 has three, and you have to take the extreme lowest routes for both of the first two, and the third is pretty much right after the second, so it's not worth the trouble. Act 2 has five, and the best bet for getting a special stage is the one close to the boss after doing that chemical bath and moving blocks part. In other words, raocow got the one checkpoint that most players will find.

It's kind of an aesthetic mess when you look at how you're supposed to get to them. There are maps in the description box here. Take a look at them and see if a normal player would plan a route out to get these. Spoiler: They won't.

[Reecer7]

wow, that is a weird path. and as a digression, because i easily get digressed by web design: that site looks really good! look at that cute background bordering the content! it's not gaudy, but it has a lot of charm and character. wish more websites were like that <.<

[kitikami]

Maybe the blue paint attack doesn't actually hurt anyone, it is just upsetting to have blue paint spilled on you. That would explain why Sonic isn't affected as long as he covers any parts of his body that aren't already blue and why it doesn't work for Tails.