Sonic Advance 2 - Egg Utopia 1 (Sonic) in 1:03:70
Channel: Kirby Mastah
Date: 2022-11-14

Time attack of Egg Utopia Act 1 in Sonic Advance 2, with Sonic, in 1:03:70

Took a lot of effort but bopped combo's WR with this run. Unfortunately, this stage is bottlenecked by two cycles - which we were annoyed about when talking about how to improve this in our DMs LOL.

1. I want to wait out the start as long as possible, but can't wait it too long or else the vertical spike ball at 0:17 will be in the way.

2. But then any negligible mistakes after that spike ball (like, less than 0.5 seconds worth of mistakes) won't matter up until the cannon at 0:55 - if I played perfectly, I'd have to wait longer for the moving block to be out of the way anyways. And Sonic can jump over (under, technically) the block if it's blocking his way, but it loses almost an entire second so it's always better to just wait.

As a result, the main optimization that matters is everything after that cannon.

0:18 - Combo saves about 0.5 seconds over me by making it cleanly over the horizontal spike ball with a single air dash. This unfortunately requires starting the stage early so the spike ball is as far left as possible, but this is ultimately slower because any timesave is time i have to spend waiting on the block cycle near the end - since combo's strat requires starting the stage earlier, this is ultimately slower.

0:28 - Obvious mistake but cycles made it not matter

0:33 - Need around 45 rings to get boost mode from running down this slope, so I need to get as many rings as I can without losing time. Also doing an air dash through the rail is a tiny bit faster but less reliable and again, negligible timesaves don't matter because of cycles.

0:55 - The cannon cycle. I fired Sonic as early as I could, at around 51.5ish seconds on the in-game timer - this cycle is the reason why any small mistakes past 0:18 don't matter, as long as I get to the cannon at this time.

1:03 - This looks slow but the game is incredibly picky on letting Sonic spindash on this steep slow, so I have to take my time to set it up. Ultimately this saves ~0.3 seconds over standing on the falling platform then spindashing off of it, as unboosted running speed is severely capped, and a downhill spindash into air dash is much faster despite the setup needed.

Watch my entire playlist of Sonic Advance 2 ILs here - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3pBMjeS6rYgdCKejb8MyW0izb9SB065v

Watch my stream live - twitch.tv/kirbymastah

#SonicAdvance2 #Sonic #Speedrun #EggUtopia