Annotated Guide to "Sonic Adventure 2 Tricks and Glitches" by Russell "SadisticMystic" Jones For a video that's full of obscure tricks--15 minutes full of them--it's only natural that many viewers will have trouble following along. This is my attempt to explain what's happening. H01: City Escape City Escape has lots of places where you can go high enough to clear the walls. Many of them are just good for dying, but I happened to have someone else's old clip of an impressive cut that skips the building descent. To do a super bounce, stand away from a wall and face it, then spindash into it and hit A and B as soon as you come into contact with the wall. If it works, you'll get a jump that can vary in height, from larger-than-a-normal-bounce to insanely high. The time saved this way is minimal if any, but not all of the glitches and tricks I show are here for usefulness. H02: Wild Canyon You're not supposed to be able to go down the wind tunnel, but if you tap A and B repeatedly, you can get all the way from the top to the bottom. I chose to do this on hard mode because there's actually a reason to descend the tunnel there: piece #3. It shows that you don't need sunglasses to clear the level (in fact, you don't need them anywhere in the game), though you'll probably want to start descending from a good deal lower than the very top if you want an advantage over the sunglasses path. Note that there's a solid floor level with the bottom of the piece, and you can't descend below that. H03: Prison Lane The door after the last checkpoint is tied to 3 enemies. I shoot the first 2, then back up. The third enemy is far enough behind the door that backing up takes it out of draw distance, so the game doesn't think it exists and starts to open the door because none of the 3 enemies are there anymore. But when I go back toward the door, the enemy comes back and the door closes immediately. H04: Metal Harbor This snippet doesn't do a thing about showing exactly HOW to set up the trick, but that isn't really possible. This text accompaniment will have to do. In the Dreamcast (not GameCube) version, pressing Y on controller 2 at any time in this level will give you a board. You get stuck with board mobility, and fall faster, so normally boarding out of place doesn't give you much benefit (although you can use it to grab the missile multiple times for an unlimited amount of points, but this is extremely difficult to do consistently). There are four ways to get rid of a board: get hit, grab a rocket or missile, cross a specific plane at the end of the shaft for the first time, or lose a life. I show the first two methods here. H05: Green Forest There's a lot of action in a short time here. Basically, you need at least one ring (and you can't have a shield). Hitting the 1-up balloon is irrelevant here. You need to land on one of the spinning spikeballs, taking a hit (and you have to survive this hit to do the trick--that's why you need a ring). When Sonic gets hit in midair, he becomes able to jump a second time. Fall through the water, then utilize that second jump and follow it up with a thok, to hit the spikeballs again, this time with 0 rings. Order is important: hit -> fall out results in only one life lost, but fall out -> hit results in dying, respawning, and dying again. Of course, fall out -> hit can only be done in a few stages (notably Pumpkin Hill and Security Hall), and of those I chose to use it in Green Forest because it had the fewest other options for tricks to represent it. H06: Pumpkin Hill Pumpkin Hill was a stage with a unique mechanic that I was sure about using in the video from the get-go. This is a stage where it's hard to imagine why a specific setup makes it work, while any ordinary setup doesn't, but it's such an advantage that you may as well just enjoy the fact that it's there. You have to glide to the edge of the level for some reason, and then get turned around. Dive down to get blown back up, and fall down again. Now keep an eye on Knuckles. As soon as he disappears, double-tap A (it's hard to gather this action from the video, but if you look you'll notice the B icon flicker on and off in the top-right corner). At the start of your next life, you get a large upward boost, so just go crazy with it. H07: Mission Street Mission Street is a surprisingly non-abusable level. I tried and failed at a few things, but in the end had to settle for one of the more minor and unimpressive tricks of the collection: using the rails to prevent road segments from collapsing. It's possible to get this far in the level without hovering (by using this trick), but not much farther; hovering is required in at least 2 spots in Mission Street. H08: Aquatic Mine I thought I knew what Aquatic Mine was going to be: a blatant disregard for a real wall that allows me to get into the Chao room without Mystic Melody. But this is incredibly difficult to do (the only time I ever did it intentionally, it took 11 minutes of trying to get through the wall), so it wasn't a level I was looking forward to recording. While experimenting with alternate ways that could potentially get to the Chao with less effort, I came across an interesting mechanic by accident, and decided to show it as a welcome change (I was already planning lots of go-through-walls glitches, and figured this might be more interesting in its place). By moving against a wall and holding A+B, Knuckles can grab a wall underwater. Concidentally, if you do this in Aquatic Mine on a wall between levels 1 and 2, your drown timer resets. Presumably this is because it's considering you to have reached the edge of the water polygon (grabbing the wall between levels 2 and 3 doesn't work like this because that wall encloses a smaller area, and you aren't touching the edge of the water there). The timing just so happened to be a good fit to the music here (if you had been underwater for 29 seconds with no air bubbles in sight, wouldn't you be surprised to find yourself living and so very much alive?) H09: Route 101 The kart levels are fairly straightforward, so I didn't have much choice in what to do for them. To prevent egregious skips, only so much of the track is solidified at any time, and as you progress you cross unseen trigger points that get the next section to become solid. Here you see that even a fairly short looparound in the track isn't solid from the start of the loop, and Tails falls to his doom. So much for catching the president... H10: Hidden Base The level designers thought so poorly of Tails' mobility that they didn't make many walls in Hidden Base solid above a certain point, thinking that you wouldn't be able to jump above the point where they were solid. We all know the drill: that decision comes back to laugh at them, and glitch-finders such as you, the watcher can rejoice. It's a tough balancing act to stay on top of the blocks and walls, but if you can make it all the way to the fake wall, you get a shortcut to the Chao room. Note that the player in the video jumps on a pot to start the journey across the top. Those pots aren't available in the Dreamcast version, but it's still possible to get there by taking a detour around the left side of the maze. H11: Pyramid Cave You've seen the super bounce in City Escape. Now you get to see just how absurdly high it can take you. Given the question in the section title, I like the effect this snippet gives: the first super bounce shown looks so high that it's hard to imagine the maneuver going any higher, and it comes up short, so the answer appears to be "Yes, you do need the key." But on the very next attempt, Sonic gets just a bit higher, and this time it's high enough to go above the solid part of the wall and bypass the key, landing in the ensuing tunnel. H12: Death Chamber This was another level where I already had the snippet that was going to be used from the moment I starting conceiving of this compilation video. It's a verbatim copy of the latter part of my world record run on mission 3. The first glitch, diving through a floor, was discovered by accident while attempting to dig for the key in hard mode, and a quick bit of experimentation showed me that it can successfully lead to a massive out-of-bounds shortcut. What follows is a very glitchy view of the level from the outside, but you can be assured that I know my way around this place, so enjoy the sights. I glide into the Chao room for re-entry, and then comes the second glitch, up through the ceiling. This one's much older and well-known, with unknown origin. The ceiling of the alcove is solid, but by bouncing off the top of the hourglass, you can pop up through the top and go out of bounds again. Another scenic view is possible from here, but since you've already seen the place (and since this video was around for a specific purpose that predates the glitch video), I do something else: glide toward the screen to abruptly end this second trip out of bounds (and in fact the level) by going right through the Chao, instead of gliding across the room and back like you're supposed to. H13: Eternal Engine The story says you're supposed to "Destroy the colony's power generator!" Yet you can complete the level without needing to do that, and the game will be none the wiser. At least if you're playing on Dreamcast, that is. The walls of the final tower beyond the point where the updraft stops affecting you are fake and can be passed through (unless you're using GameCube), and from there you can make a 5-second-long freefall that, with proper aim, will land you directly on the goal ring for a quick completion. I have a few videos of my own for the ending, but none of them give such a clear view of the goal alcove and make it so apparent what's going on as this run does. H14: Meteor Herd This snippet starts with a minor bonus glitch: without opening up the floor, you can dive straight through it, using a technique carried over from Death Chamber. Then it's on to the feature presentation. The lava is supposed to push you back up and prevent you from passing through, but as we learned in Wild Canyon, you can't count on an updraft to stop Knuckles. It's harder this time, but with proper timing, each dive can get you a bit lower down, and once you fall beneath the bottom of the wall, you can start gliding out of bounds. Note that the game is silly and allows meteors to fly around even when you're underground, and there are multiple inconsistent lava polygons. With the game timer at about 54 seconds, you'll get a brief view of three pipes at the top of the screen. Big the Cat actually holds on to one of these pipes (if you're playing on Dreamcast), and if you're lucky enough to get hit by a random meteor while gliding underground, you can get high enough to get a close-up view of Big. (Alternately you can look down at Big from ground level, using the glass floor on the side of the tower facing platforms 0-2 and 0-3.) H15: Crazy Gadget The ending of Crazy Gadget is definitely the most freeform path enabler anywhere in the game. No less than 4 radically different methods exist for getting from the final checkpoint to the goal in under 20 seconds, and then there are all the scenic routes to be considered. The path shown here is no longer the fastest known way of doing the ending (you can do it faster by using a super bounce on the underside of the purple block), but this way looks the most interesting, considering super bounce has already made 2 appearances. The corners on the laser grid don't hurt you, and even though it's supposed to act like a wall, a spindash works for sending you right through it. Falling sideways and thokking into the goal (without touching the acid barrier) is also just plain cool. H16: Final Rush Final Rush is a wide-open level, which means there's not much you can do that's considered a glitch. But even this level has its closed sections, and that's what allows us to seize an opportunity to represent this, the halfway point of the 32 levels in the video. You can't break through the stacks of boxes without bouncing, so why not bypass them altogether? With a jump from the tunnel roof, you land in the right-side chute and can continue. A similar trick at the end allows you to get through all of the story without ever needing the Bounce Bracelet. D01: Iron Gate While Final Rush was giving difficulty for being too open, this level was eluding the search for a glitch for being too closed. I finally found something neat, allowing Eggman to fit in a space that clearly looks too small, between a 2-high stack of boxes and the ceiling. The tank on the left was destroyed after the setup was complete to allow for a better view. And however reminiscent it may seem of Super Mario 64, with the ability to jump repeatedly as fast as you can tap A (up to 30Hz, anyway), you don't get to take off backwards at high speed, and you can't use this setup to get out of bounds. D02: Dry Lagoon This one is like Death Chamber in a way, but sparser. Note the small gap between the top of the water and the underside of the ledge. There's just enough room there for Rouge to grab onto the wall (though I've heard that GameCube players are unable to grab the wall here for whatever reason). From here, holding up will have Rouge climb up through the top of the wall and into...a void. You can access many different places from here (the main area, and the oasis prison without having to wait for the turtle, are among them). In this snippet, it's shown that you can glide around to the underside of the Statue's Pool, and use the water polygon to resurface. Luckily, the walls in this area take a small chunk out of the corners, and the water polygon doesn't, so you can resurface to a small strip of out-of-bounds water, and from there make more of the level accessible. In this case, if you glide in the right direction, you have just enough height to make it to the second one back of four secret rooms (they have to be stored somewhere, don't they?) and it's this room that holds the Chao. D03: Sand Ocean Here's another level where it's obvious which trick to show. Sand Ocean and Hidden Base handle fall-out deaths differently than other levels, and wouldn't you know it, Sand Ocean has a way to take advantage of that. You need to fall into the sand right next to the spring, and when Eggman says "NO!", that's your cue to move into the spring. This bounces you out of the sand, cancelling the death procedure, so that you can still move around freely. This is interesting, but not really helpful. What is helpful is that when the death animation starts, the clock stops. It remains stopped even if you can cancel the death, and as such you get to play the rest of the level with a frozen timer. Every mission in Sand Ocean has the same theoretical minimum time: the time it takes to get to the spring and stop the clock. D04: Radical Highway This was the most uncooperative level for me, and the last one where I figured out something to do. Eventually I discovered the tunnel and building above the last checkpoint, and pieced the snippet together from there. Shadow's running back and forth to the music while up against the building was entirely coincidental; I actually didn't think the first song (which lasts 8:41) would make it through 20 stages. But it did, so think of it as a nice little bonus. D05: Egg Quarters This is a relatively minor trick, but it needed showing. It doesn't skip the Mystic Melody, but it does skip the sidetrack into another room to hit a switch, cutting the time on this level roughly in half. It does at least skip the Iron Boots, which are shown not to be necessary anywhere in the game (except perhaps for a dependency to get the Treasure Scope, which is necessary only in hard mode of this very level--I've speculated for ways to get the Treasure Scope without having to break the boxes, but with no success yet). D06: Lost Colony This trick is a lot like Eternal Engine, except you're going backwards, and the wall you pass through is further back--and it works in both versions of the game. I tried to get as close as I could to the inner red wall without going completely inside--if you pass through that second wall, you're stuck back in bounds and have to spend another 40 seconds on the long lift ride up. This snippet shows a simple use of the trick, to fall back above the start of the lift ride, which is conveniently the location of the lost Chao. You need to reach it within 2:30 to get the A, which is possible to do without Mystic Melody, but the limit is extremely tight--this run would have missed the cutoff by about 10 seconds if I had bothered to collect the Chao. It's also possible to use this setup for a more exotic trip, namely backtracking from the end of the level all the way to the start before getting back in bounds. I leave that journey as an exercise for the watcher, and I'll add to that by pointing out that such a trip isn't completely useless--you need to use it in order to get 205 rings in the level (on Dreamcast) or 215 (on GameCube). D07: Weapons Bed Silly things can happen when you hide the lost Chao behind a Mystic Melody warp that sends you backwards a good way through the level. Specifically, someone might find a way to reach it at the earlier point where it's positioned. Not surprisingly, in Weapons Bed, that's just what happened. You don't have much room to stand on, at the edges of the platform, but there's enough that you can work your way around and finally squeeze through the back corner, reaching the Chao in under a minute. D08: Security Hall This trick is possible in any of the 9 hunting stages, but I chose to use it in Security Hall for three reasons: 1) Security Hall was running short of other possibilities to put in; 2) it's the only hunting stage that visibly differentiates items 1, 2, and 3, so you can see that there are specifically two red emeralds, instead of two copies of GENERIC_ITEM; 3) the fact that it uses Chaos Emeralds allows me to give it the somewhat amusing section title you see in the video. This snippet easily took the most retries to do out of any section, because the red emerald only appears in that enemy once out of every 45 tries. Since it's so rare to see the emerald in the right spot, I was willing to keep the snippet even with a missed Omochao grab followed by three failed spikes before I managed to do what I wanted. D09: White Jungle I figured this trick out the very first time I played White Jungle on hard mode, since I didn't have the Flame Ring at the time. If you can get Shadow to jitter on the right side of the tunnel before the boxes, you can catch him in a groove that allows you to slowly but surely squeeze through the gap. As a matter of fact, it's possible to get all of Shadow's emblems, including the all-A emblem, without collecting a single one of his character upgrades. (Another spot further into White Jungle's hard mode poses the last major problem, if you don't have the Air Shoes, but if you're dedicated enough to do the no-upgrade challenge, you'll find a way through that spot without me telling you.) D10: Route 280 Route 101 already showed off a ghostly track. What, then, could Route 280 do? It offers a more impressive ghostly track fall, from lap 1 all the way down to a tunnel on lap 3, but it would get boring to see that again. Fortunately, you don't have to. Route 280 was another level where it was obvious what trick would be shown--I had known of this trick for more than four years, longer than anything else I used in the video. Make sure that if you earn a boost with 80 or more rings, that you don't use it. Then get your ring total to exactly 99 on mission 2, get to a section that has rings on one side of a split track, get to the outer edge of the track, turn so that the 100th ring is in between you and the pit, and fire the boost. You'll complete the mission, and then in your victory animation, you'll fall in the pit and hit the water. This sends you back to start, but you're still in level complete mode, so the timer starts counting up from 0 and ends up saving a really low time. By using the back mechanism from crossing the would-be finish line, you return to start, which is at a higher altitude, so that you can complete the mission in section 1. Because there's longer to fall from here, the timer doesn't get as much time to count up before saving, so this way you can get a time of less than 1 second--all the way down to 0 seconds flat under the proviso that you don't use a save file. I decided against doing that for the video, because the level complete screen would initialize on the over-3-minutes time and you'd be given an E rank based on that, and the rank wouldn't change to A after you hit the water and the timer resets. I wanted to make it obvious to the uninitiated viewer that you would definitely be getting credit for the low time. If you have a sharp eye, you'll notice that the count-up timer comes briefly to a stop on a certain time while the "NOW SAVING" message appears. If you can catch that time, the time that will be saved to your record is that time, plus either .01 or .02 seconds. In this case, the brief pause is on 7.27, so the run counted as 7.29 seconds. D11: Sky Rail This is my least favorite snippet in the video. The camera blocked a lot of the action behind the wall of the mountain, and after traveling through the fake wall, there just isn't much to do here. At least it's something, and it shows that the mountain was incompletely-designed on Dreamcast. I don't know what happens here on GameCube, but I do know that there is more intricate scenery elsewhere. D12: Mad Space When I figured out how to get inside the ARK, that was the trigger that led to a brainstorming session where I concepted this whole video. Yet another thing you can thank Mad Space for, if you like the stage as I do (though this is admittedly unlikely). The ceiling that hangs above the ARK platforms is solid, but the walls above that ceiling are fake. So how can you get up there? Fortunately, the platform that houses the "Quick Screw Kick" piece in hard mode is slightly higher than the platforms attached to the ARK. Also fortunately, the outer edge of that platform is inclined slightly, so that ramp physics come into play and let you jump higher. The platform is just large enough that you can use its diagonal length as a runway, build up speed with a B-boost kick, and go fast enough into the ramp that you get just enough jump height to glide through the fake wall and stay there until you reach the hollow inside of the ARK. Enjoy the view! D13: Cosmic Wall At over 90 seconds, this snippet is more than twice as long as anything else used in the video. Hopefully you'll find it interesting for what it is. It'll help your comprehension of what's going on if you know how the canisters work. They don't provide a fixed amount of points, such as 400 or 2000. Instead, once you destroy a canister, you get a constant stream of points for as long as the canister remains in draw distance (20 points per frame per canister, with 60 frames to a second). For this reason, you can get the most points out of them by shooting the canisters one at a time instead of trying to build a big lock-on bonus, which prevents the first shot from being fired until after you've locked onto all the targets. Normally, you only come across canisters while you're on a rail ride, so you naturally get swept away and they stop giving points after about a few thousand each. However, with the help of a fake wall, it's possible to get back to the rail ride area in hover mode, where you can travel at your own pace. In this video, Eggman hovers over to where the canisters are, getting them all in draw distance to maximize the point gain, then hovers in place until the natural height loss of hovering causes the canisters to get far enough away that they stop giving points. When all is said and done, over 101,000 points have been gained from this journey out into the rail section, without a single shot being fired. The score at the end exceeds the currently listed world record of 170990, but there's a caveat involved in this--a big one. You see, once you've backtracked across the rail ride, it becomes impossible to complete the level. When you arrive back at checkpoint 3 and the start of the rail, there's no platform waiting to send you forward, and you're stuck forever. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. D14: Final Chase To reach the Chao in Final Chase, you need to cross a void--a really, really big void. It's a distance of 15 light-dash rings, and without Mystic Melody to create those rings, that gap seems too big to cover with a single jump. And as a matter of fact, it is. Try as you might, you can't spindash jump from the platform on one side and land on the platform at the other end. But you can at least get close--close enough that a homing attack will home in on the spring and send you into it. Now you go flying back to the other side of the void, which isn't where you want to be...or is it? In addition to shooting you far, the spring also shoots you high. You end up falling before landing on the platform again, but why would you want to land on that platform? The key to this is...you don't have to. As you're falling, you can guide yourself in the direction of your choice. There's enough room to fall that you can move over and land on the tiny roof of the pulley that brought you up here. From here, you're higher up off the ground, and with your second attempt you should be able to clear the gap. L01: Cannon's Core Cannon's Core is full of bugs. Knuckles has one that lets you pop up through a ceiling and out of bounds. Sonic has one that lets you stop time forever. Rouge gets to do both, so that's the section I chose to represent this level. The key to the permanent timestop, just like the key to massive points in Cosmic Wall, is draw distance. When you hit a switch, it starts shaking, then it comes to a stop, and that's when it starts beeping. But if you can move fast enough that the switch gets put outside of draw distance before it comes to a stop, then the switch is no longer considered to exist--and the beeping action never takes place. This will stop time forever unless you get back close enough to the old switch to put it within draw distance again, or hit a new switch. The amount of time Rouge spends standing next to the Kool-Aid waterfall is to demonstrate that the timestop doesn't normally last this long, so it's stopped forever. Then the acid ceiling in the next room isn't very solid as a ceiling, except insofar as it damages you when you come into contact with it. But if you climb up through it while you're still in the hit-stun period, you get to go right through the ceiling and glide out of bounds. As it turned out, the block in the way in the next room made this level uncompletable without restarting time, but the glitches had already been demonstrated. There's another strange glitch involving Cannon's Core: Play through mission 2, being sure to collect the 100th ring as Knuckles. Then immediately select Chao World, enter it, and exit right away. You'll return to Cannon's Core, this time in mission 1, starting from Sonic's section with a very low time (definitely less than 10 seconds, possibly less than 2 with the right setup). I chose not to use that in this video because Chao World seems a bit extraneous for a section that's supposed to be on Cannon's Core. E01: Green Hill This isn't so much a glitch as a curious oddity. If you try to collect every ring you can in the level, you may end up with a 266/267 total. Where's the last ring? As a matter of fact, it's embedded in the ground right below the starting point. And yet you can actually get it. You need a lightning shield (get the regular shield on top of the loop, gather at least 90 rings, and cross the checkpoint to turn your shield into a lightning shield), then you need to backtrack all the way to the start of the level without getting hit or falling off. I approach the ring slowly to make sure that when I do pull it up out of the ground, you'll be able to get a clear shot of it. Also, I made the embedded ring my 100th ring so that the change is more visible. If you have any further questions or comments, you can leave them at the video site where you got the video, or you can send them to questiondesk@gmail.com. For credits information, see time 15:11 in the video.