Sonic Adventure 2: Battle (TAS) - Lost Colony Strats Comparison
Hello everyone! I guess this is time for a Dark Story TAS update!
HUGE thanks to Brianpso for planning the speed shoe stacking strat and TASing it. His Youtube channel: / brianpso
This TAS was created by myself, FusionVaria and Brianpso.
FusionVaria channel: / itspersonnal
==========
Explanation by Brianpso:
The new strat (on the right) takes advantage of a glitch known as speedshoe stacking, which is done by collecting a new power up before the effect of the previous one has ended.
Speedshoes work by doubling a value called "base speed" (a multiplier the game uses to make changes to your acceleration dynamically) and the glitch works by making the game store your previous value while you already have it doubled by the first power up, so when the timer that defines how long the effect lasts reaches 0, your "base speed" value goes back to the doubled one since that's the last one that was stored.
That's the reason why its value goes from 4 to 1 and then back to 2, because for a brief moment Eggman had 2 power ups doubling his "base speed", but then the first one ended, restoring the value back to what it was prior to getting it, and after that when the second one ended it restored the value back to 2 since that was the value that was there at the moment the effect started.
Story TASes are optimized for real-time, meaning that even though this new strat finishes with a higher in-game time, it's still superior. The reason why the standard strat has a faster in-game time is because it delays skipping the upgrade cutscene, in order to have optimal platform movement prior to checkpoint 2. Because this platform is on a cycle, approaching it any sooner would require having to slow down and wait before you can clear the jump, so that downtime is spent with the timer paused within the upgrade cutscene.
==========
Enjoy!