How Pausing Broke Sonic 2 Speedruns

TWITCH: / lunaticj
TWITTER: / lunaticjtv
DISCORD: / discord
Sonic 2 speedruns for many years have used the in-game timer as the main timing method. It's pretty accurate, except when you pause the game, since that also pauses the timer. Many new strats were found thanks to pause buffering. Uh oh.
Sonic 2 Speedrun Leaderboard: www.speedrun.com/s2
Classic Sonic Speedrun Discord: / discord
Research help from:
JoeyBaby69: ‪@JoeyBaby69‬
SegaJunkie/Mike89: ‪@SegaJunkie‬
Shore05: ‪@shore7154‬
#speedrun #sonic2 #SonicTheHedgehog

[@LunaticJ]

Gotta go fast

[@alexplaysgd]

gotta pause fast

[@splashmanej3]

gotta fast go yes speed very dash

[@theevilsideofthegentleman7990]

​@@alexplaysgdare you reading my mind?

[@CptJistuce]

Gotta go slow to go fast.

[@gmdFrame]

​@@alexplaysgdhey! I like gd too!

[@Drekal684]

Eggman in the Wing Fortress: "Mwahaha, I'll trap that blasted hedgehog this time for -" *sonic manifests in the ceiling and destroys the laser* Eggman: "That's it, I'm getting off this plane-" *sonic perches at the edge of a platform, body contorts, becomes the letter N in defiance of logic, physics or biology*

[@ianmoore5502]

Timestamp lmao

[@Sillyguyb]

Timestamp is 8:15

[@nuggnugg8464]

reminds me of the sonic 2 edition of the "something about" series

[@Torturephile]

​​@@Sillyguyb, 7:58 works better.

[@tomarmadiyer2698]

Sonic "*BE AFRAID*"

[@meltingrocket89yt]

I’ve always loved the fact pausing breaks this game so much to the point where speedrunners can create new level wraps that wouldn’t even exist without it it’s amazing and also just funny

[@AgentLazarus]

Wrong.

[@psychomedal4146]

@@AgentLazarus used to be believable

[@mega_micro]

​@@AgentLazarus what exactly is wrong?

[@realityvanguard2052]

It doesn't just trivialize extremely precise single-frame tricks, it abuses the way Sonic 2 speedruns count time.

[@SunsetBear]

i think it’s weird and boring

[@ticron]

@<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="644">10:44</a> "The final ingame minute barrier that will ever be broken." Speedrunners: Challenge accepted

[@JDLupus]

A tale as old as time.

[@NethanielShade]

"The final ingame minute barrier that will ever be broken." Has been said and proven wrong time and time and time again in many different games' speedrunning communities. It's a statement that requires and asterisk. "The final ingame minute barrier that will ever be broken.* *: Most likely, with the current strategies, unless some major new gamebreaking skip or strategy is found in the future."

[@prestongarvey2599]

@@NethanielShade as I've said to some in the past, the only time a minute barrier can't be broken is when there are no minute barriers left to break

[@NethanielShade]

@@Amazon-34079 no one cares

[@RianQuenlin]

The only time I saw an actual "never be broken" was because the idiot that made the category made up his own special rules so he would always win, I call it "Fat Kid on the Playground" syndrome.

[@General12th]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="609">10:09</a> Ah yes, my favorite Sonic the Hedgehog 2 speedrunner: *PAUSING*

[@Joe4evr]

Iirc, there's at least one speedrunner with a verb for their handle. I forgot who, tho.

[@IDESTROYER236]

Pausing and TAS are always there at the top. They're just that good.

[@bentleyvos]

It's official. Sonic invented Chaos Control.

[@stillprophet7529]

"the final minute barrier that will ever be broken" I've heard that one before, how many times must we teach you this lesson old man :D

[@ianmoore5502]

"I love the young people"

[@NethanielShade]

"The final ingame minute barrier that will ever be broken." Has been said and proven wrong time and time and time again in many different games' speedrunning communities. It's a statement that requires and asterisk. "The final ingame minute barrier that will ever be broken.* *: Most likely, with the current strategies, unless some major new gamebreaking skip or strategy is found in the future."

[@RadiativeChester]

Well, in this case it might be true, since the change to RTA might discourage some would-be IGT saving tricks. See how current WR went back to below that barrier

[@CellSays]

ONE TWO THREE ACTION!

[@baggelissonic]

It's definitely the last barrier since the game is retimed now. Unless they find an ACE exploit, but thatt would just lead to a new category.

[@shovelclaws]

im glad someone covered this topic! sonic runs always get super overshadowed despite their amazing stories, and S2 is one of those games that has a very unique history

[@DOC_951]

Idc about Sonic, but I’ll watch a speedrun video on pretty much any game!

[@corndoggoiscool8223]

SUPER overSHADOWed?! what an (unintentional) play on words!

[@Virtualnerd101]

Your username is badass. I'm glad not everyone has forgotten Sonic X!

[@Rainok]

Honestly, if I made the rule about pausing, I'd give a time penalty for collective frames paused. Idk if this sounds reasonable, but I am glad that they changed it to be RTA-TBC because it does feel like a more logical change especially since we have better methods for RTA if I'm correct about it

[@darren8453]

RTA-TBC does essentially the same thing but with a fixed number of frame counts.

[@Rot8erConeX]

@@darren8453 I wonder if something like RTA-TBC can be done for Crash speedruns? Since IIRC they go out of their way to break some crates specifically to avoid the end-of-level animation of all unbroken crates landing on Crash's head is shorter.

[@tokeivo]

You could do something like: ScoreTime = InGameTime + (RTA / 3) Such that every second of real time would have to save you 3 seconds in game (substitute for reasonable number). But I'm not a speedrunner - I don't know if that would just leave other issues.

[@jothki]

The difference there is that breaking crates involves the speedrunner doing more work to get a better time, not less.

[@-jadepink-500]

“Of course, a very long time is not forever” is way too motivational to be in a video about pausing. Lol

[@Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1024]

Motivational but demotivating

[@nossir]

At least it's not in a video about edgying

[@MysticRixel]

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

[@hibnotix]

Can't believe the timing was changed to solely benefit JoeyBaby >:( fr tho this video is crack. good stuff!

[@shore7154]

Fantastic Video! Really glad I was able to help out. :)

[@cannaroe1213]

Thank you for being awesome :)

[@gamingwithahandicapreviews]

Sonic speedruns are amazing! Sonic 2 and Sonic adventure 1 are some of the most incredible games to see speederan

[@idontwantahandlethough]

it's actually _speedrunned_ (i'm just kidding)

[@SilasAdra]

So true

[@gamingwithahandicapreviews]

@@idontwantahandlethough hahaha!

[@blacklight683]

How to go fast:STOP and think about it

[@satibel]

slow is smooth, smooth is fast. (still somewhat accurate except pause buffering making the game very jerky)

[@DawnSRC]

Awesome video! The Sonic 2 Speedrun has always been one of the best Classic Sonic runs and glad to see the community finally pulled the trigger on this change. Ironically Sonic Adventure 2 had a very similar timing method change but chose to actually time pauses for similar reasons lol

[@crab4426]

one of my favourite youtubers made a video about our speedrun community. Thank you so much, Lunatic, I really appreciate the work you put into this video :)

[@3gotistical786]

Amazing quality video! its always incredibly appreciated to see our unique and interesting history being shared across communities :)

[@thespeedegg]

Favorite game to run, always good to see it get covered! Awesome video!

[@n0ne_2_0ne4]

Sonic 2 final getting getting love??? Literally about time XD. Great video and I hope more people speedrun Classic Sonic more!

[@teeejj_]

Good video dude, and thanks for giving our little community some love with this one.

[@Liam-lo3mt]

Great video! I personally was for RTA-TB and was very happy to see the change. It makes the run flow a lot more in my opinion

[@LynxFTG]

This was a certified Touhou hijack.

[@DoctorSwellman]

Thanks for explaining how sonic goes so fast. I wonder if I can do the same thing if I pause in real life 👀

[@Milktube]

This seems like the perfect game candidate to be played on a hack/mod that makes the real time load after hitting the goalpost at the end of a stage be exactly the same before moving to the next stage, regardless of your in-game time, ring count, or any other bonuses. That would completely solve any concerns of people pausing for excessive lengths of time because all of that time is now frames that could've been saved instead.

[@SheWolfVal]

Excellent vid! Very good pacing and information

[@jazzabighits4473]

Great video, thanks for making this mate.

[@DoomGal444]

awesome video i cant believe it took them so long to switch to RTA its insane to have the #1 spot be actually so much slower than someone 6 or 7 places down

[@laytonjr6601]

Eandis went from 1st to 2nd after the change?

[@JustPinging]

Love the videos man! This was an amazing one, keep it up!

[@isocle]

I'm really glad the community decided to implement the new timing method. It makes perfect sense, and when speedgames live and die by their playerbases, changing the meta to "only pause if it saves you time" is much more appealing (for runners and viewers) and hopefully keeps the community lively.

[@lenaz1178]

Dude I love your videos so much fr

[@LordAziki]

Speedrunners having an incentive to practice those zips without pausing will make speedruns a lot more competitive while sticking to the spirit of speedrunning. If watching speedrun documentaries has taught me anything, it's that whenever people assume something is only possible in TAS there will be somebody crazy enough to pull it off through pure skill and dedication.

[@Stevegeta]

Really enjoyed watching this video. Great video !!!!!!

[@Mordecai02]

Cool skips like these are sick as hell. I see this as an absolute win!

[@griffonsarcade]

Hell yeah. Shoutouts to the wonderful and enduring speedrunning community for Sonic 2.

[@miwiki6]

Sonic speedruns are my favorite.

[@Ticci_Tobii]

I want to be able to speedrun games like a TAS bot Yk what that’s my new life goal

[@WikiHL]

Glad to see a new vid

[@endarkenedgd]

"pausing is too op" sounds like something someone who's only ever played online multiplayer games would say while trying to play a singleplayer game

[@Reset2150676]

as someone that enjoys speedrunning sonic 2 casually, this was a very interesting video to a world im missing out on

[@Reset2150676]

danel zack, your comment got deleted

[@osukarui]

Interesting dilemma and well presented videp!

[@swampcooler8332]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="1">0:01</a> i appreciate the koishi

[@designerwookiee]

I'm reminded every time I watch one of these history of (insert game) speedrunning type videos. Speedrunners do be built different.

[@Vantoxify]

Cool video man, I enjoyed it

[@SkullJamal]

bro the chat on the bottom at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="498">8:18</a> got me on me on the floor

[@SuperSonic71087]

Great video! Thanks for covering this amazing Sonic speedgame!

[@TheRockToraGaii]

I love see spreedrunnes going realy fast

[@ruslanemiraliyev4361]

First screen in the video speed runner, there was koishi komeiji from touhou project

[@vonryder]

Great vid!

[@Valientlink]

That's pretty funny actually. I always sucked at the special stages as a kid, so I'd just keep pausing and unpausing to see what was ahead lol

[@vjspectron]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="490">8:10</a> is one of the funniest glitch moments I've ever seen! It looks like he gets splattered against invisible glass by Robotnik's machine taking off.

[@wroometh9208]

koishi jumpscare right at the start of the video. awesome splits background

[@traviscrum5860]

An ad came up when you started talking about pause buffering and, somehow, the video is now stuck on pause. It wouldn't play no matter what I did, but is playing now that I exited and reopened the video Pausing (in the form of an ad) broke the video stream lol

[@damientheincin]

When you were talking about how the timing style changed, I was honestly expecting some sort of uproar to be brought up, I'm so used to this type of controversy in speedrunning communities, it's really nice to see a community accept a change like this and peacefully adapt for once. I'm sure a few people were upset, but I'm glad that it wasn't enough that it had to be brought up in a video like this. Good job, Sonic 2 speedrunning community, you're awesome.

[@kellypaton2618]

i think a big part of it is that the old way was making speedrunners slow down and nobody wants that!

[@damientheincin]

@@kellypaton2618 Very valid point, I don't know why I didn't think of that!

[@thesubinion]

lol nice Trails in the Sky music at the end there

[@DonYagamoth]

That's a really neat summary, thank you :) I wonder if the Dark Souls 3 speedruns could (or already have?...) implemented something of that equivalent. To me it always felt silly that they spend half a minute quitting to the main menu any then immedialy loading again, in order to 'save' the time of the door opening animation. I understand why they do it, it's just the logical conclusion of how their timing method works and is best utilized - but having no penalty for saving & quitting seemed weird to me. Time to check their leaderboards again, because the runs themselves were really awesome aside from that

[@idontwantahandlethough]

awesome video bro

[@zahidlaguna9432]

What's crazy about these pause breaks is that openAI(the company that made chatGPT) held a competition to train an AI agent using reinforcement learning to play and beat Sonic 2. Someone found a way to train it to use pause break glitches, and they won the competition. This video reminded me of that, and I found it pretty cool.

[@AkiDave]

Finding out new Speedrunning lore is always fun

[@emilvennerberg4927]

Im convinced that speedruning will eventually turn into a competition of who can turn on and off the games the fastest.

[@alexohkay]

I remember doing these on metropolis act 2 and 3 as a kid, but not knowing how or why these happened.

[@Xris_Kinder]

Thanks for never letting me forget to shoot for the moon! :)

[@lepopcornnaisseur546]

Blud showin a Genny controlla like we aint playin Origins in 2024 💀

[@VoltBandit]

I see a new LunaticJ video released 1 minute ago. Let's go

[@LendriMujina]

I'm reminded of the time stop scene from the first Sonic movie.

[@Kuropopex]

This video makes me remember a phrase from two youtubers i watch: "You can go fast......but you really shouldn't"

[@ALEXIS_OG]

I swear speedrunners are able to break ANY game to make it finishable in less than 10% of all time that needed for ordinary olayers.

[@WTheW_gaming]

I'm in the IGT camp. I feel it's more in line with the spirit of the game

[@superben1755]

If you don't like pauses in speedruns don't watch Perfect Dark runs. Pausing totally ruined them.

[@yammz1181]

I love how speed runs have become.Who can break the game better

[@magne7771]

Talk about catering to my interests. I'm a Road Rash 3:TDF player. Turns out, there's a pause/unpause glitch in there that feels like... having confetti cannons strapped to your bike, and just, with a *_WOOMPH,_* shunts you to one side or the other. It's the best. ...unfortunately, its banned in speedrunning, despite being... situational.

[@maskedgamerCX]

When speedrunners hit terminal velocity

[@vincentauronward347]

I speedrun LEGO racers and hold some single track world records. Measuring with in-game time rather than RTA seems really silly. I think RTA should be king in 99% of games. The strategic value of pausing for a level wrap or just playing normally sounds really interesting and like a fun puzzle to solve. I'm very surprised to hear the debate lasted as long as it did. Amazing video!

[@EvolvingFetus]

Many games need this change on PC tbh. Where the main meta has become to exploit the load remover, essentially allowing you to pausebuffer the entire run like it was a tas. RE4 is a good example of this.

[@DeadMedia-vf4je]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="0">0:00</a> starts the video with KKHTA Koosh

[@shadowthehedgehog3113]

See, this is why I warned y'all about speedrunning!

[@yeolemillinial8295]

there should be a speedrun version of the game that allows to hit a button to skip the end the level scoring like a lot of games allow by default. this would fix the need to go back in game time, which would also fix the timing for pause buffering since i know they aren't getting rid of it.

[@Autumn5layzallday]

I personally think we should calculate the mean of both timing methods OR add an rta timer, but pause it at the score tally.

[@rafaelramondemorais2743]

Trivia: Pausing in Speedruns is also present in Sonic CD with Colission Chaos Boss Skip.

[@TARINunit9]

Title: "Pausing broke Sonic 2 speed runs" My initial thoughts: "Well yeah that's the sacrifice when you use in-game time instead of real-time. If only that Time Bonus didn't take so long to tick down, we wouldn't be stuck with-" Screen Wrap Glitch: BONJOUR

[@BryanM86]

The answer to the question in case you don’t want to watch this whole video Passing makes doing TAS tricks easier

[@roswaallmathers5253]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="870">14:30</a> trails music jumpscared me I don't usually see youtubers using them XD

[@Dominasty]

I never care about these things but I watch you recaps of lore. Why are we like this?

[@Tomeroche]

"The problem with being faster than light is you can only live in darkness.

[@kenshiro8984]

so funny that the game most known for having a fast character has extremely counterintuitive score mechanics regarding speedrunning it

[@chJohnJobs]

I would've argued for a catagory split, Only because I enjoy fast as possible regaurdless of method

[@Selph217]

Great video, Random question though what sonig is playing at then end, it sounds like its from a trails game but i cant find the actual song lol

[@Selph217]

Found it continuation of the dream from trails in the sky sc

[@lepopcornnaisseur546]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="820">13:40</a> do you notice something? The poll option colours are Sonic 🔵 Tails 🟠 and Knuckles 🔴 😱😳🤯

[@oflameo8927]

💎Chaos Control!!

[@oil_moon]

Need that slightly altered version of Chemical Plant zone that you used!

[@brianpso]

So happy the community chose the better choice in the end. Allowing pause buffers without consequences is absolutely stupid.

[@TDM_]

Monkey ball has a pausing problem that had to be removed from speed runs, because you can control yourself at high speeds by rapidly pausing and unpausing.

[@tosterzyingd]

i think bro bouta have beef with summoning salt & bismuth

[@andrewsanders17]

Monkey ball speed runners had a similar issue and they banned excessive pausing to accept the speedrun. The agreed pause buffer tricks can be deemed an exception.

[@rphntw1n]

Of all the games to actually slow down in a speedrun.

[@xwulfd]

this is probably the most ironic thing on speedrun, you have to slow down to get fast time,, in a sonic game lol

[@aetheralmeowstic2392]

What's that music in the _It's always sunny in Emerald Hill_ title card?

[@tomt7621]

A new video about speedruns... Nice When lowest percent finally shows us how totk can be beaten with 0% the world will be all good again😊

[@emmet042]

The discrepancy I seen regarding IGT to Real Time in speedrunning has to be Splatoon 3's Side Order. Last I checked, the world record was around a <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="210">3:30</a>; however, the real time is for the run was around 25 minutes!

[@lordgeovanni]

I sorta see the merit of both timers. Like, RTA gifts people who take the time to train for those frame perfect actions. But Pause is sometimes just required, and Sonic actually has a negative for having excess in-game time (the Time Bonus). Because both of these are valid, and honestly speedrunning is about getting it done fast... I don't know. I think both should be applied somehow to balance things. Like maybe if you took the average of RTA and In-Game? So there is incentive to lower both as only lowering one of the two times gives less results than lowering both, but it also more heavily incentivizes lowering the higher time if only one.

[@foodflare9870]

If I were in charge of this, I'd just make two categories. IGT and RTA would just be separate categories.