(OLD) Sonic Adventure 2 - Aquatic Mine - m5 - 0:27.72

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Flashback: 2006/10/18. Aquatic Mine was, to the best of anyones knowledge, a very tame and enclosed level with no brokenness to have to contend with on time runs. I had just finished up a run on Aquatic Mine hard mode in a then record 53.89 seconds, staying in bounds at all times (again because that was all I knew). However, even if I couldnt navigate outside the level, I knew the way it was shaped, and that if breaking through walls was in fact possible on this level, there would be a big payoff. So when I submitted the stat to TSC, I accompanied it with the following comment: A perfect time on this level would be around...28. Seventeen months later...here we are. Aquatic Mine has indeed been subjected to numerous wall clips, and the comment from before rings eerily prophetic as I strung together a completion in, you guessed it, just under 28 seconds. (However, to the chagrin of the prophecy, over 5 more seconds have come off.) It takes only a bit of deliberation after watching 33.50 before a glaringly obvious improvement comes to mind. You break out at the three fans to the left...and the Sunglasses spring drops you off right by those fans...so why in the hell would you make that level 3 segmented? Yes, by pairing 3 into 1, the time spent on 3 is almost a freebie. However, this does introduce the big dilemma of multi piece segments: their multiplicative complexity. If you get one piece in a satisfactory time about 1 out of 10 tries, and another piece 1 out of 20 tries, segmenting them means you can expect to take 30 tries to deal with both. However, if it saves time to string them onto the same life, youre looking at about a 1:200 success rate, and 95% of the time you end up getting 1, itll be for naught. Here the matter is even trickier, since positioning yourself for the breakout at the fan is a lot easier in standalone segments (when you can approach the wall at glide speed) than in the combination (where you practically get thrown into the wall, higher up, and just hitting a quick climb may cause you to overshoot). This was another one of those levels that easily ate up over 1000 lives, but its just that last one (or more accurately, the last three) that transforms it from tedium into prophecy fulfilled. To break out, approach the fan horizontally, such that Knuckles feet are at the same height as the top of the fan. GRAPHICAL NOTE: If you did watch 33.50, you would have noticed it was very dark and almost unwatchable at times (particularly trying to follow the breakouts). This time around, Ive upped the brightness a bit, hopefully making this dark level easier to see.

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