Thanks to how cluttered the modern internet is, it's difficult to find a clear, complete answer on this subject. If you collect every ring in a stage, you get an A rank, regardless of how poorly you do, even if you get hit and lose them. I always thought this was interesting, and wanted to do this as a challenge run: A-rank all the stages by nabbing all the rings. But in some stages, this is literally impossible because some rings spawn in a death barrier, or are otherwise uncollectible. What stages, exactly, suffer from this problem? Are there any mods for the Steam version that fix this? Or would I have to use a cheat engine to try to keep within the spirit of this challenge?
Off the top of my head, the big stages that are impossible were metal harbor and white jungle, I dont remember the other stages that were impossible to get every ring.
White Jungle comes to mind with hundreds of out of reach rings. There are no mods or anything to fix it though IIRC
SPEEPSHighway has a vdieo for the early Green Forest layout present in White Jungle, but I can't find videos for the other levels in a quick search. While looking for the videos I did find a mod that is supposed to fix the issue, however I have no experience with said mod so I can't vouch for it.
It is possible to get every ring in metal harbour, there's a hidden ring on the top of the pully bit.
Has anyone looked at the code to see how this is scored? If rings are impossible to get then you should only be ranked on the rings that are possible. Just as there is considered to be a perfect pacman game where players eat only the ghosts that are possible on each level.
I haven't looked at the code, but some things to note is that it doesn't just count the ring objects, it includes the rings you can get from checkpoints, this can be manipulated I believe to get more rings than you should. That would suggest a fixed value for each level, although the early green forest object layout under white jungle is counted. Seems silly that they would count if they used some constant ring total per level. I'll perhaps have a look at somepoint when I'm at my PC (kinda hard to do it on an iPhone 4S).
I’m interested in this, it’s the only way I’m gonna get an A Rank on some of these levels on the GameCube version.