Most games actually do have glitchless categories! Admittedly, one would need more than just knowing how to M-Speed and D-Speed to hit Unleashed and especially Generations leaderboards.
I don't get the fun of finishing the games with all that hurry and haste. I can get it to some extent if you're aiming for getting a higher score on games that give a time bonus, but there's usually more ways to earn points in those games that could give you a better score through slower gameplay, so all that stress of doing perfect runs through weird exploits is meaningless for me. I like to take my time in every game, including Sonic games, unless the game itself demands speed for whatever you're doing.
I had a ton of fun speedrunning Mania for a while. I felt clever when I temporarily claimed the top spot on Oil Ocean 2 by flying over 70% of the map as Tails. I don't mind when there's a big glitch or trick once in a while, but when it devolves into something like just being screen wraps over and over I lose interest. I'm glad that categories exist to help with this—watching GDQ runs of Diddy Kong Racing bores the hell out of me because they just play two tracks over and over due to a glitch, and thankfully that's not the only category out there.
Just think of the time as a score of sorts in itself. But like in golf, so lower is better. Thank you, I will look into that.
Well, that's pretty obvious, but my point was that games that reward you a score bonus for going fast do also reward other things that way, and, more often than not, going slower gives you a higher score. Well, that, and the fact that many games give you extra lives and that kind of stuff for scoring certain amounts of points, while speed running or getting any other kind of new record usually only serves for bragging rights. As I said before, being a pro speedrunner is not worth the stress it brings unless you're dunno, a gamer miracle that does marvels without a single tear of sweat while streaming on Twitch for a bazillion watchers that donate money for achieving such feats.
As people, we like to see goals complete (thus the nature of the video game), these goals can be both extrinsic (score bonuses, in-game ranking, waypoints, etc.) or intrinsic (playing around with ragdolls, building sky-limit towers and jumping off, etc.). Speed-running is of intrinsic worth (although, it additionally can be extrinsic for some games defined by getting to the end as fast as possible or by leaderboards, in spite of said leaderboards' tendencies to get hacked) to some, as they believe it is worth the effort to get the 'perfect run' and perform their best (or they're just trying to get Twitch donations oof). The 'fun of it' is simply seeing yourself getting to your peak performance. Sonic's fast nature certainly helps with that, too.
Speedrunning isn't always a hardcore thing. It can just be a fun self-challenge or a competition among friends. Whenever I play a Sonic game I try to go fast because going fast is its own thrilling reward. Sometimes, that's all there is to it. Whether the game has a tangible benefit to it isn't important to me, and I doubt it matters to the speedrun community at large, either. On the original subject: The Sonic Adventure games have lots of ways to get characters to improper places, whether it's wrong warping, going out of bounds, or messing with menus. I acquire every version of these games that I can, including the early Japanese releases, just to personally document the many differences in "glitchiness". It's what kept me playing these games for hundreds of hours, and I still think up and try out new ideas every now and then. The Sonic Adventure games also have their famous glitch that allows you to give an item to a Chao an infinite amount of times. I love the cute little guys but the grinding was monstrous. I'd have never 100%ed the games had I not found out this trick. I remember finding the screen wrap in Metropolis Zone by accident. It's at that point of the zone where the fatigue start to sets in, so anything that lets me skip ahead is nice. Sonic Heroes has a funn movement trick wherein you can cancel the belly flop move with a glide or a swap to speed formation for a burst of speed. I had a lot of fun speedrunning Team Rose levels, which were already my favorite due to not overstaying their welcome like the others. Sonic Mania in its earlier versions had a fun glitch with steep slopes: holding down and mashing the jump button would continuously give you speed. Chemical Plant 1 was already a level I had a blast speedrunning but I found this to be a fun metagaming bit that didn't detract from the run like certain clips and zips would.
Not really to the benefit of completing a game or level, but in MD/Genesis Sonic 2, selecting "1 Player" or "2 Player VS" resets the amount of Chaos Emeralds collected while the Options Menu does not. So something friends & I would do is activate level select, put in the all Emeralds code, go to the Options menu & access 2 Player by selecting "VS Mode Items". With this, Super Sonic can be accessed in 2 Player mode (with slightly messed up sprites), and hitting a Teleport Item Box if Sonic was transformed would give infinite invincibility and higher speed to Tails. Super Sonic then loses these properties but maintains his higher jump, ring drain, and appearance until his rings reach 0 (and naturally, any future teleports would continue to swap the properties between P1 & P2). Playing like this was a fun way to mix up the multiplayer and experience some form of "Super Tails" outside of S3&K
Those weird launcher things at the start of Oil Ocean 2 have a weird glitch that can result in messed-up movement. It's something I do whenever I play the level.
This is a lot of theory that I know and doesn't really counter my point. When I said I can't see it's worth, it's not because I can get everyone has their tastes, it's because time is such a precious resource it would be better spent in more healthy or more productive ways. This is a better counterpoint, but I usually associate speedrunning to its hardcore side because the soft side had always existed before speedrunning became a gaming culture, and, in the global scenario internet is, you're usually either the top of the world or no one at all since others can do better. Technically, I've "speedrun" S3K competition mode, but I haven't tried hard to beat my times once I saw they were good enough and it would be a hell to go beyond. For example, sometimes you're lucky and jumping from the curved ceiling in Balloon Park can get you through the moving hole in the floor instantly even without touching the bumpers below, but trying to do that more than once in a single run would be a contant headache instead of a fun goal. And I play Sonic games really slow the first time I play them because I like to explore. Imagine my stupid face stopping at every step in Unwiished just to see more straight corridor without a single platform and fighting the camera to check out if I was missing something behind. On the other hand, you can't imagine how much I suffered to get a Jet rank on Kogane Jet race when I played JSR, It felt good when I got that, but the process to get there was a torture. Oh, and sorry for derailing the topic. I still can't remember if I exploited any glitch, btw.
I don't know why you're so adamantly trying to delegitimize the ways others enjoy their games. Other playstyles don't need reasons to exist and they don't need to be explained to someone who doesn't seem willing to understand. Saying that you disagree not out of a matter of taste but because other people's styles are a waste of time is one of the most arrogant things I've seen.
This was always one of my favorites (happens at 1:36): I don't always get it, but I at least TRY for it every time I play Planet Wisp.
That certainly looks incredibly cool. Finding an actual speedrun use for a trick is really satisfying. I found a way to get over the top of Lava Reef 1 in Mania as Sonic, but I'm too lazy to actually optimize it in a speedrun. From up there I can skip the zig-zagging ending sequence, place myself over the goal, and fall through the floor and back into the stage. Speaking of Mania, it's possible to cheese or skip some of the bosses by flying over their triggers. Standing right before the scroll lock trigger and having Tails run along and hit the capsule is another great way to skip some bosses. It doesn't always work, but with how annoying bosses can be, any skipping helps.
Well, that's not what I wanted to say, but I see I may have been disrespectful by saying that. I put an example that I thought would explain my point, but it's probably too subjective. I just wanted to say that some forms of fun can become some kind of obsession, and there's when it starts looking to me as unhealthy. I'm not going as far as to call it an addiction, but indeed something to be careful about, and trying to be the best at something tends to put us near that risk. I didn't want to judge the way you have fun, but I deal with a lot of esports players and know how weird things can get when one gives games more space in their mind than they should. About the "productive" part, well, that's more a rule I put for myself when I noticed how much time of my life I was losing instead of putting together and making real a lot of projects I had in mind. I get that, if your project is speedrunning this or that game, then everything's alright, but, once again, I see a lot of gamers with great creativity and ideas that never realize them because they're entertained playing the same videogame hundreds of hours. Not saying they're wrong in doing so, but I really wonder what marvels they would do with that time if they spent it creating something. So, to put it shorter, I wasn't adamant in disregard your hobbies, I'm just adamant in worrying about what I've seen happen to a lot of people, myself included. Hope I explained it better now.
To get back to glitches: There's a thing the version of Retro Engine that the Sonic 1/2 remasters run on where, if you jump when touching the very surface of the water, you jump stupid high. I remember a couple points in Labyrinth and Scrap Brain 3 were made easier because of it.
I think you're framing it wrong for yourself. It's not even about finishing the game at that point and in about 99.9% of cases, the speedrunner in question has already finished the game 'normally'. Speedrunning is about a few things but I would say the two main appeals of it are cooperation and competition. It's a cooperative exercise in that runners will often ape tech from each other in order to put together the optimal run - then comes the competitive part, being the one to finally lower the record is a fantastic feeling and you want to get there before anyone else. See it as just a way to get more out of a game if you love it enough. This is a good video that may impart at least some of why people do this to you.
