Does anyone know if it's possible for Knuckles to get into this area, and the path that connects to it, in Launch Base Act 2? I'm thinking it's not, but I wanted to ask about it just in case. It's normally exclusive to Sonic and Tails. Knuckles can't climb up the wall because the horizontal tube on the right is solid. He can't run up the angled tube because it's not solid. He can't jump high enough off the purple tube on the bottom, so he can't climb the far right wall and then glide over. I've tried a few other methods too of getting up there but none of them worked. The only other way I can think of would be to glitch through a ceiling in the Knuckles-specific portion of the act, or glitch through the floor/tubes that go above this path... but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work either, and they didn't when I tried, however I'm not very familiar with all of the glitches in the game so I'm hoping someone else might know better? Not including debug mode or patch codes, please.
It's possible to get into Sonic's section, but not at the point you were talking about about, and you can't backtrack to that section because the water pipes are one-way. The glitch/oversight happens around 0:30-0:31 in that video, and it looks like you also need to go super in order to have enough momentum to run around the curve at 0:50-0:53 in order to land on the diagonal pipe (or else you just go through it).
Interesting trick, but the only question that pervaded my mind was "Genecyst? Really? Even in 2008, we had better emulators than THAT..." I did like how the glitched sprites for the three-tiered-boss-whose-name-escapes-me lets you see where the spike ball is at all times.
Thanks guys but I just wanted to say, nevermind, I found a way. It involves rebounding off a Flybot 747, which must be lured there from fairly far away. It's actually somewhat tricky because of the way they're programmed. If you get too close, they go into a dive, and then go back up to their initial height. However, it's also possible to lower their height by letting them slowly chase you from nearly the edge of the screen. That's probably the only possible way to get up there "legit"ly.
If you have Gens+, you can play back this ridiculous run which uses preexisting gravity glitches carried over from the start of the level to visit every path meant for all characters, or at least every path with rings on it.
You're likely to have lost any lightning shield by that point though due to the water on the approach, unless you get one from the bonus stage hidden on a previous platform. A more reliable way to do it as Sonic alone is to grab the bubble shield in the previous section, spindash from the ledge under the Flybots, then bubble bounce off one of them to get up there.
