IL leaderboards for all Sonic games are hosted on soniccenter.org, for this game specifically you can find them here: http://www.soniccenter.org/rankings/sonic_4_episode_i/times

Hi, I was thinking that it might be cool to add categories (in all the games that have them) for the campaigns of gamemodes other than the regular race campaigns. I personally think it'd be really interesting to see speedruns of the Puzzle or Platform campaigns, cause those aren't intended to be played fast. Getting through them quickly would be a good challenge. I'd personally be interested in running the Platform Title Pack in TM² Canyon

Hi! I've done ILs in this game a few months ago, and I couldnt find any leaderboards or any other competitive runs for this game anywhere back then. Any chance IL boards for this game could be added?

My ILs were done in Time Attack Mode and I took my time for all 4 laps, but of course also could be done for a single lap

There is no complete guide to learn this game at this point. It's very helpful to watch many different runners of this game, that will give you a good idea of most strats, and also many different strats to choose from if you have trouble with one. For the more complex tricks, theres tutorials around, as Smashman64 already said, Darkpr0 / RussianBlue4S has very detailed tutorials on pretty much all huge tricks in the game, some other runners have done tutorials as well if you look out for them

As far as emerald locations go, yes, there is a pastebin that lists all of them ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mZ7jBAfALq6dMAAnFUwUaGEs0Ow6Tp3TcwxB7ZGapxQ/edit#gid=0 ), but for most people the possibly most enjoyable and efficient way to learn them is to just play the levels over and over again and you will learn the pieces automatically

Good luck running!

if you dont use Metal Sonic, Sonic is probably the best choice. But you wont be able to choose from different mods from the start and youll waste time after races for levelling up

also thanks for adding the subcategories, ill probably get on doing some Canyon runs once we agreed on a timing method. I wanna suggest to maybe add "all flags" for each environment as well, to have all difficulties for one environment in one run

being able to montage a video isnt an argument against Ingame timing. You can also montage one, put it into OBS and then play a timer next to it, and you have cheated on a real time speedrun. Theres many other very competitive games with a fairly huge community (Sonic 2 being one), that go by adding up ingame times. That shouldn't be a problem for this game

ive definitely seen subcategories on this site before

Yeah, I approve of this. Even PC to PC is probably a lot different in this game as well, at least it was in TM². I lost so much time due to my bad loads in my Canyon speedruns. And since no one did any runs of this yet it would be the perfect chance to change to that as timing method

(you'd have to add though that restarting the track adds up to the time as well, so that people don't restart the track until they get a good time)

I've just been getting started with any% and I'm really enjoying it but having an All Cups category or something, similar to Mario Kart games, would indeed be really cool, and I'd be interested in doing that as well at some point

Seems as well like a logical category to me since any% just covers World Tour, which doesn't even (in my opinion) equals to beating the whole game

In my opinion, the best way to get good at this game is by just doing what you already do. Playing it a lot and also watching many runners of different skill levels run it. General movement in this game is hard, and if you play it a lot you will notice that you will get a much better feeling for it. Also watching many different runners will show you many different strats for the same thing, so you can get ideas on what are the best ways of doing certain things in the game. As far as resources go, there are turorials for the individual level skips, but those are not recommended for when you just get into running the game.

For learning different levels, for Sonic and Tails levels I'd recommend doing IL / individual level speedruns. You don't need to learn any fancy new tech for those right away, just do what you know you can do and retry the stage until you have a complete run of it without any major mistakes, this will get you some routine for running the levels. For Knuckles levels, just play them over and over again, until you can confidently tell the piece locations and can quickly move around in the stage. Your piece knowledge doesn't need to be flawless, but of course the more pieces you know, the better

The important part at the beginning is getting through the game, without getting stuck at any points for too long, this will already get you a decent time.

Good luck and have fun running!

I don't see this being a thing for this game, since the borders between glitchless and glitches are somewhat fluent and it would be very hard and arbitrary to define what would be allowed and what not. But for getting into the game (I don't know how much practise do you have yet), you wouldn't do skips anyways, and only eventually adding them later on. That being said, you can still get a really decent time without doing any major skips, so just go for what you like