Howdy! I've slowly begun learning the run, but on GCN. And i noticed most records are set on PC. Are there any major skips or strats not possible on GCN version?
Currently, I'm having alot of issues with the automatic camera, and weird shared button layout used on GCN, where you only use 2 buttons, but they kinda change what they do, for certain parts of the game, while having alot of completely unused buttons.
Thank you in advance! :)
- LoveBot
the reason most people run on PC is because its most accessible and easiest to capture for most people, and also it is the fastest for real time (by far the shortest load times). Competitively, that's not relevant anymore though, since the leaderboards are now sorted by ingame time (all level times add up) to make it fair between different platforms and computers. Also on PC you can use the automatic splitter and ingame timer, so that you dont have to do calculations and splitting by hand
Theres a few differences in the run though, but none of these is major enough that I would recommend not playing on GC if that's the version you're most familiar with it. A few clips behave differently (some for the better, some for the worse), and non-HD releases have a bit of a disadvantage in hunting stages, since there's less hint monitors.
Generally speaking I would recommend to keep on playing the game on the platform youre used to if youre learning the game
Everything that you can do on PC you can do on GCN. The only real differences are longer loading times as well as less hint monitors on the hunting stages. Running on GCN wont put you at too much at a disadvantage as once you get a sub 50, the leader boards go by in game time, which you can manually calculate. Also, even on PC there is still the problem of the shared button layout despite the unused buttons. If you ever need help the community will be more than willing to help. Feel free to join the sonic speedrunning discord, the link is in guides. Good Luck learning and have fun.
Version differences are negligible in this game, the reason most people run on PC is because it's the most accessible to get your hands on and easiest to record, and also because it has the autosplitter/ingame timer that we almost all now use to time our runs accurately. Before we switched to timing by IGT, PC was the dominant version purely due to loading times, the consoles just cannot keep up with it and therefore PC is still preferred for races.
As far as skips go, technically it's actually GameCube that has the advantage. Hidden Base has a GameCube exclusive skip involving flying straight through a wall since the collision simply doesn't work correctly on GameCube version. There is however a tradeoff in the Knuckles stages; Death Chamber and Meteor Herd have less hint monitors on GameCube version, which can have a significant impact on your level time. Dreamcast also has a version-exclusive skip in Eternal Engine, but it's extremely difficult and nobody would want to attempt it in a run.
For controllers, the same 'issues', if you want to call them that, exist the same on 360/PS4 controller as they do on GC controller. As you said, you only have two basic buttons for this game: A, and then the Action Button, which is jointly assigned to B/X, and performs different actions depending on your position and state. This is the same on the above controllers: A on 360 against B/X, and X on PS4 against Square and Circle.
tl;dr the version differences are minor at worst and you're still basically playing the same run regardless of version, we just generally prefer PC because it's more convenient.
