Just a thought on Casino Night, you could prohibit using the slots. That would keep the player from skipping the part of the run that differentiates it from a beat the game speedrun, exploring the whole level quickly. It also increases the difficulty as Casino Night 1 requires some tricky backtracking in the later pinball sections to finish with 302 rings and Casino Night 2 has split paths with points of no return.

I know Tee-N-Tee has set some impressive IL ring attack speedruns in Sonic 1, so seeing this idea develped into a full game run would be cool to see.

Cool to see other wispons getting attention. It would be interesting to see how skilled runners play these stages with wispons other than Drill, and it would be easier to find these runs with subcategories. I like the proposed ruleset. My current ILs on the leaderboards that use wispons other than Drill are: Spaceport - Burst Prison Hall - Burst Arsenal Pyramid - Lightning Park Avenue - Cube Aqua Road - Lightning Capital City - Asteroid Red Gate Bridge - Void Guardian Rock - Hover Null Space - Lightning Imperial Tower - Void Final Judgement - Cube Death Egg Robot - Void Fire Cannon 1 - Lightning Reverse Block 1 - Void

Are there any known changes with the way the game plays as Knuckles in the SEGA AGES release compared to the 1992 release? Sonic has the dropdash to distinguish it from the 1992 release, but Knuckles does not have access to this feature. The Sonic 2 (1992) leaderboards currently have many re-releases on several platforms as they all play the same way, rather than separate leaderboards and this may apply for Knuckles on SEGA AGES if there are no changes. An example of a change in gameplay was found in SEGA AGES Sonic The Hedgehog with the spindash and dropdash abilities disabled, in which the kill plane at the bottom of the camera border was no longer in effect, making a few levels faster or easier to avoid a death.

Request "Mega SG" added as a platform.

Mega Sg is an FPGA-based aftermarket game console compatible with Sega Genesis, Sega Mega Drive, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear and SG-1000 games, designed and manufactured by Analogue. Mega Sg does not use any software emulation.

The rules for the Races and Grand Prix categories state to Beat all Races or Grand Prix. There is no progression tied to these events so it does not make sense to require a first place finish in each event. If first place is not a requirement, then a different word or phrase should be used. Beat would imply a first place finish. Considering a worse result, such as last place, as beating a race or grand prix is not typical. A DNF should still be prohibited.

A Team Adventure 100% should fully complete the adventure mode which should include completing all of the expert missions as well as getting all of the stars and keys. A run that does not go out of the way to complete missions on higher difficulties could be simply called Team Adventure (All Stars And Keys).

The Race categories have options to change the number of Teams, AI Racers, Laps, and a Mirror Mode. Are these going to be left as default for the leaderboards? I would think that lowering the number of opponents would make it easier to get a fast time and lowering the number of opponents, particularly lowering AI Racers down to 1, beats the point of doing a race instead of Time Attack. Laps can be increased to 4 or 5, certainly not an advantage. Not sure what competition there would be for longer races. I am not aware of any changes in Mirror Mode that affect times.

This game needs a Best Ending category, separated by version: Genesis (to include the re-releases on GCN, WiiVC, PS2, PS3, Xbox, X360, and the Steam client on PC), PC (1997/1998 Windows PC release and re-releases also for Windows PC), and Saturn. This category adds new content to speedruns in the form of playing the special stages, playing an additional boss fight, and different routing in levels. The concept of a game having some sort of 100% completion category that adds an appreciable amount of new content to the speedrun that is easy to define and is built into the game is common throughout the speedrunning community and most Sonic games on this site have a category that includes emerald collection. The various releases of the game have different special stages that vary in length and are not competitive with each other. To alleviate some confusion, the release for the Steam client on PC is an emulation of the Genesis release and should be listed under Platform as Genesis Emulator (this includes all 3 of the existing PC runs at the time of this post). This has been implemented on leaderboards for other games, such as the Streets of Rage series.

So it looks like the change in physics is the reason for creating a separate game entry for Sonic Mania Plus submissions. Something to consider is that Sonic Mania (not Plus) v1.05 also has the physics changes. It would make sense that those runs should also go to the Sonic Mania Plus leaderboards as they have the same physics to compete with Sonic Mania Plus..