Preamble:

Sonic Riders Tournament Edition is a tournament mod for Sonic Riders that was developed to gear the game towards a competitive 1v1 environment. In the process of doing this, there are many notable changes to the game that still apply when there is no opponent to race against. SRTE is still Sonic Riders at the core, but there are many small mechanical changes that add up to making a run in this mod look very different from a run in the original. We are going to focus on what these changes mean for speedrunning the game and how to use them effectively.

Changes:

• Many of the crazy glitches in the game have been fixed or lessened. Pause glitches with FLY types are impossible as you are now required to hold the pause button for a second in order for the game to pause. In addition, the Auto Slider can no longer drift dash in the air. (Sorry but you won't be able to perform 6-second laps anymore.)

• "Quick Time Events" (QTE) automatically spin. In almost every track of the game, you are required to go through a qte. In vanilla runs of this game, you will notice that all WRs are dominated by people who specifically use keyboard on the pc version. There is a reason for this. The pc version has a glitch where pressing both keys allows you to go through the QTEs frame perfect, gaining max air and lots of speed with no effort. Getting rid of the glitch would have been an issue as we have built this mod using the GameCube version, and keyboard players wouldn't be able to make a circle motion with their non-existent analog sticks. In SRTE, you simply go through all quick time events automatically frame perfect so that you can use whatever controller you please for runs.

• You gain a flat amount of additional speed from dash panels instead of being capped to a specific speed. This means that dash panels are something you want to hit unlike in vanilla where you actually want to avoid dash panels most of the time. Make sure to time boosts and drift dashes before hitting the panels. You want to do this so that the dash panel speed gets added on top of your speed, instead of hitting the panel first and then setting your speed back down to whatever your boost or drift dash would be.

• We removed the 100 Ring Box and MAX Air Box due to their anti-competitive nature. This means for speedrunning the game, you will actually need to get good at ring collection and all of the skills that come with it such as spacing, routing, air management. These make the runs much more challenging and varied, compared to the original where you get handed a free level 3 on most tracks.

• Ball & Chain item was removed. This item was stupid and needlessly added rng to the runs in the original.

• Speed shoes now adds 100 speed instead of setting your current speed to 200. The problem with the original speed shoes is that all gears at level 3 move faster than 200. Considering speed shoes was an item you could grab in random boxes, this item added some nasty rng to Heroes and Babylon story runs in vanilla. With this change we made, speed shoes are almost always useful.

• Dying does not reset your rings nor your level. You won't have to instantly restart your run due to one mistake. Additionally, this opens up possibilities for skips in nearly all categories since in the original you couldn't afford to do many of the skips because you'd be knocked down to level 1 for dying.

• In Time Trial mode, gears that use rings as fuel will always get 10 rings instead of 20 from random item boxes. Gears that use Air as fuel will get 10 ring boxes from random item boxes until the player is level 3. At level 3 the player will pick up 30 air boxes as usual. Time Trial mode is normally weird since it is a lot slower paced than Free Race. These changes are to make it so Time Trial mode runs resemble the actual performance of an extreme gear in competitive play.

• Players can hold the Z button to become immune to turbulence & pits. You can also press the Y button to toggle the function on or off. This change makes certain categories have less rng.

• Big one, characters are all unique with more varied stat spreads. In ILs for the original, you would pretty much only ever play Shadow, Tails, or Aiai for each type respectively due to their stats making every other character obsolete. In tournament edition, some characters work better for specific gears than others due to things like having higher top speed, longer boost duration at certain levels, or higher drift dash speeds. Refer to the sidebar on this page to see all the changes in detail.

• Another big one. There are 40 unique gears (Each individual character's default gear is not counted) in the game and they were all changed to be incredibly varied and do something completely different from each, rather than the original where most of the gears were just a crappier version of Darkness. (Shadow's skates) Refer to the sidebar on this page to see all the changes in detail.