Everyone lauds City Escape but it's nice to see Radical Highway get some love too.

And now Radical Highway is Black Doom's hyperfixation as of Shadow Generations.

I was expecting "Playable Cutscene" to mean automated and on rails but was pleasantly surprised to see it used as a praise of the gameplay and story integration

One thing I liked about this stage was how it was like a „darker“ version of Speed Highway, the paths that you could safely run across in SH are now being bombarded by the military, tunnels that in SH were perfect for running to your to top speed are now cramped and guarded. Plus the fact that in general the stage is more bumpy and uneven than the mostly smooth SH. It’s a good way of showing how similar sonic and shadow are in certain parts but also where they are different.

>You found a secret! 😃
>Oops, you can’t get to it because you don’t have the Light Dash 😞
>Which is what I would say if I was a chump 😎

I can’t get enough of how much passion went into this game.

Plus, failing Lost Valley's homing attack chain actually puts you on a faster path, counterintuitively enough! Just fall, boost, bounce, and then boost out of the bounce.

This video was sponsored by black doom.

“I just think Radical Highway is so cool”
-Black Doom

About the Flame Ring, an angle that makes it even better is, I imagine they designed the Dark Story levels with the assumption that, while you COULD start with the Dark Story, you most likely played the Hero Story first, and therefore already had a handle on how Sonic, and by extension Shadow, played. In that case, you may know how to do a spindash jump and could think to do so when you saw the ring trail. Your reward for this is an item Sonic had to wait much longer to get, allowing you to play through all of Shadow's levels already having it instead of needing to backtrack like you may have done with Sonic's.

Black doom's favorite level

playing this stage on 2P with a competitive brother lowkey makes me sweat

I legit had NO IDEA about the bridge being propped up by the metal boxes.

That’s one of my favorite things about this game, always learning something new.

Something you forgot to mention is that in the cutscene where Sonic and Shadow meet, Shadow is always physically above Sonic. From standing on top of F-6t Bigfoot to planting onto the building. Even when Shadow briefly moves more towards Sonic's eye level during chaos control, he's still floating in the air. The ground Sonic walks on is so beneath Shadow, he never sets foot on it!

sega saw this video and went "hey lets make this the stage black doom turns every stage into including the final stage "oh shadow i just love radical highway"

“A special technique I call running away”
ZoomZike is apparently a Joestar now.

I love Shadow running animation in SA2, I don't know why they changed in literally every single subsequent game.

I've never seen such a perfect defense for the Adventure style gameplay over the Boost formula.
Seriously, they had something there. If only they worked at it better.

I think Black Doom liked your video.

Can I just point out how cool it is that they actually incorporate their personalities in their first zone with the ring path and shrine. Just like with GUN and eggman, you can literally tell the game itself "don't tell me what to do."

It could just be a happy little accident, but given how much independence and defiance are core to his character, I can't imagine it being a mistake.

The great duality between Sonic's first stage and Shadow's first stage is how it depicts GUN's trickery. GUN was only capturing Sonic because Shadow was a top secret that they didn't want the public to know about, thus they put the blame of Shadow on Sonic. Because of this only the lowest level Gun weaponry and personnel was sent to capture Sonic while much higher tactics were being used on Shadow, the real target of capture.

It could be argued that GUN didn't even want to recapture Sonic and took it easy on him via the much more open layouts and less advanced tactics from GUN in Sonic's first level compared to Shadow's. This doesn't mean that GUN itself didn't want to recapture Sonic, only that the top brass didn't want to put any large effort into recapture because the most effort they were using was on Shadow. Thus they sent more incompetent and/or newbie leaders to lead Sonic's recapture.
I imagine the leaders of GUN didn't want to recapture Sonic because as long as Sonic was free they could continue to pin Shadow's crimes and appearances on Sonic.

With this outlook Sonic's recapture makes even more sense because not only did both units surround Sonic after Shadow left, now the much more advanced unit was forced to recapture Sonic. It might also be why Sonic was placed in Gerald's cell and why the area he was in had no other prisoners. They had to make sure the only personal dealing with Sonic were the ones that had clearance and the knowledge of the top secret Project Shadow information so when Sonic explained what happened the only people who would hear would be people willing to keep it covered up.

If you're wondering where all this information about GUN covering up Shadow's existence comes from you need to look into the original computer screen info graphics and japanese text from the dreamcast version as it's all there in the original.
I don't know why such important information was changed but that's how it goes sometimes.