Sonic Colors: Ultimate

Egg Shuttle is the yellow ship that flies around the Zone select screen after defeating the bosses of both Sweet Mountain and Starlight Carnival and is essentially the game's "Challenge Mode". While the Egg Shuttle unlocks after these bosses, the achievement for beating it will not be awarded until you've beaten all other stages, therefore making all stages available in the Egg Shuttle, so don't waste your time until you've seen the credits.

This mode is essentially just playing through the entire game from Start -> Finish, starting with 4 lives, without quitting or losing all of your lives, Mega Drive style - so no quick resume or shutdowns; set a couple of hours aside and do it in one sitting. Pausing is okay. Similar to the Mega Drive games, you get a life every 1,000,000 points. Unlike the Mega Drive games though, you don't get lives every 100 rings and if you lose all of your lives during your playthrough, there's no continues, so you restart from the beginning; Tropical Resort Act 1. Try and earn as many lives as you can for the later levels - remember to break the score on the results screen for some extra lives!

Any Rings, score and boost energy that are left over from the previous level carry over into the next - exploit this! If you manage to collect and hold on to at least 1000 rings, then you'll get ring bonus of at least 1,000,000 at the end of each stage. 2k rings = 2M points = 2 lives etc. All Wisps are available from the start, so if you know where some lives are hidden in the earlier levels behind some wisp moves, you should go for them. Super Sonic cannot be used in this mode, even if you enable him via the Options Satellite, so get good at Terminal Velocity Act 1!

Red Rings don't count towards your total, but are worth 30k points, so it doesn't hurt to get them. Any Park Tokens collected via the Egg Shuttle do not count towards your total either, so you can ignore those. S ranks don't matter, so don't worry about performing dangerous manoeuvres for shortcuts. Just get to the end as quickly and safely as possible.

Avoid getting a Time Out, as otherwise you'll stop getting points for the rest of the stage, including 0 bonuses at the results screen for your rings.

Be warned that certain boss fights become a bit harder in this mode, with slightly altered attack patterns - an example is the final boss having waves of five different attacks instead of 2 or 3 - nothing too new or special though. This should be your last achievement in the game, by which point you should be seasoned enough to handle anything this mode throws at you.

I finished this mode in 148:06.82 with 76 lives and a score of 64,039,370. It wasn't as difficult as it was long - I didn't stick with the main routes a lot of the time and tried my best to get as many lives as possible as quickly as possible. I only got a time out in two stages (including Terminal Velocity Act 1).



Expect this mode to take you a little over 2 hours (depending on how much you die/divert from the main route), and again, practice Terminal Velocity to avoid unnecessary time wasting.

Good luck!