Hidden Base

Hidden Base is the 10th stage in Hero Story. Our heroes have found the entrance to Eggman's hidden base, and Tails clears the way for everyone.

The Beginning
The beginning of this stage features many different options for strats, ranging from deadbrain simple to extremely tight. I'll cover the skips in some detail, and you can decide which strat is right for you.

Axl Jump
Aside from going through stage normally, this is the slowest of the strats, but it is the easiest and safest to do. It requires a good hover, but a pause hover makes this jump much easier. This is about 2 seconds faster than playing the stage normally.

GC Skip
This skip received this name because the wall you clip through has no collision on the GameCube version. On other versions, you need to fly Tails into a corner in order to clip through the wall. While this carries the risk of dying if your angle is incorrect, the skip is about 1 second faster than Axl Jump, saving around 3 seconds over a skipless beginning. Low-level runners playing on GameCube should definitely use this strat, since the skip is *ree for them.

Pole Jump
This is the current fastest strat, but it is also the most difficult strat. To do this, you need to jump on the pole to the left of the door. With that position and a good hover jump, you can go over many wall collisions, allowing you to skip the entire corner. The other part that makes this strat difficult is that you have to match a platform cycle later in the stage. If you don't match the platform cycles, you will most likely die. This strat is 2 seconds faster than GC skip, making it 5 seconds faster than a skipless beginning.

By standing on the door, the trick becomes a lot more lenient. It has a 3-frame window for the pause, and requires a frame-perfect unpause. If you go for it on the collapsing platform before the pole, it requires a frame-perfect pause and unpause. Note that the unpause has to be perfect.

To know if you had enough height with the second jump, I like to see if I can cross through Knuckles' right nipple in the painting on the wall. If you did, you should have just enough height to make it over the wall. Otherwise, you may want to go for GC Skip as a backup.

Comparison of Strats
Here's a good video comparing all the strats.
 * Axl Jump in the top-left
 * Normal in the top-right
 * GC Skip in the bottom-left
 * Pole Jump in the bottom-right