Home > Video Games > GameCube > Sonic Adventure 2: Battle > Collecting 99 Lives
One day during probably 2006, I was playing Sonic Adventure 2: Battle when I decided on a whim that I wanted to increase the number of lives I had in the game to 99 (the maximum amount permitted). At this point, I had already gotten stuck on certain stages in both the Hero Story and the Dark Story, so perhaps I thought that if I ever attempted again to complete those difficult stages, I would never have to worry about running out of lives if I kept on dying.
I turned to repeatedly playing the first mission of the Route 101 stage (i.e. Tails' kart racing stage) to accomplish this, as I figured that it was relatively short, easy, gave me plenty of rings, and had very little (if any) risk of death. I can remember with some clarity spending part of my afternoon and evening grinding the stage; based upon the time required for a single play of the stage and the fact that I would acquire two (or maybe three) lives per play, it shouldn't have taken me more than a few hours to accumulate 99 lives. By the end of this task, I had become very familiar with Route 101, and ever since then, whenever I play the stage, I invariably think about this grind that I performed one day back in (maybe) 2006.