Jeez, almost thought this was the original topic I posted in years ago.
Thank God it's not, I hate my old writing style.
Anyway, I've been playing the game on and off since 2007, I think. The single player back then was the best possible example of bad level design, but, Mystic Realm, Blue Heaven, and Emerald Isles existed, so I was spoiled for choice with single player content. SRB2's unique level design kept me coming back for more of a compromise of speed and exploration. The game's like any other open source project, it gets better and better with time.
Then, I got to wanting to play as Blaze so badly when I first beat Sonic Rush. Enter the spriting madness I went into in 2009, spring-boarding myself into creating several other absolutely useless characters that I still regret wasting my time on. It held me back from getting into digital art sooner than I did.
Still, I don't regret contributing to SRB2 Riders, or making Blaze, Amy, or Mighty. The rest in between would've been better left to those who are outdoing those old works now, like with Shadow.
I didn't have a steady Internet connection until around 2002. So I was only able to be made aware of SRB2's existence around 2000 or 2001, downloading Demo 4.35 and whatever scraps the Addons section had, to take for offline use by myself in tiny half-hour segments.
Back then, I struggled to play the special stages on the kind of high-latency motion-blurry early laptop screen they had those days, while only being able to press two buttons at a time.
I would have been so much more, but I couldn't. I'm sorry.
JTE comes from a poor family, raised entirely on hopes and dreams.
The feels man, they're real, omg. I've used some old hardware myself, but not like that.
