United StatesI don't think there's been one in the past, but if people wanna get together and talk V6 then here's a fresh discord server: https://discord.gg/5bRhpBF
It's empty right now, but anyone can help fix that if they want.
2.2 Is the best version for every category besides unrestricted Any% (The one with WRs less than a minute long) as it's more stable and doesn't really have occasional frame skips, which 2.0 has been accused of having. Version 2.0 plays almost entirely identical to 2.2, though this version doesn't have text storage patched out. If you want to run Any% with version 2.0, there is a "glitchrunners beta" under betas that you can opt in on steam. For the other categories, you're better off using the latest version.
You have to press flip 19 times with text storage to advance the game state to "Time Trial - Space Station 2". I don't recommend this route as it's faster, but you're gonna have to grind out runs for hours at a time before you get a few successful runs to the end. All I can say is the inputs aren't just spamming, but are exact and intentional.
Press Enter + R on the same frame. You'll know you started it correctly if you hear the death noise while the teleporter menu pops up. After that, you have to experiment a little with flipping before and after you teleport in order to phase through walls. To get some guidance on directions to hold and when to flip, you can watch existing runs that do or don't have input displays visible.
It's a bit hard to accurately pin down the reasons for the disparity between IGT and RTA. The game tends to lag by very small amounts ( which varies based on computer hardware to a degree) in rooms where there are moving enemies. The biggest instance of lag varying by machine is probably the tower, which is a huge scrolling entity. This is also not a consistent event. On the same machine, you can record multiple runs of the same length IGT that will vary in RTA. The In game timer is frame accurate, so no matter how much the game lags, the time played in game remains the same. Unfortunately, this is the only way to accurately measure runs, since RTA gives a much more concrete advantage to players with consistent/better computer hardware. The downside is that players with exceptionally laggy computers may have an input advantage over players with faster computers during specifically laggy segments, but this hasn't caused any issues yet. No one's machine is capable of making the game run faster than 29.4fps, so don't be afraid that your computer will make certain tricks impossible, as they are all very achievable at the full frame rate. There are some fringe glitches that allow you to reset the in game timer, but they involve saving and quitting, which doesn't suit the single segment nature of most of the categories.
If your in game time is shorter than another player's, then you performed faster during the frames in which you were allowed to input commands.
When you get a time below 12:30, ask me how to do double intermission skip. It saves 9 seconds and only does so if you do it perfectly. It's not worth it for anything but the top level of play.
The fastest run that does the route with intermission one is this
it's pretty easy to follow it verbatim for the most part, but once you get to 8:33 in the video, make sure not to move before pressing enter to activate the teleporter to prevent softlocking the game, then press left once, and press enter again. You'll end up in the end of Space Station 1, where you can teleport back to the ship, rescuing violet. When you're here, remember to hold R before pressing flip to kill yourself and skip the cutscene, and hold right after you do that so you don't end up causing another cutscene glitch.
If you have more than 2 hours on your hands, there's this video of me stumbling through an impromptu tutorial of pretty much every room in the game. Eventually, there will be a better tutorial uploaded, but until then, this one is the most thorough. http://www.speedrun.com/VVVVVV/guide/edjni
I don't believe there's a fully fledged tutorial on beating any%, but in this AGDQ 2015 youtube mirror, FieryBlizzard explains the number of times to press flip to increment the game qualifier, so that, in addition to the many runs on the leaderboards, should be more than enough to learn the route.
He begins running Any% glitched at 16:27
https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/a_new_keyboardmouse_visualizer_create_your_own_layouts.html
This is one largely used by PC streamers and is fairly versatile. There are a few others I could throw up here, but this is the one I personally use.
Achievements are not components of the main game mode, and as such, are not factored in the percent completion of it. When you complete the game, the only collectible VVVVVV keeps track of is the number of shiny trinkets collected during the playthrough. Additionally, the unstable frame rate of VVVVVV, especially in the tower, creates a large disparity of comparison between real time and the in game timer between various machines (sometimes different runs on the same machine). The only perfect way to measure speedruns of VVVVVV is through the in game timer, because regardless of lag, it is frame accurate. It's only in the case of glitched Any% where real time is a somewhat reasonable measurement, since it can be completed so quickly that pc hardware is unlikely to give much of an advantage in most cases. Even in this case, the popularity of the category shows. Measuring in real time for a run that can take over 36 minutes to complete can introduce much greater gaps only due to measuring in real time, which would greatly undermine efforts of players on inferior hardware in comparison to a hypothetical competitor on a machine that runs the game quicker and very stably.
If the category were ever introduced, someone would have to run it, there'd have to be some method of applying game time for anyone to take it seriously, and it would probably be called "All Achievements". The nature of completing all achievements under a real time measurement would be relegated to a mostly casual affair, and is made clear by the complete nonexistence of recordings of people doing so. Creating categories that do not have any preexisting activity or immediate plans to do so doesn't make a lot of sense.
