United StatesJust the top screen is fine as long as the moderators can tell what is going on.
I plan to request a category extensions page for this game. If it gets approved, your idea could turn into a category. It would probably need more than one person to run it to have a leaderboard, but if you want it to possibly happen I would encourage you to make that video.
I agree that Pacifist would not be especially interesting in this particular game (at least for me personally). But if enough people want to do it, then there's no reason there couldn't be a category extensions page for this game (better than a miscellaneous tab imo). There could be plenty of non-standard categories that would be fun for some people, like tanuki-less, Luigi Any% (as an artificial new-game plus type of thing), All Ghost Houses, maybe even bring back the old race category of beat 5-2 warpless.
It looks like requests for category extensions pages are handled by site staff as game requests. Games with less runs than 3DL have C.E. pages, so if we have some runs of other categories to show I don't see why it wouldn't be approved. If anyone wants to actually do a run of any of these five categories (with video preferably), then I'll also do a run with video. I'd be willing to submit the game request and moderate the category extensions page if the other 3DL mods don't want to be bothered.
Yes I've done this before. A speedrun and a non-speedrun playthrough can be two very different ways of enjoying a video game. We probably all know of games that we like to play but would not like to speedrun. So it is natural that the opposite would sometimes apply.
For me personally this happened with Super Mario 3D Land. After playing one or two levels I had no interest in continuing the game. Months later I saw a really cool GDQ run of it by Kosmic. I realized that this would give me a different way of possibly enjoying the game and this motivated me to give the game another try. So I started learning how to speedrun the levels before I'd even completed a playthrough. Thousands of hours later I still speedrun it and I have never just played through the game in a non-speedrun fashion.
I can't speak for others, but to my mind menu management should be done on the clock. It just adds another layer of complexity/strategy/skill to manage. Knowing when to switch items and being able to do it quickly and efficiently is presumably part of the skill of playing the game well, so it should be part of the speedrun too.
People have made some good points. But some seem to be tacitly assuming that there is one right proof standard or one right way to verify runs that applies to all games. But why should we think that's the case? (In fact, this is one major reason why this site is better than a draconian system that rigidly applies its catch-all standards top-down like Twin Galaxies.)
The OP mentioned a DS game. If you're not emulating, then capture cards are very expensive and recording with your phone can be a significant annoyance (especially for longer games). For these kinds of games relaxing the video proof rule (or even the screenshot rule) for non-elite times makes a lot of sense.
Naturally, some people will reply with the standard “You can run the game without a leaderboard.” That's true of course, but some people will be a lot less likely to learn a speedrun if they can't submit to leaderboards. You might think that's the wrong approach, but any one person's opinion is irrelevant, since there is no single “correct” approach to a hobby. There are people like this (and if that is how they get enjoyment out of this hobby then good for them), and Bemels made a good point about driving away potential interest in the game.
Even if you don't care about the enjoyment of other people who share your hobby (but not in the exact same way you do!), there is a potential problem in terms of accuracy. Some people who can't costlessly record a game will run the game but not worry about submitting at all. For instance, there are a lot of handheld games where I have no doubt that many runs have been done faster than a lot of times on the leaderboard. This accuracy problem is not completely eliminable of course. My point is only that there are some cases where a strict video-only rule actually makes the leaderboards less accurate, not more.
