Might as well respond.

I make an alright post about exactly why this isn't a strictly good idea, and it gets mostly ignored except for one upvote. A handful of people all make basically the same "please add this, everyone wants it" post, all ignoring my post completely, and all of them get numerous upvotes.

It's kinda hard to have discussion when actual points are getting overrun by "the community demands it"-type posts, yet those same people also claim those bringing up actual points are the ones stifling discussion. It's frustrating, really.

Misc categories are fine, I guess, because it's pretty obvious those categories are just there for fun. But that was never the original intent. Saying things like "hundreds of people play this, you just HAVE to add a category" totally implies that you want this to be front page material. It's already not an entirely good idea to even acknowledge it as a category, but to put it even beside Any%-set-as-primary is still insulting to SGnG.

It's insulting because the loops in these games are analogous to something like Kirby Super Star Ultra with the Spring Breeze and Revenge of the King modes. People don't play the individual games in KSS separately, because that's prime short race material. Really, you start putting in things like KSS sub-game splits and GnG 1-ALL runs when you start putting in things like ILs, and you do that when the game is already popular enough that the then-large community decides it's a fun thing to do. You don't do it beforehand, because then you end up with a bunch of totally dead categories... and the occasional popoff about your game being dead because you have too many categories. Trust me, I know way more about this than I probably should.

Yes, I'm aware there are now 1-ALL categories. This is about whether they're a good idea, and about debunking the myth that numbers are all that matters. I just hope people don't start asking for ILs in this game, because then you're gonna see the problem taken to the exact logical extreme that I'm worried about here.

Zero should be merged as a part of this series.

Might as well say something.

The games that have one-loop categories do so because they almost always loop infinitely and actually need a one-loop category. Some of these games suck because the single loop has very little to it, such as Donkey Kong.

A single loop of Super isn't that short, but let's be real here: playing half the game and just quitting is missing the point, especially when that game is only about half an hour.

The endings aren't arguable at all, there is literally no bad ending. The cutscene at the end of 1-7 is the halfway point, not an ending.

Seeing a lot of people run a category might actually be the worst reason to keep a category around, because it leads to things like race goals becoming more than race goals or really short goals sticking around for no other reason than tradition. Not naming names, other than Donkey Kong. More submissions simply is not inherently a good thing.

None of this is elitism. "everyone else does it so we should do too" is so much more dangerous than "trust in the handful of people that decided on this", anyway.

Dunno if this is supposed to be in Guides, but someone made some informative posts on SDA recently.

https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/adventure_island_ii_nesdiscussion_thread.html

This game could maybe use a warpless category. There was always a spot for it on the SDA KB, but noone's ever really given warpless for the AI games any thought.

I also found a hack that throws out the egg-based level order and makes you play all 80 levels. Note that taking a warp in this hack breaks the new level order code, don't do that. Seems like a pretty neat potential category?

The usual choice for NES and FCDS games is FCEUX. Some valid alternatives: Nestopia (and UE?), puNES, higan, Mednafen, and MAME.

Japan generally considers autofire to be a separate category in scorerunning. I don't think it was ever really considered for speedrunning and is currently up to a given game's community. For what it's worth, HoD is a typical scorerunning game.

The new layout should be optional at the very least. Since that can't be done, you should revert it completely and forget it ever happened. When you make a huge change under such poor direction, you're not supposed to bull forward with it, you're supposed to revert it immediately and consider what you've just done.

From the very start, this was never a matter of simple opinion. There was absolutely nothing wrong or even dated about the old layout. Meanwhile, this new one is still horribly broken and is still missing features, and somehow makes the site much harder to read in numerous ways. All of this has been pointed out a hundred times so far; I'm only here to add to the pile.

To defend what's happened here, you have to be either staff, paid for somehow, or completely undiscerning. Meanwhile, we are to believe that there is nothing we can do, and there is nowhere else to turn to because speedrun.com is literally the only website of its type (as it's supposed to be). This is just a really rotten situation all around.

This is difficult. I think it might be best to clear the book text, then stop timing. The book text is part of the "read book" action, and works the same as reading any other book.

Now that I think about it, I'm curious what the game actually does there. If anyone knows, does it check to see if you've read all six books, or does it check to see if you've read only the sixth book, etc?

I don't see a problem with ending timing once you lose control. On the other hand, many games start timing well before you gain control...

You can get a lot of officially emulated Mega Drive games on Steam. You might want to avoid its Steam Workshop...

The Ys series of action RPGs is known for being a bunch of fast-playing games even casually; speedruns tend to work out pretty well. There's a trilogy (1 2 3) of Ys games that are RPG/platforming hybrids, with a heavy emphasis on the platforming. Maybe not quite what you're looking for, but I might as well plug.

Can anyone experienced with SSF and Sega Saturn games go into detail about that subject?