Hello current and future Feuders!

We've made some changes to the leaderboard and wanted to explain them so people understood the reasoning.

WR strategies in Family Feud involve a strategy called "seed targeting" which we use to ensure we get desired questions. Unfortunately, Emulators and Flashcarts provide a level of consistency when starting up that makes it easier to do this, especially when a TAS can be used to hunt down the right frame to start a game. (FCEUX in particular can target the BEST seed early after a reset with aid of an audio cue).

So in the interest of fairness it has been decided that Emulators and Flashcarts should not share the same leaderboards as Original Cartridge. Under the two categories ('Fast Money Win' and '$20,000') you can filter the board by selecting the appropriate variables. 1p1c and 1p2c can also be selected as an additional filter.

Even though the Emulator/Flashcart categories have more runs posted to them, we are keeping 'Original Cartridge' as the default variable since the accessibility offered by those options is not the same as popularity.

Hello all!

I'm pleased to announce the addition of two new categories!

DEATHLESS Now that there are more runners on the leaderboard using the "Death Route" for top times in any%, a Deathless category is justified. I have copied over all the Deathless WRs from the past, but kept them in any% as well since they are the any% WRs of their time. If you are one of those runners, PLEASE keep those runs in both categories. Anyone else is free to move their eligible runs to the new category using the "edit run" option, leave them in any% where they are, or make a duplicate submission.

POWER 1 Power 9 requires that you to complete the game at the maximum power level. Now, those looking for a challenge can try killing Jaws at the MINIMUM power level. This IS possible, as demonstrated in a youtube video by kareshi (not yet submitted at the time of this post). At this time there are no other restrictions on the category with regards to getting a submarine or collecting crabs for the speed boost, so it's not a true "low%". This may change in the future as the category's potential gets realized. I look forward to seeing what strategies develop!

OTHER CHANGES I removed the "minisub/subless" variable. The original purpose was to help distinguish runs using the newer subless death routes from runs using traditional strategies. But now that we have a separate Deathless category it is mostly redundant and was making the rules and submission process more complicated.

Hey all! After a long period of "learning" (mostly offline), I finally did my first weekend of Individual Level runs. I didn't do Single Segment yet because I didn't even finally beat Mike Tyson for the first time until this afternoon. I would like to submit my times to the SRC leaderboard, but there's an issue...

The emulator I used is MesenRTA. Neither MesenRTA nor the vanilla version of Mesen are on your approved emulator list. Why is that? Mesen is a high accuracy emulator. There were some boards that banned Mesen a while back due to some confusion over the "Run Ahead" feature added in the last version update, but some have now reversed that ban (i.e. Ninja Gaiden). But I don't see any forum post here announcing the emulator being removed, which makes me think it was never on the list in the first place?

I'd like to request that Mesen/MesenRTA be added to the approved list. Bizhawk has a tendency to lag, and other emulators are lower accuracy.

Below are videos I made a few months ago. The first demonstrates how to detect use of the run-ahead feature (the bans were motivated by the false belief that use of run-ahead couldn't be detected.). The second is an infomercial for MesenRTA, developed by ThreeCreepio, explaining the new features that make is better from a moderation standpoint, including the removal of the Run Ahead feature.

A new version of Mesen, known as MesenRTA, is approved for Legend Of Kage submissions. It has enhancements designed to give speedrun moderators greater confidence when approving a run. The standard version of Mesen is also still allowed, but if you are a Mesen user, consider this alternative.

It can be downloaded here: https://github.com/threecreepio/mesenrta/releases

And here is an infomercial I made to explain and promote it:

A new version of Mesen, known as MesenRTA, is approved for Jaws submissions. It has enhancements designed to give speedrun moderators greater confidence when approving a run. The standard version of Mesen is also still allowed, but if you are a Mesen user, consider this alternative.

It can be downloaded here: https://github.com/threecreepio/mesenrta/releases

And here is an infomercial I made to explain and promote it:

Hey. Starting to learn the game. It was brought to my attention today that the "Race Edition" romhack is permitted for the NOoB category(which is what I'm running), and that raised a question. If we're allowed to use a romhack that guarantees cave 1 technodrome, what reason is there to restrict emulator?

My understanding was that the FCEUX ban was because the consistent ppu/cpu alignment made frame targeting foe the cave 1 technodrome easier and therefore provided an advantage on the RNG grind. Is there some other reason FCEUX is banned that would still apply to categories that allow Race Edition?

FCEUX runs smoother (uses less CPU) on my computer, where as with Bizhawk and Mesen I'm more likely to get emulator lag (not the same as game lag). If I CAN use FCEUX, I would prefer to.

So for a while now I've been doing something on my stream called "All Prizes". The rules have been that you must win the game 6 times, winning the 6 prizes available in the game. If you lose a game, you must try to win that prize again. Time starts after completing your name entry on the first game (as usual), and ends when the "You Have Won This Fabulous Prize" screen pops up for the 6th unique prize you've won. You don't have to win the prizes in any particular order.

A lot of people have been saying that it should be added as a category, so I decided to open this thread to get that conversation started.

I've been running it as "vs CPU" but there's no reason for it to be limited to that. I think it would be best if the leaderboard was arranged as 2 main categories with two sub-categories each. Either "Single Game" and "All Prizes" as the mains, with "Any%" and "vs CPU" as the subs, or the other way around. (my vote would be for the former)

And even though I've only been doing this for the standard WoF, there's no reason Junior and Family Edition can't have the same categories. (I'm not very familiar with "featuring Vanna White", so don't know what the Prize situation is)

So what do people think? Anyone else like the idea of "All Prizes"?

Below is my current 'All Prizes vs CPU' PB, a 35:06. My splits are set-up so that each individual prize can be measured as a single game run.

I just summitted PBs for both categories that employ the "Two-Family Strategy".

This involves starting the game by selecting "Two-family game". The primary benefit of this is skipping a cut scene. In One-family mode, when the second family is shown, they have a computer generated name and there is an unskippable cutscene where the host walks up to each family member. In Two-family mode, you type in a name for the family, and then the cutscene is mostly skipped, cutting 11 seconds off a FMW run (44 seconds off a 20k run).

As it stands, there is nothing in the rules for either category that specify that you must start a game in One-family mode. But I recognize that this may be be a little controversial to some, so I wanted to open the discussion up to the community and see what people thought about it.

Personally, I think this should be a valid strategy for the existing categories, and should not invoke the creation of new "Two-Family" versions of the categories. For the most part, it appears that skipping the cutscene is the only real benefit.

Hypothetically, the second family can be used other ways. For example, if you need to answer a 3rd question before a Fast Money, you can answer the #1 question, pass, have the second family get 3 X's, then the first family can steal. I am still not convinced this is faster that simply answering the questions, since even after a steal the game will spend time revealing all the answers on the board (this is in addition to the time spent checking the board to get those 3 x's). But this and potentially other strategies taking advantage of the fact that you control the second family could be employed. I still do not think this demands new categories.

Ultimately this decision is up to NihilistComedyHour, but I would like to hear what people have to say on the matter.

Here are the two runs I submitted:

Thought it would be a good idea to post this here so the info could be preserved. There is a glitch for Godzilla that could be used to cut time off a run. I will be referring to is as the "Death Warp".

I had read about the glitch in an 8 year old SDA forum post (link below), but had never seen it and didn't know enough details about it to try. Then I encountered the Death Warp first hand in a live run (links below).

Buffalax, Jahaley64, and myself rewatched the clip, brainstormed and experimented trying to figure out what exactly happened. And we think we have an answer.

On some stages in the game, a "friendly" spaceship will drop blue balls of light. They can deflect enemy attacks/ships, sometimes pop to become life capsules, and most importantly then can collect life capsules for you. When Godzilla or Mothra die, they don't collect life capsules during their death animation, even when they float right through their bodies. But the blue balls of light CAN still collect life capsules for you during the death animation. If this happens, your dying monster gains life and the game doesn't fully register the death. You return to the overworld as though you completed the stages you were traveling through.

If the Death Warp could be easily duplicated it has the potential to cut lots of time off the run, allowing whole stages to be skipped. In my run, this occurred at the beginning of the first of the last two hexes of the map, meaning I skipped about one and a half stages, representing a 42 second save over the previous gold split for that level!

However, it doesn't seem easy to do on purpose at all. And we're still unsure if there are other elements that must be in place to trigger the effect. Mothra was already dead in both known occurrences of the Death Warp. Also they occurred in the same type of stage (green base that has a "barrier" near the beginning). Also, in both cases Godzilla's overworld sprite had been moved to the final hex of the planet.

Another thing to keep in mind. Although the game returns you to the world map as though you're alive.... you do still lose a level as though you had died. Even if this glitch could be performed reliably on every stage that's eligible (ones that have blue balls of light being dropped in them), the reduction of level could make getting through stages and fighting bosses take a little bit more time. In my run I caught back up to the level cap before the end of Jupiter, so it wasn't a major issue in the long run, but my Jupiter time was pretty slow, and I'm more concerned with what would happen if we tried executing the glitch late game.

More work will be done to find if the "Death Warp" can become a reliable glitch for speedrunning. Any significant findings/developments should be posted here for the community's benefit.

SDA fourm post where i first heard of the glitch: https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/godzilla_monster_of_monsters_nes.html

The segment of my live run where the glitch occurred:

The full run that had the glitch:

So now that the any% WR is subless, we don't need a separate subless category. they should be merged.

fun idea: can we add an extra column to the any% leaderboard that identifies whether a run is a "mini-sub" or "subless" run? similar to how on the metroid all bosses categories there's a column for "kraid 1st" and "ridley 1st". it would future-proof things in case a mini-sub run got back on top.