I should bring my copy of Trygg-Torkel, basically a parody of role-playing games and tropes. It's really mostly a single player game, though we usually play it with a player, a narrator and a protocol keeper. I prefer narrating it than actually playing, so I am very up for that for anyone who wants to play. It's in Swedish, so I'd have to translate on the fly for any non-Swedish player, but I've translated some bits in advance.

I'll probably bring my deckboxes, but since I'll only be there for about half the event - leaving Wednesday morning - I likely won't be able to play in any tournament.

Bought my ticket now too.

Edit: Train ticket Gothenburg -> Växjö purchased as well, let's do this

Ninja Smasher! has pretty low system reqs so it should run well on any of those. Will need to set things up before my run since the character I'm going to run is an unlockable, but bringing my save files should work. If not I'll just have to do a regular playthrough at some point before my run to unlock it. And make sure the controls are what they should be.

Oh, and since the game has multiple characters and I'm not playing the default one, the Ninja Smasher! category should to properly reflect this be something along the lines of "All Items No KG - Chain Sickle" (which is the way it shows up on the site here), or "All Items No KG (Chain Sickle)" or somesuch.

I see I got to change category, my thanks to the ESA team for that! I have just today submitted a run of said category to the leaderboard here on the site since I finally nailed that sub-30 run, so any progress of mine will be visible there. It should be verified within the day.

Up to you if you want to use them, but I made icons intended as leaderboard trophies for the Umihara Kawase theme. They can be found here: http://kenny.next-era.net/sr/uk/

Gold, silver, bronze and regular hooks, of course meant to be for first, second, third and fourth place, respectively.

So the second round of cuts for ESA2017, the annual live speedruning marathon here in Sweden, are done and I have two games in - one of which being Ninja Smasher!, of course.

It's currently on the schedule as Glitchless Any% (Chain Sickle ofc) because heh the game and categories changed a lot so I updated my submission like three times in the span of one week. I'll see if I can get to do All Items instead. If not, that's fine.

So yeah, in either case, as long as I don't end up entirely unable to go, Ninja Smasher! is getting a marathon showing this summer. I am excited.

Oh heck yeah, both my games survived.

So I will now formally ask if I might change the category for Ninja Smasher! from glitchless any% (which as of about yesterday is actually called Any% No KG (KG is for key glitch) because not all glitches are created equal) to All Items No KG. Since it's been entered in the schedule with the 32 minute estimate, the estimate kind of doesn't need to change as I'm below that in All Items now (and my current goal is sub-30, but I must stress that the any% estimate I gave was based on what was known about the game at the time and a longer category now being shorter than that is for a lot of reasons), but I would just ask for an additional 3 minutes, making it 35, to be marathon safe. Mostly it's about how any% in the PC version has gotten so many skips that I don't really find it much fun anymore, so I've switched to All Items as my primary running category (and it's a much better watch, too).

But it's fine with if the answer is no - any% is what I submitted and even with all the stuff that's happened to the category (I think I updated my submission like three times in the span of a week), I am ready and willing to run it at ESA.

Woop.

Edit: Let it also be known that I quite approve of Ketsui getting to be in the marathon, thumbs up for that.

I said I would protest, so for real, though: Key glitch and vertical displacement ARE NOT GLITCHES OF EQUAL STANDING. My latest run should ABSOLUTELY NOT be in the same category as a run that uses the key glitch. One uses resources outside of the current save game. One does not. One is, as far as I'm concerned, NG+. One just does what you can do from a fresh, clean save file.

So it's partly my fault for calling the initial suggestions of categories "glitched" and "glitchless". That was, I will now admit, a mistake on my part, since "glitchless" really is a bad name for a category - for exactly the reason that there's a wide variety of glitches. Some glitches are just unintended movement tech that save a second or two that can be done on accident without really noticing that you do it. Some completely mess up what the game should be like and save two hours. So when it comes to categorization, some do make sense to do a category split over. Especially when one of the glitches is a kind of controversial practice. In this case, it absolutely isn't arbitrary. You wouldn't really call a Super Metroid run a glitched run just because it uses Mockball.

I don't really care what you call the key glitch category, even though I think it should have a label as well. But I will officially and politely request that "Glitchless" is renamed to "No key glitch". Or some more elegant version of that.

Edit: Thanks for that, glad we could get that cleared up. Now my efforts in this game are going to be all about Chain Sickle, All Items, no KG, and I'm quite sure that can be a sub-30 run. It's funny because it wasn't long ago that my any% goal was sub-40.

And maybe Kunoichi All Items too. We'll see. She's so fragile though.

So this is kind of last minute, but there's been stuff going on with Ninja Smasher! and any% is now... weird. The estimate has been lowered further to 25 minutes (and the video link updated), and I am committed to doing the run if it makes it to the final schedule, but - and feel free to ignore this if it was added too late - I've also thrown in an incentive to make it an All Items run instead, which is the category I'll mostly be running myself now, and it would add 10 minutes to the estimate. I assumed I absolutely wouldn't be allowed to switch categories entirely at this point of the process (even though the estimate for the new category is less than the initial estimate for the old category when I did my submission - and I will mention that after all the latest developments, All Items is currently actually more like what I initially submitted than what any% has become), but if that actually is acceptable, then I would definitely prefer to do All Items at the marathon instead.

But if any% is what you'll put on the schedule, then any% is what you'll get, no problem, but All Items definitely is a better showing of both the game and the run now. It's definitely not just playing the game the intended way fast - the category-titular items are in no way collected in the intended order, and half of an entire dungeon is completely skipped which is good because it's the long and boring half of it.

I mean, obviously I'm not saying to remove the real time entry, and I'm still going to use LiveSplit for the "checkpoint times". I also have no complaints about using RTA as the primary time. But since the game does have an ingame timer that displays your final time, I just think it's not a bad idea to include that alongside the real time.

The rest are identical as far as I can tell. Haven't played a lot of anything but Chain Sickle on PC though, did the one playthrough with Ninja to unlock the rest, played Kunoichi up to the end of Haunted Temple and Robot Ninja, well, up until double jump boots. Never did play much of any of those two on 3DS either. The only real difference Chain Sickle has is that he as of PC version 1.01 can do multiple chains in one jump, and so can do a lot more stuff with it. 3DS Chain Sickle never got that update.

I don't know about JP or US eShops, but Ninja Smasher! isn't available on the EU eShop any more, so I don't know if adding that category is worth it at all. 3DS has more lag, at any rate.

Also I mean I'm going to start running it as All Items regardless of what the category actually is named. Even though I'd rather skip the gauntlets.

So this game has an ingame timer. As far as I can tell, it's accurate. We should reflect this in the leaderboard in some way, at least, though using LiveSplit for split times is still good, of course.

At the very least, we should add an ingame time column. I wouldn't be averse to having it be the primary time used for the game, but I don't really care which one it is. But ingame time should be displayed, at least.

I keep going on about categories but any% glitchless has become pretty disgusting in the bad way so once I've solidified a route (there are currently two options and both are terrible) and made it viable I am switching over to All Dungeons, so I actually get to play the game too. I actually wanted to ask if we can change that category, from All Dungeons to All Major Upgrades (or some more elegant name), just to have an excuse to include the Ghost Catacombs for the Wind Scarf as well. It would include also getting the shuriken, yes, and apparently you get those in your Ninja All Dungeons run, so that run would be perfectly legit for All Major Upgrades as well. I guess we could call it All Items, that should leave out hearts and scrolls. And potions.

And when talking about categories, I think we should revamp the sorting - make the characters the primary thing, not the categories, and under the characters have the different categories. Would neatly deal with that Ninja doesn't actually need both any% and All Dungeons since he can't skip any, and can easily slot in a separate 3DS category under Chain Sickle only without making it look weird.

100% I doubt I'll ever do. I did play with Kunoichi, and while running with her is going to be terrible, I did discover that her dropkick is so fast that she can actually two-cycle the ghost boss without water.

So while we're talking icons, I made gold, silver and bronze coin icons, intended for use as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place icons on the leaderboard. They're at the bottom of that same page, if you want to add them to the game theme.

Edit: Made a banner too, while I was at it. It looks mostly good when resized after getting uploaded. It's also on the page.

The black corner pixels bothered me, so I've added some transparency and reuploaded them. Also made versions of the icons without the frames because why not.

Edit: Aaaand apparently I missed one corner on the gauntlets. Will fix tonight.

Also edit: Fixed.

I doubt I'll do 100%, and regular Ninja just isn't interesting to me. I've been thinking of routing Chain Sickle All Dungeons, which probably is just going to be Volcanic Cavern first and the rest in order, grabbing Wind Scarf before Haunted Temple and entering Snow Mountain from the back. As Chain Sickle I'd still skip actually grabbing the gauntlets, at least definitely the ones from Haunted Temple and maybe the Silver ones too, since getting stuck on the walls and ceiling would just be a bother (and no longer getting stuck on walls is my favourite thing about the new Chain Sickle route).

Might start running Kunoichi any% too. Though taking twice as much damage makes Underground Lake the worst thing and that category will definitely involve buying a lot of health potions, and maybe even grabbing some additional heart containers.

Alright. One last Ninja Smasher! update. It's been a few turbulent days for this game, both for me personally and here on the speedrun.com leaderboard, but now I've finally gotten my submission proper, with a real video, and all that.

The estimate has been dropped to 0:32:00, which is 5 minutes more than my current PB, and covers some marathon safe strats and potential fuckups. It's got an actual full game video with the correct character from me now. As soon as my run gets verified, I'll be on the actual leaderboard too! Most likely won't have any more time to put into running before the next round of cuts, either way.

The new video is in the submission, but I'll post it here too:

So I made a set of icons for splits and stuff.

You can find them at: http://kenny.next-era.net/ninjasmasher/