In reality, it shouldn't really matter whether there's anything to incentivize running it on switch or not. It's an official release of the same game, so it should be an option to submit a Switch run.

No, Mother 1+2 is a different game mechanically and is not accepted on this leaderboard. We do allow emulator though. Any of the generally accepted emulators are allowed.

We recently made some changes to the Earthbound categories and made an announcement on the Earthbound Discord. Copying the announcment here for posterity:

@everyone , we have made the following changes to the Earthbound leaderboards

1. Sword of Kings has been removed as a category. Following a lack of activity and deeming it not different enough from other categories to merit standing on its own, we have decided to remove it.

2. A new filter has been added to the Any% Glitchless category, "Manipulated". Any run that has any manipulation in it whatsoever has been marked as "Yes". All other runs are "No". The end result is the following: The main page of the leaderboard remains unchanged. Your placements are identical. Now, though, every runner can have a "manipulated" run and a "non manipulated" run. The faster time will always be shown in the leaderboard, but if you filter by type, you'll be able to see each of your runs. I tried my best to flag all existing runs the best I could but if you find any mistakes, please let me know. You may remember that when we added Boogey%, we accepted SRL times initially. We will not be accepting SRL times as proof for this filtered category. All runs will continue to require videos. If you have highlights of Race PB's or some unmanipulated run done in the past, feel free to submit it as your "unmanipulated" time on the board.

The goal for these changes is to strengthen Earthbound as a speedrun in the long term. We want the community to continue to thrive as it does now. This is a "beta" change for the time being. If you have any feedback on these changes, we would love to hear them in order to evaluate if this will be, as we hope, a positive change for the leaderboards going forward.

Just a minor mistake. We'll get it fixed.

Awesome work, man. Any work on manipulation, especially in Winters with Bubble Monkey trailing, is impressive. I've seen people toying with skipping the first protoplasm and I've seen it happen in a run before. I wonder, with manipulation, if it would be possible to add in a first protoplasm skip.

Regardless, since you're moving the phone call to before winters and not having to reset in Brick Road, this is probably a free 30 second or so time save.

If you have a video, yes.

After way too much discussion and deliberation, Boogey% is going up on the leaderboards. It'll be rolling out little by little as I have time to input these times since everything is manual.

I'm generally against putting partial runs of an existing category on the leaderboard (since Boogey% is essentially just the first hour or so of glitchless). I would also be in favor of removing SoK from the leaderboards since it's just not different enough from glitchless to merit making it an entirely new category. Was SoK even talked about before being added to the leaderboards? I just remember it popping up one day.

I'm also happy to help with the Brazilian Portuguese translation, but I defer to native speakers if you have enough.

This discussion goes all the way back to the early days of SDA (https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/earthbound.html).

The same ideas you presented were mentioned along with some more ...interesting things like visiting every area in the game and talking to all NPCs. Nobody could agree on anything, and the consensus was that nothing is really tracked by the game so why do it or why put it in the 100% category. Because there are so many different opinions on the matter and it has been in discussion for years and still doesn't have a run, it will probably never become one. The rare drops can be cheesed with RNG manipulation. You could use the debug menu to put all levels up to 99. You could use the item duplication glitch with rare candy to force everyone's stats to max. You can clip out of bounds to the item drop areas quickly. It breaks down quickly and becomes a wonky run which many people don't anticipate.

Note that this doesn't mean you can't try something like this out. By all means, have fun with it. All it really takes for for a run category to become a thing is one person doing it, people seeing it and liking it, and additional people picking it up. I could easily be proven wrong here (but my money's against it :D)

I'd be game for this. Not randomizing NPC sprites is disappointing, but I guess it's a necessary evil so we aren't forced to load up the save state on a different rom to advance the game. I'm sad I will never be able to buy my multi bottle rockets from a buffalo.

This category is brutally difficult and is crazy dependent on RNG. I managed to finally pull up the debug menu a single time one stream after two hours of pressing L on the out of bounds area. Mind you that wasn't two hours of failed attempts or bad inputs. It was two hours of checking the out of bounds area until I finally got the game to randomly give me the right text. You then have to do a set of intricate inputs either 15 or 17 frames apart from each other. Any more or any less and you missed your chance. The fact that nemi got this as quickly as he did is absolutely incredible and it's an amazing run. If you extrapolate my attempts and say that the right text is given every two hours of randomly checking, Nemi got what is essentially a 1/120 roll by getting the right text in the first minute of checking. In reality, it's probably more rare than that. I've watched others struggle for hours in the Threed tent attempting to bring up the debug menu there only to walk away with nothing.

It's a fascinating run indeed, but I'm hesitant to add it without further discussion about it. In the past we have always timed until the final prayer on Giygas. This run doesn't kill Giygas. So is it true any%? It depends on what the true goal for the game is. If you determine that the goal for the game is to see Pokey say "Spankety spankety" and get the The End text, then sure, this is true Any%. If your definition for completing the game is defeating the final boss of the game, then this run didn't satisfy that condition, whereas the currently listed any% runs satisfy the Giygas condition.

Additionally, because all timings in the past have defeated Giygas, this run ends timing at a different point. Is that ok?

Note that I'm not opposed to adding this category to the leaderboards. What I am opposed to is adding them blindly without discussion amongst the community for these points and possibly others that are brought up.

I am definitely going to try this out this evening. Thanks for putting this together, Auri :D

I too run game. Is fun.