The good: By just playing the game in the practice room, several people stopped by to talk to me about the game. Most had a positive reaction to it saying "oh man! this is such a nostalgia bomb!" I told lots of people about the discord and told them that this would be a great game to learn for the 12-Hour Speedrun Challenge that's usually done after AGDQ.

The bad: When I showed potential watchers/runners the src page, most people were disappointed to learn that the community runs mostly on emulator. I talked with a few runners at length about how for a lot of us, it boils down to time, resources (such as consoles & cables), and money to run the game, and sometimes, those things are hard to come by, which is why some of us lean towards emulator. I also mentioned how the community's thought process was "why ban something when we are just starting out? Let's get more runners and then separate the two." While they understood both of these things, it was reiterated to me by several people, including staff at GDQ, that emulator runs would not be accepted into the marathon. One runner put it this way: It's hard to get on board with emulators because as a moderator, there's no way for me to do my job effectively verifying runs. With emulator, I'd have to make sure everyone had access to the same computer with the same specs and hardware, and it's just not possible for me to go to every house of every runner and verify this. This is why emulators are usually banned or heavily discouraged and a big turn off for most runners.

So I guess my question for all of us is this: How serious are we about trying to get a nicktoons game into a GDQ? Because if we are going to make a solid effort, I think we've probably come to the point where we might need to make a decision about emulation and console runs.

Personally, I'd love to see any of the nicktoons games in a GDQ, but I just want to make sure we don't shoot ourselves in the foot. I wanted to make this information known now because I don't want people to work on a great submission for six months only to be told "no" purely on the basis of it's emulated.

Thanks for coming across this, and getting this to my attention about where our current community is headed. Obviously there are some games that are not as popular as others, and have still gotten into GDQ. But for a game like this one it's kind of substantial to have a larger community and most runs performed on an actual console, because then again, we're still starting out. We are indeed getting more people involved and informing others and giving them a chance to see if they like it or not, and for my opinion, personally I think it's fine to start out with emulator, surely once we do get bigger we have to reject or make a completely separate category for emulator runs. With that being said we haven't even fully processed of what we're going to do for a run to potentially get into GDQ, we can't just let 2 people decide, we have to inform basically most of the community that is active, and see their opinion on it. We'll talk further in the discord.

Question regarding the emulator things, how many runners do we even have that run on a console? I know that Arlynia runs on an actual console, but I'm not sure who else uses it. If it were up to me, I'd probably set off the console vs emulator debate for later since all but two of the runs on the Any% leaderboards are actually on a physical console. If we split up the emulators and actual consoles, we would probably have one list with all of the runs and another that would stay barren with a single run. I'm considering getting a copy of the game for GameCube as well as a capture card, and I might be able to switch from Emu to console since I have a console handy, not sure if I can say the same about others though.

For this, we're not getting rid of past runs that were performed on emulator, but in the future for emulator is unknown for now. And the other runners who do use an actual console, are just baz/bro and arlynia, any others I do not know.

I have the game and a console, but I don't have any way to record it, so that's why I use an emulator. You could probably just buy the game for like $10 from Gamestop and if you have like either a cheap game cap or a camera that you can record with it's not too, expensive. We don't have any tricks on Emu that don't work on Console, so everything can still work. Also, my bad for not being around too often right now, just got a new job, so I'm adjusting to everything around that and focusing on that stuff as much as possible right now, but whenever I have free time I'm either playing Melee or this, and should be getting a run in sometime soon. Will work on getting a decent game cap also for future console runs.