Hi! The reason separate difficulty categories were removed is because they don't really make enough of a difference to warrant them. They would only differ by around 1-2 minutes, and the only extra "difficulty" is RNG as the rats could immediately destroy objects you need to use as platforms for skips. From what I've seen, unless they really make a big difference in runs (see the Monkey Island games for example) most people would just run the easiest difficulty since they would allow for slightly more aggressive runs and less RNG, while the other difficulties would be completely ignored aside from a handful of people and not have much competition.

I do agree though that the "forcing one character" rule is a bit silly though, so I've just removed it. We do know about skipping both the Scarab and Rescue boss fights, though no one has done a run with that strat yet so its not known how much time it would save, and may not be worth it over just playing as Banubis / Atomicat for the whole game considering the slow menuing on the world select screen (specially on N64) and loading times.

If you change costume and pause the game while the transformation animation plays and exit the level or start a new game Rayman keeps transforming and you can use the costume you chose in places you normally can't, like the jail cell at the beginning of the game or the village.

Sadly i wasn't able to find any use for this glitch, in the jail cell the cutscenes won't play properly and Murphy won't show up so you will be stuck with all costumes except for the Gangsta costume. And even then you can't crawl in one part of the level so you can't finish it anyway.

In the village you can't do anything as far as i know.

This glitch works in both versions of the game.

Pretty much all the games i have ran but of all of them Castleween / Spirits & Spells is the best one and the easiest to get into. https://www.speedrun.com/castleween_gba This is a really good game and a short run too, even 100% runs are short. So far im the only one who has run this game, and its a shame because its very fun. There's a Discord for this and its console version but only has 5 members (including me) and its pretty inactive

Spirits & Spells / Castleween GBA is very good, controls really well and precise, its short and easy to run https://www.speedrun.com/castleween_gba There's a Discord for it but it only has 5 members (including me) and has barely any activity at all. https://discord.gg/pjSqQSq

The GBA version (and DS) of this game is completely different to the console version, i've made a run of the GBA game, should we submit the GBA version as a separate game?

I don't know how to start this so yeah, here are all the regional differences i could find in the game, since this is a Speedrunning website im going to start with the ones that affect runs:

-The Japanese version (Mahou no Pumpkin) has a battery save feature, the American (Spirits and Spells) and European (Castleween) versions use passwords instead.

-The Normal difficulty is easier in the JP version (You start with 5 lives instead of just 2 and has fewer enemies in the levels) than the US/EU versions, the Hard difficulty and Time Attack are identical in all versions though.

-The EU version has WAY more slowdown than the US and JP versions.

-In the US and EU Normal difficulty the game is impossible to 100%, this is because in the stages The Endless Corridors and The Robot Factory they removed some of those little yellow trampoline monsters which you need to reach areas that have sweets and pumpkins, you can only collect 73/75 and 35/46 sweets in these levels respectively, the JP Normal and Hard difficulties don't have this problem and can be 100%.

-The training mode has a message that says the explanations work with configuration n.1 in the US and EU versions, the JP version doesn't have it, which makes training runs faster.

Now here are other differences that don't really affect runs at all:

-The EU version has 5 language options: English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. The US and JP versions only have English and Japanese respectively.

-In the JP version's menu screen Load Game/Password and Options switch places compared to the US and EU versions.

-In the JP version the sparks were replaced by crystals.