Christmas IslandI was responding to Jump_Ace, saying that the category I think they're describing already exists in a way. Not related to your original idea
Nope. There's lots of acceptable options, but MGBA is not one of them.
Edit: and the game you mentioned is a GBA game, so accepting MGBA makes more sense, but this game is a Gameboy Color game
Any% but you don't get any toys beyond the one toy that you start with, including from events and from the time capsule.
Since one of the strongest strategies you can use in runs is the crayon or marker toy, which standardizes the order of your deck and lets you build around that (along with some other strong toys like the candy necklace, GC controller, heelies, play-doh), sometimes the run ends up feeling cheap at the end when you can easily steamroll your opponents on the first turn and don't even need to bother with arranging stickers on anything past your opening hand. I think it would be cool to have a category where you're forced to build a more balanced deck that you can actually play all the way through. Some heavy hitting strategies would still accelerate the run greatly, like fever and parrots, but this would more closely resemble a casual run (done efficiently).
There is a Steam achievement for finishing a run with 0 toys, but relying on the time capsule to be able get a valid run and having to make sure there is an empty spot in it wouldn't be fun for trying to do multiple attempts and get a good time, so I think just sticking with the one that you start with is good.
I was skeptical at first because the early game for this looks kinda bad, but tbf robot was abysmal to reset for and clearly you've made this work. Nice run!
As of today, specific animations now scale more strongly with the game speed setting, those being the turn banners ("let's play", "opponent's/your turn", and certain card animations (drawing and playing cards, but unfortunately not sticker effects). Another note from this patch is that "Very large numbers are now handled more gracefully and don't slow the game performance down", which I haven't looked into myself but is probably good for single cards that generate a lot of stars. These changes on their own deserve some attention, but while I'm writing this post I want to mention a few things about the previous patch series from last month.
- The blue orc and knight stickers were nerfed (knight only gives 3 stars per sticker instead of 5, and blue orc gives 4 stars instead of 5 and no longer decreases its stop chance when you add more).
- There are new boss possibilities. Bobby & Bonnie from week 1 can have long turns due to their increased hand size, and if you have to take more than one turn, this can lose quite a bit of time. Malick from week 2 can mess with your hand if he plays a card with the camera sticker, but I've noticed that he doesn't always discard your strongest card so it's probably about as random as midgame Elias' backhoe toy. Dinosaur Min starts with a newly added toy that adds a fav-blocking dinosaur at the start of the battle, which is annoying if you don't have token denial and have to wait an extra turn. I like the idea of trying to get a dragon/alligator into your 1-card win sequence just to make battles like this more consistent (dragon has the bonus of clearing the opponent's stars in case they had a hefty first turn, but also will nullify any on-draw stars you got if you're playing the car deck).
- Along with the new bosses, there are also new starters and some new stickers. While this does increase the pool of stickers, I don't think it makes too much difference. Some barnyard stickers are good out of context, like the pig for token denial. The new starters don't seem as good for speedrunning as robot or car (detective in particular is too slow). Each starter also adds a new toy, but these don't seem particularly helpful for speedrunning.
- The claw machine has a more polished but slower animation, so you can't exactly spam click it anymore.
- Super duper tough card battles can appear in daily schedules. They seem to just be a version of the same battle from later in the game (or potentially from a higher difficulty?). They aren't super intimidating in most cases, but they are definitely not worth taking in a speedrun. I have no idea if their addition has increased the amount of events that can appear on the schedule, making everything else like 5% less likely (made-up number), or if it's just a modifier of a regular card battle and the pool of events is the same.
- The challenges are cool! The one I struggled with the most by far was "My Card Is Shorter Than Your Card", which prevents you from putting more than 3 total stickers on each card, but does not have this limitation for the opponents. The reason I bring challenges up is because completing each one adds a new toy to the pool for toy boxes and claw games. Of particular interest to me are:
Cash Register (I Make My Own Starter Packs): Shop rerolls are free
disco sphere thing (Quick Match): Increase max fever multiplier by 1
Toy Plane (Me First!): Choose card or candy grants you double reward on round 1
Purple Token (Smash The Piggy Bank!): Get one free attempt in every Claw Machine and Vending Machine
Play-doh (My Card Is Shorter Than Your Card): Transforms into the toy on left at the start of a card battle
Despite some of the nerfs and increased pool of content that you need to draw from, I think the game is still runnable. Blue orc is way less viable now, but knight is still good enough, and even without either of these, it's possible to make 1 card wins if you get different lucky pulls (and I think 1 card wins with crayon or marker toy are overwhelmingly the way to go for speedrunning). With the increased game speed, this will hopefully offset any slow starts you might have.
mostly by using aerial cancels (attack in midair and then shield as soon as possible, and repeat to continue going that same direction). by moving around the maps a lot in this way you'll gain familiarity with them and know where to dash and where to attack for good spacing
I haven't played the challenges yet but I took a peek and they do look interesting and potentially RTA-able
Thank you for the kind words! It's satisfying getting a good run where you can coast through mid and late game, so as long as I keep getting good seeds I'll try to bring down the times
Make sure to convert switch times using a tool such as https://nudua.com/convert since the Switch GBA emulator runs at 60fps but previous official hardware runs at 59.7275fps. The emulator is very accurate with this one caveat.
There should not be any difference because the text is in pages and doesn't scroll if you advance the text optimally
I agree that teleporting is a clearer visual indicator, but the point of doing Trial of the Stars is to open the chest at the top, and unfortunately there is already a precedent of runs stopping when they open the chest, and these runs would lose a bunch of extra time because they wait for a while before entering the teleport. It's true that most runs simply exist as videos on YouTube and such and haven't been submitted here, but to me that means that most people would have come up with these rules anyway.
