The title of this game on this site appears to be "Froggys's Battle", which doesn't seem to be correct.

There's been interest in removing load times from the run to even the playing field among players with varying machine capabilities over time. I had previously showed indifference towards the idea, but recent developments have put me on board with it.

With an autosplitter, automatic load time removal would be easy to set up. However, past runs would be time-consuming to manually retime. There are 1,222 load screens in existing runs and I'm in college—it's not likely any retimes will happen before May.

Thus, should the community decide to go with this, the process will be as follows:

1. A version of the autosplitter with "RTA minus loads" timing will be developed and tested.
2. Its use, using the "Game Time" timing method, would be requested in all full-game PC runs of LEGO Racers 2 going forward. I'll evaluate whether or not to require it, though I recognize that this doesn't work for the PS2 version (which nobody has run).
3. Runners would not be required to use its automatic start/split/finish functions (most runners don't split at "finish line of every race"), though runs will be retimed at the start and end as if they did.
4. Until the mass retiming, runs will be timed by the current rule—this is that I find the timestamps of the start and end within the video, and the difference between them is the run time. It's worth noting that I've already done so with all the runs presently on the board, including new runs as they come in.
5. Sometime in May, once my classes are done, I'll make a Google sheet to track all the load screen timestamps to manually retime existing videos. This sheet will be publicly viewable during and after the retiming process, including for all runs I need to manually retime well after the rule's implementation. No times will be changed until all runs have been retimed.

Some driving forces behind this change are:

• The installation method of the game affects load times. If you used the LR2 Alternate Installer, for example, load times are twice as long or more.
• The PS2 version of the game would likely experience uncompetitively long load times as well.
• Even before my modship, the change has been requested.

This change would not invalidate existing runs, and a manual retiming would ensure they're not disadvantaged by having been run before the rule change.

If you have any concerns or input, or would like to approve or oppose the proposal, leave your comments below.

For those that don't know, I recently made an autosplitter for this game, and its timer start action is slightly late (the end of the load screen when Sandy Bay first loads) as compared to the stated rules of the existing categories (the moment you confirm your car).

As such, I'm proposing that the stated rules be changed to match the automatic timer start:

Timing starts when Sandy Bay finishes loading at the start of the game.

This would involve retiming all the existing runs as well, though it shouldn't result in any changes of rank because it's less than a three second difference and the only two runs within ten seconds of each other are already timed according to the proposal. (Should the community reject this proposal, I can retime those two runs to the existing rule instead.) The full list of retimes will be in a following post.

So I had a couple run category ideas, and this is the second of them: All Races NG+

This category would have a completely different set of rules from the other categories, as follows:

• Time starts when the foyer (or the Sandy Bay overworld) finishes loading after selecting Continue Game.
• All 24 races must be finished, but they can be done in any order.
• If you don't do The Grand Finale last, the credits are counted in time.
• Time finishes when you cross the finish line to end the last race.

I've done a couple attempts at it myself, and my PB is 1:12:40.76, which you can watch here.

Note: In the video, the Game Time timer has a bug that I've since fixed, where for the frame of a split, the timer switches to what it showed at the beginning of the race. At the end, it should read "1:03:02.39".

I've got a couple proposals for new categories. This is the first, low% runs.

A Low% run is very similar to Any%, with just the following two rules added:

• You can't complete any bonus games.
• You can't collect any of the 15 golden bricks from the overworld, even unintentionally (such as the one in the Mars shortcut).

Because of the first rule, you don't get the speed boost from the taxi game, which makes winning the races more difficult - I've had to restart certain races because the opponent(s) just break away.

Because of the second rule, you can't go to Arctic immediately after Dino Island, and Mars is just that little bit farther away. It also makes the Mars waterfall shortcut a little more tense, having something right there that can end the run if you just take the shortcut a little too wide. (It's easy enough to avoid, though; I've managed to dodge it in every run so far.)

My time for the run is 1:25.05. You can watch here.

There's now a pair of Steam games related to this one that are out and available for purchase: Chip's Challenge 2 (the sequel to this game) and Chip's Challenge 1 (the original Chip's Challenge levels in the CC2 engine, minus the ability to drop items at will). Chip's Challenge 2 probably needs to be a separate game, but how will CC1 be handled?