The problem this game has in regards to speedrunning is that it has one particular power-up that allows you to skip the whole level if you get it. This means you save 30 secs or even a minute of what a regular run would be just by picking it up. The thing is that said power-up doesn't appear in the very first seed when you boot up the game. And even before my runs, baldnate and substylee were optimized enough where the only way to beat them was getting the power-up.

This implies 2 things:

1. As wintery_mix pointed out, the game is clearly intended to be replayed, just like arcade games with hard difficulties.

2. Runs that start on the first seed won't be able to beat current top runs.

As for savestates, a run starting from the first seed until you find a good one wouldn't work because for some seeds you might have to play the game 3 or 4 times, although the last seed would be the fastest if you were timing it alone, like we're doing right now. And in that sense, a run that does 2 loops would be faster than one that does it in 4, but the 4th is the fastest. Like it would be too convoluted and even a bit tedious to run.

I personally think the seed search makes the speedrun a bit more unique as an additional way of routing. I could add a category for the first seed, but honestly this is a small and not very active leaderboard, so unless someone wants to run it I won't add it for now.

Hi, the run itself doesn't use any savestates and you can see through the video that I don't use any during the gameplay.

I only used a savestate before starting the run to make it faster to restart after each attempt. If I didn't use said savestate I would have to play the game twice just to start a new attempt.

The game creates different items for your next attempt based on where you die on the previous one. I just saved after dying on one attempt so that the next one will give me the required power-up to beat the WR (Which is impossible any other way).

It's allowed because: A) I'm not using savestates during the run itself. B) The items aren't randomly generated, so I'm not doing RNG manipulation. It's the same as Set Seed category for Minecraft, except instead of writing the seed I just load a save at the start of said seed to begin the run.

Hi, could you add categories for this game? I want to run it.

Thanks! Yeah it does require a specific RNG, but since the game is short and the map is so small it doesn't take that many tries until you get a good seed if you're good at recognizing the patterns.

I see, thanks for the info!

Hey so I wanted to speedrun this, but from what I read online (including the forums here) MAME seems to be inconsistent with this game. I was wondering if there is any other emulator that can run the game correctly or that is allowed for the arcade leaderboard.

What

Your runs so far have been getting more optimized. I just found some small time saves. I might also experiment with another route but I think this one is the best. Good luck!

Oh alright, that confused me because the other run didn't have the animations. Thanks for telling me!

Hey where can I play the game. The website linked here sends me to a page that says "Website no longer available". Is there any other place where I can play the game? Also could you add a category so that I can run it?

Weird, can't you re-upload it? Sorry if I'm too annoying about it but a WR should be visible for anyone. I might want to try to beat it or at least tie in the future (not right now), and I would need to see what time saves did you got. It's not that I don't believe you got the time, but from what I remember my 2:33 run was almost perfectly optimized, so I would like to know where did you shave 2 seconds off.

You need to go to your youtube channel studio, content, and then go to the video and change the visibility from "private" to "unlisted" or "public".

Hey, congrats on the run! Good to see this record getting beaten. But the video is currently private, please make it visible for everyone.

Hey, all the links on Resources don't work, it sends you to a private telegram group that you can't enter. I can't access the versions, could it be possible to upload them somewhere else? Or send the download links here?

Alright great, thanks for replying. I think the leaderboards should stay like this until said version is complete. Once its done we can try it and afterwards we can just delete the top runs that are impossible if so. (I mean, as if there is a fixed time that makes it impossible to beat some of the runs, we just delete those without reseting the entire leaderboard.)

Hey, so I noticed that the loading time for the "Level Cleared" is faster in the top runs. How do you do this? Can you trigger it or is it RNG? Cause so far I haven't got it once. If it has to do with hardware or something like that, then I think there should be another way to time the run, since it would make it unfair for some people like me to aim for the WR, since I don't have a faster PC and so the WR becomes impossible for me to beat.

This game actually ends (it has 3 levels then it loops), so I think it would be better to just have a category for that instead of so many categories for points and highscores.

Hey, I would like to run this. Can a category be added? The game doesn't seem to have an ending, and loops are kinda short, so I think a 1k and 5k points category could be added.

Hey, just wanted to try to get mod cause this game is for GBA, just wanted to add the platform lol, I cant ask the mod because he has been offline for so long. Ill delete this run inmediately after since I cant do an actual run right now, wasnt planning on submitting this for real.

Yeah, its the same for all FCF games, as I mentioned in the other game, Retroarch or RALibretro.