Man I'm pretty late on this so I hope it's already been answered but I'm pretty sure it's the "Spiderwaffle freeze" (thats who I learned it from anyways), you freeze the 2nd to last Geruta(red ceiling hopper) 2 rooms before the elevator to Ridley's Lair as it's moving to the right, and that makes one of the balls go to the right since those 2 things occupy the same RAM "slot" giving you good pattern in the ball room. The freeze itself is unimportant, as long as the direction when it leaves the screen is right or possibly straight up and down, but if it's moving left you get bad pattern.
Agree that random snow has 0 impact on any% and should be removed, and a "loop" of the game should be defined.
Given the large number of bonus points received per level I would assume any points run would just be beating the levels as quickly as possible, that being said I could add something like beat level 4-4 or 5-4. Beating level 3 is a bit too easy. Also added tutorials to the guides section.
Allowing screenwrapping which bypasses large sections of the game and disallowing deathwarps is just absurd to me. There's really nothing special about deathwarping at all, it's a routing decision you can make in any game. I don't consider this worthy of being something so special as to be a new category, but if we must hold on to the arbitrary rules of 10 years ago it might need the word "deathless" in the category name or something. I don't know how 2 glitches in Mario 64 were just compared with deathwarping in Metroid. Maybe a better comparison is other non-linear NES games like Faxanadu(deathwarps allowed) or Rygar(1 with, 1 without, 1 ww). Perhaps some new mods are needed here that are actually a part of this established Metroid NES community to clean the site up a bit.
Banning manual deathwarps in any category is outdated and simply nonsense. As an example, I consider the any% no up+A run that manually exits Kraids instead of deathwarping to the start of Kraids to be a very skilled run of a very bad route. The fact that deathwarping has the same function as up+A is largely irrelevant. One is a code on controller 2, the other is simply a strategy.
Using a 2nd controller to input a code just feels wrong. No one uses Konami code or invincibility codes or any other such codes in runs. Just because 10 year old rules are around doesn't mean they're good rules.
This rom came from some pack of all the NES games on emuparadise
Nestopia 1.40: Frat Guys Fceux 2.2.2: Generic Dudes
29 4e 4f a0 92 db 8e 29 d8 3f 71 e1 37 d1 f9 9f