First, welcome to the forums its cool to have you. You're right, there is no specific starting point in starting to speedrun as you may have noticed. :) However, you could go through your favorite games list and see if there are any games there that might peak your interest. I personally like to play a lot of console/arcade/and pc games. I'm more of a no death run/no damage run gamer myself but on occasion I like to speedrun from time to time. The arcade library has a nice selection of games to speedrun.. some suggestions (I know that they say that posting random suggestions isn't really advisable because it's hard to narrow down what games you like so I'll just ask you what games do you enjoy playing?) mercs arcade, the punisher, haunted castle, elevator action returns, double dragon, final fight series, smash tv (the snes version is more popular than the arcade version on this site). I could list a lot of games but I think I'll wait and see what some of your favorite genres of gaming are then I'll try to help you out. Hope this helps!
Welcome to the site! As shadowflare said, random suggestions rarely work without knowing anything about your preferences. A general advice is to start speedrunning games that you like and enjoy playing casually, and start from there to other games.
Ah, you're welcome. Unfortunately, I don't know much about jrpgs because I don't usually play them. However some random rpgs you may like are Sweet Home NES its an horror rpg, and the mother series I heard is pretty good to. One of the corpse party games I can recommend is on the PSP thats survival horror and adventure game. Jet Set Radio I heard was good but I never played it. VVVVV is a good and solid platformer you should look into but its pretty difficult. Some other difficult platformers you may want to try I wanna be the guy and I wanna kill the kamilia 3.
Glad that I could help you out. You settled for Jet Set Radio then? Cool good luck with speedrunning that game. :) Nah, those questions aren't annoying. Most speedrunners seem to be satisfied with a program called livesplit for timing their runs, although my knowledge with that program is quite limited because I don't use it myself so you would be better off asking someone else about any problems or issues with it. Posting runs here is quite simple. First you're going to need a video of your run so it can be verified. I recommend using youtube (it's what I use) or just about any video streaming service will due sites like vimeo or dailymotion etc. You could use Twitch if you wanted to as well thats another popular choice amongst runners. Once you have your run posted then find your game on here (if it's available) and you should be able to submit your run on that games page. Allow some time for the moderators of the games page to verify your run. However, if your game isn't available on the site you can request the game to be listed under the game request area of the site. If the game gets approved then you will automatically become a super mod for your game on its new page. Hope this helps, I've only been here around a year and mostly just use the sites forums to post.
Glad you liked the Mother series. Never knew that you enjoyed some of the more hardcore games like I do such as VVVVV. I guess I'm pretty good at scoping games out for players. :) Maybe you can do both Jet Set Radio and VVVVV. If you haven't checked out the I wanna kill the kamilia series definitely go for it its way harder than VVVVV. You can easily find some of the videos of youtube documenting its toughness. Any other questions or game requests feel free to ask.
No problem, glad we got your runs picked out for you so soon. :) Great choices. I can't wait to see how you do on these games I'll have to follow your progress. :)
That's not a bad idea to watch the current WR speedrun to get an idea of what you will be in for when you do your attempts. There are plenty of things that you can try to do to improve your times ie; Watching current WR as well as older WR attempts, read guides that provide useful tips because as runners we cannot always decipher what the runner might be doing on video, play for survival first (learn the ins and outs of the gameplay mechanics) and do deathless playthroughs, do level by level breakdowns including practicing bosses, route planning, break the game apart by trying new things and try to find new glitches nobody else has found to better your time for optimization. There really is nothing that you cannot do always remember that. You're going to be tackling some of the hardest games the worlds ever seen so keep in mind these runs are probably out of most gamers reach, I just want to wish you good luck. If you have any general questions let me know I would be happy to answer them, if its game specific I might know them since I play a lot of games, if not then you can always ask on the games forums when you run a search for the game.