Howdy! In talking to a few folks from the Crush community, we were thinking about exploring more of Alien Crush via longer categories.

In that spirit, I spent some time to get a 10M and 25M run together. Those point marks match the longer categories used for Devil's Crush.

Anyone else interested? So far the strats are more or less the same - bottom bonus for victory. Not accidentally draining and getting consistently good bonus redemptions seems extra important for keeping a good pace. But perhaps the top screen has strats that are worth the ramp up for larger point targets.

How should a hard difficulty run of the 2600 version be submitted? Here is my run for reference: https://www.speedrun.com/kangaroo_arcade/run/y6656ljy

In collaboration with fellow Naxat Pinball runner CheeseVikingGames, I was able to beat the game. On the TG-16 version, this involves scoring 1 billion points.

Here is the video for your consideration. I ended timing at the moment the score locks at max, which is immediately followed by the playfield exploding and the ending playing.

For any folks that like to use visual cues to retime their runs, the offset I measured from selecting "MAN" to the screen turning black afterward is 63 frames.

Frame at which I held Run to start the game:

The first frame of black after that:

• I added Genesis to allowed hardware and US as the region variant
• I updated all existing runs with that info, which means that the emu state you set on your submission now shows on the board
• I verified the backlog of submissions. A few were off by a second or two; I updated the submission before verifying.

The 8-bit versions have solo categories, and this version supports playing solo, which would be faster than playing against the CPU opponents.

Howdy @NihilistComedyHour,

I got around to dumping the puzzle banks from the following 3 versions of C64 Wheel of Fortune from Sharedata: v1 (the original release), v2 (New 2nd Edition), and v3 (New 3rd Edition). My tooling is not 100% precise, but I think the results are good enough to discuss here.

All three versions have just over 1000 puzzles (1032, 1019, 1022) . v1 and v2's puzzle banks are nearly identical; everything in v2 is in v1, and v1 has 13 more additional puzzles. I suspect this is actually a result of the dumping not being completely accurate, so I'd say they are probably identical.

v3, on the other hand, is profoundly different: less than 1% of puzzles overlap between v3 and v1/v2.

I haven't looked at the game play differences yet, but at a casual glance the versions look identical once you get to the main gameplay.

All said, I'd support either a single board for all three versions or separating v3 from v1 and v2. Separating v1 and v2 seems unnecessary.

All the Any% runs have CPU players. Is there anything permissible in Any% that isn't also permissible in the vs. CPU category as well?

The only thing I could think of would be to say you have 3 human players and play all of them yourself.

Just checking if anyone is still here. I picked this game up and worked my way to this run:

I've enjoyed Ishido enough that I did runs for Gameboy and Famicom Disk System. While the core game is the same, the UI choices and display limitations change how quickly you can play the game.

Here's my slow play:

Here's the TAS: http://tasvideos.org/2522S.html

My notes so far: Death comes quickly, and losing your power ups adds insult to injury. Oddly enough, the stronger bosses aren't that much harder... except the final boss (OHKO plus faster boss magic). The levels are the hardest part... the patterns are more dense and have harder and hardier enemies.

On September 14th RGLtv will be hosting a one night only tournament for Ninja Spirit. For more info and to join the bracket, go to https://challonge.com/RGLTV_NS_TG16_ONOT

What's the opinion on what difficulty to play on? The default is 4, and KobePilgram's run shows the option screen to confirm that. The other runs I watched didn't show the difficulty, so I'm not sure what was used.

It'd be nice if the rules could either state what difficulty to play on or that any difficulty (or other settings) are permitted. What have y'all been playing with?

From casual observation, the easier difficulties seem to be more about AI behavior than damage values. On 1 the AI will rarely get in a special move, whereas on 4 you will almost certainly get countered by something during a run (especially during the group fights).

Just checking to see if the mods are still around. Cheers!

I'd been kicking this idea around for a while, but this week I finally sat down to do it: Strider 100%.

That means:

• All boots
• All keys
• All disks
• Slide In and Plasma Arrow
• All the tricks
• Beat the game
• Otherwise, no limits. Zip, death abuse, etc. all allowed.

I was interested in this because I was looking for something longer than any%, but without the restrictions of the Zipless and TG categories. I thought it would be an interesting routing exercise, and that it would be different enough from the existing categories to stand on its own.

Here is my latest PB:

Here is what I've learned from the exercise so far:

1. Not all sequence breaks leave you in a state where you can still collect 100%. Ex: If you collect Disc 2 and kill the Zain in Kazakh in one trip, when you go to Egypt the Key 2 script trigger doesn't happen.
2. However, some sequence breaks are ok. My run above finishes China in a single visit, and afterwards I finish Kazakh in a single visit (in TG that would have been two visits for each).
3. You can skip the outdoors part of Africa since it is faster to go through Australia. As such, you visit Australia twice.
4. The glitched Yggdrasil kill is a little different. Namely, the top of Yggdrasil doesn't work quite the same way as in the any% route. I'm still working through that, but my muscle memory from any% results in me getting stuck on the top until I jump.

In terms of flavor, nearly every level has a zip in it now, or death abuse, or both.

If this seems worth creating a category on this leaderboard, then I'd be willing to draft of the rules and help verify runs for it. If not, well, I've had fun exploring more Strider!

Just checking to see if this board is still moderated. Cheers!

Since I have accidentally stumbled into the Any% category, I have a question about the Any% rules. Specifically, what is a linear warp?

From the Any% rules (emphasis mine): Can warp to any Dimension at anytime except for linear warps from stages 3, 7 and 15.

I searched around for more info about this but couldn't find anything. Anyone have more details?

How do you setup your splits and start your timer from Contra? I thought I had something decent by copying what I saw in Toad's run (-9 seconds, start timer when you mash start), but over time I've noticed quite a bit of variance on when my timer hours zero versus gaining control in Jungle. Any tips? Should I just be manually starting at zero?

I've got two rules related questions, both related to things I noticed with Gallivanter's 9:29 arcade version run:

1. It appears that this run uses the bootleg romset. Does anyone know what gameplay differences there are between the bootleg and the non-bootleg set?
2. This run starts with 5 lives in reserve, whereas the default lives setting is to start with 2 lives in reserve. Is it acceptable to configure the dip switches for extra lives?

Note that there are opportunities to save time via death abuse, so additional lives would confer a speed advantage.

Here is an all encompassing Intellivision discord where people can discuss highscoring, speedrunning, or just casually talk about their favorite Intellivision games: https://discord.gg/jHh7TrV

You can talk about this game in the #ice_trek channel. Cheers!