Indiana, USAI'd recommend joining the community discord if you are still struggling on this. It would be a lot easier to help you out if we could see a video of one of your attempts.
Most LEGO games do not have glitchless categories. The community as a whole has little interest in glitchless since those categories tend to be seen as far less interesting compared to the normal versions of categories. You are welcome to run the games however you'd like though and submit to the existing boards with whatever strategies you choose to do.
After watching LEGO speedruns for a long time, there are some little things that make it pretty obvious. One person controlling two characters is going to play the game quite differently than two people each controlling one player.
The DS version is a separate game with its own leaderboard. You can find it here: https://www.speedrun.com/lswtcsds
We can add an NG+ category, but I would prefer to not use IGT since the timers in game are rounded to the full second, so the actual time shown is not very accurate. I think staying with RTA is fine for the time being, and if it becomes an issue in the future we can reassess.
I keep hearing about this AnAnonymousSource guy in the news, crazy he is here too.
From speedrun.com site guidelines:
"After you’ve practiced and captured your best attempt, submit the run on the Game Page and a game moderator will verify it within 1-3 weeks."
Mods are not expected to be verifying runs every day. Someone will get to it soon, please be patient.
This game does not run well with modern hardware when run as is, most notably with the higher FPS that effects the physics of the game and the speed of the in game timer. That rule is in place to help normalize the performance of the game between runners. The expectation is that you use it to cap FPS at 60.
Hey, I know this is an old post, but timers are not required in order to submit runs to the board. Moderators retime all runs regardless, so the on-screen timer is more for the benefit of the runner and viewer than an indication of validity for the run.
Yes that is allowed. You would submit to the Wii category, and set your platform to Wii U.
yeah there is no glitchless category for this game, or for most of the LEGO games. This is often due to the fact that defining a ruleset for "glitchless" is pretty tricky (is 1p2c allowed? are basic platforming skips allowed? should extras be banned?) Obviously if you want to run glitchless, you are welcome to define your own rules and run it however you like. But be aware that that doesn't mean a category will be created, since we tend to only create "conditional" categories like that (i.e. any% minus some specific thing) if there is a large demand for it, which currently there is not.
Anyway, to answer your question, the structure of the route would depend a little on whether or not Extras are allowed. If you allow extras, then the three currently obtained in any% using no glitches (Exploding Blaster Bolts grabbed in Gunship Cavalry, Infinite Torpedoes grabbed in Into the Death Star and Vehicle Smart Bombs grabbed in Battle Over Coruscant) would still be fast to obtain. With that in mind, the fastest route has some options. As long as you start with episodes 1 and 2 (since you have to play 1 first, and 2 gives you Exploding Blaster Bolts) and end on episode 5 (since it has the longest end cutscene and benefits from all of the Extras), they you will be playing a pretty optimal route. The order of the other 3 episodes does not really matter.
If you are also excluding extras from your definition of glitchless, then it episode 2 does not have to be second, and the rest of the above paragraph still applies.
All LEGO games allow 1 person to control both players, and top LEGO runners use this pretty much wherever it saves time. So there really is not that big of an advantage from that perspective to playing co-op instead of playing solo. In fact, there is definitely a bit of a disadvantage to co-op unless two players practice together and coordinate their strats. Most co-op runs are more of a "for fun" thing that two runners do rather than a serious attempt at grinding a competitive time.
A noteworthy example of co-op runs where the two players prep and practice quite a bit can be seen in Shred and Jarool's runs in The Skywalker Saga, which are way faster than the solo runs.
