Hi all! I've seen there has been some discussion about possible rules for the Any% arcade category and I am happy to begin the discussion. My proposed rules are as follows:

1. Run starts when you gain control of Dover after the opening cutscene.
2. Run ends on the frame Wardner turns "grey" when he dies.
3. Emulators are permitted (unless anyone wants to track down a Wardner cabinet!).
4. Starting from a save state during the opening cut scene is permitted.*
5. Unlimited credits permitted.**
6. Any Dipswitch difficulty setting are permitted. ***

• RE: save state - from my understanding, Enemy drop RNG is determined when enemies appear on screen. In other words, if you start from a save state before getting control of Dover, your RNG for drops will be different every time. This means we don't have to worry about doing a full boot every time and going through the ~30 second boot sequence. Should speed up runs significantly.

** Re: credits - the prevalence of "Death Warping" in this game means that I don't think we should limit runs to 1 credit. If a runner wants to do a route with 4 death warps, I don't think we should limit this. We can set up a 1cc% category if people want to do one-credit runs.

*** Re: Dipswitches - This one I'm not sure of and am happy to be proven wrong on. I've played around a little bit with Dipswitches and I personally don't see that much difference (if any) between Easy/Normal. I also think it would be a pain to verify Dipswitches, as essentially every single run the runner would have to bring up their console and show the difficulty setting, which would be a pain. Because of this, I think unless it can be shown that Easy difficulty provides a significant time advantage (e.g. 5+ seconds) it would probably just be easier to say "anything goes", rather than splitting up runs into multiple categories.

Let me know what everyone thinks!