So, quick note about the 0-99 category, the rules for MS-DOS (And I presume Amiga, but can't be 100% sure) should be slightly different. In DOS, you're looking for "Well Done Eternal", NOT "Well Done Immortal".

Why? In the DOS version, your title changes every 50 levels, not every 100--Eternal is the third title after Mortal and Immortal. This is because the base game and the expansion are effectively two separate roughly 500-level games that both use the same passwords, and you're exclusively playing either the base game or the expansion in a given session. In the SNES version, the expansion levels are "interspersed" throughout the base levels, turning it into one 989 level game (I'm actually curious what the one level missing from the SNES version is--I'm guessing the expansion version of Genesis).

Alternately I guess you could make a "0-49" category for the DOS/Amiga versions, but I imagine the goal as Feasel imagined it for the SNES version was "Get to Level 100", not "Get a new title".

Hello!

So it turns out that besides the manual, DOS Populous back in the day ALSO came with a Reference Card that the GOG release DOESN'T include. On it are a bunch of shortcut keys!

The full reference card is at https://archive.org/details/populousmanual/Populous-ReferenceCard-PC but I'll go over some of the highlights here.

There is, in fact, a whole keyboard MODE for controlling the game if you happen to not use a mouse! Sadly, some of the best shortcuts (There are keys to mimic the SNES's "quickly flatten enough land to make a castle" and "quickly flatten the general mass of land under my cursor" button combinations to name two--"/" and "*" on the numpad respectively) are buried and ONLY allowed in keyboard mode. You can hit Ctrl-M to switch between keyboard, joystick, and mouse modes, so I suppose one theoretical improvement might be quickly swapping into and out of keyboard mode to quickly flatten land.

But guess what shortcuts AREN'T buried in keyboard mode? That's right--increase and decrease game speed! It's a pretty fine-grain control actually--you can slow the game down to ludicrous levels if you're patient enough, and it might be that one press speeds up or slows down the game speed by one "frame per action" if that makes sense. To increase game speed, hold Alt and hit S, and to decrease it, hold Shift and hit S. From the default game speed, it seems like about 10 presses will get you to "max speed". Be warned, though, it's fast. Very fast. "Even on Genesis enemy will outpopulate you and begin engaging you on your land" fast, or at least they did to me.

Other keys not locked behind keyboard mode are hotkeys for your various powers. These are: Placing your Papal Magnet - P Earthquake- Q Swamp- S Knight- K Volcano- V Flood- F Armageddon- W (Why W and not A? I have no idea. Maybe "World End")

Speeding up the game itself in-game (Which seems allowed as far as I can tell, though I'll admit I don't know if people were aware this was even possible--I wasn't until yesterday) obviously allows for huge potential improvements, providing you can play that fast. I used it to get a "Win a Level" time of either 3:29 or 3:30 on Genesis (AKA Level 0), which is...a big improvement! The link to the video is at

Obviously, I don't expect that to be the best time for long once people really dig into the game, but it was fun to come back for one "Free WR".

So I'll take responsibility for screwing this all up.

Funny thing about this: For many years, before I came along, SDA timing WAS from File Select (THAT'S how long it was between the last SDA submission and mine). The short historical version: After it was discovered that in-game time was useless (It was known many years back, even before I went more in-depth about some of the particulars, that the in-game timer was useless for segmented runs because it dropped seconds upon reloading, and segmented runs in general and relating to Metroid II specifically were much more popular then than they are now), it was one of the first games in the series to use real-time as the primary timing method (After the original Metroid, for the obvious reason of "The original Metroid completely lacks an in-game timer"). Radix, pre-maturation-of-SDA, decided to count from file select as a form of "segmentation penalty" for the game, whereas most other games on SDA counted from the time you first gained control of your character. For consistency's sake, he also applied this penalty to the "first" segment, which made "From hitting start on the title screen" the de facto "SDA timing" for Metroid II.

It wasn't until I submitted my runs sometime in the past couple years that SDA timing changed to match the rest of SDA (Because, well, it should've matched, and because being a single-segment run, I didn't think the segmentation penalty (As such) was necessary any longer).

Going forward, I don't particularly care which timing method is used (Forget "speedrunning Metroid II", when was the last time you saw me even stream anything), but I do agree it should be one or the other. I think someone should also probably come up with the exact offset (I think someone did, and it was something like 5.72 or similar)--5.65 was close enough to be "visually correct" in real-time, but I didn't do any frame-counting or anything like that to arrive at that number.

tl;dr: Do what y'all want, don't go along with what I did just because I did it and was the closest thing to a "name" the community had at the time.