Thank you everyone for input! I appreciate it!

Insofar as glitches vs glitchless, I do think there's a certain appeal to runs that include glitches, but glitchless could admittedly be a feasible starting point to really up my game and reactions.

The games I listed off are all games I've played an excessive number of times already over the years, so I feel competent in my general knowledge, but a new "casual" playthrough in any of them is also a good place to start, I think.

There's a lot of good advice here for me to incorporate as I give things a shot. If anything I feel relieved that it's not a negative that I have a few games I'm trying to get the hang of. Once something "clicks" I'll focus in on one, though.

Also, if I have a personal interest in a game that seems not to have much of a community, do you recommend fiddling with that a bit myself? When the ps3 Ratchet titles came out when I was a kid, I played them over and over, essentially grinding my time down before I even knew what speedruns were! So I was a little sad to see there isn't much around for those.

So I've been following a few speedrun communities for a few years now, and I'd really like to give it a shot! I've started by trying a few earlier run glitches for some of the games I'm interested in, but I'm struggling to pull anything off, and I'm starting to feel daunted by a lot of things (it's mostly timing, that's hard to convey without seeing the controller during the run).

What do you think is the best general advice for someone completely new to this, that's feeling a bit discouraged?

And am I maybe in over my head, and should set my sights on different games? Or are there easier ones that suit my preferences?

The games I've been considering are the ps1 Spyro Trilogy, any Ratchet and Clank games, and the Sonic Adventure games. I'm a big fan of 3D platformers, but we had Playstations growing up instead of Nintendo.