Honestly? Oh boy this might seem like a downer. But to me, it's not.

So, I was born with half a working heart, and at 3 years old, I had a surgery to reroute things so my half-heart could function similarly to a normal one. It went pretty well except for the part where I was dead for a few minutes. I couldn't talk well for over a year after surgery and I was barely coordinated enough to hold a ball.

3 years later, my cardiologist told my parents to get me a video game system as this would improve my severely damaged motor skills. So they came home with a Super Nintendo one day, and I hated it. I sucked, bad. I wanted to play with the box it came in more that the console itself - that was more fun to me. But quite literally, I was forced to play it, by friends, then my sister and cousins, and finally my father. Over the course of two years, I managed to beat Super Mario World. It did improve my coordination. I could even play catch now too. To this day, I am still very grateful to that cardiologist.

Then at age 8, I was hospitalized with Kawasaki's disease, and was out of school for several months. Some kind soul donated an insane amount of original NES's and games to the hospital I recovered in, and I spent the better portion of a month "racing" other kids to beat Super Mario and Kirby's Adventure when I felt well enough. It was almost a year before I was back to some semblance of my old self and in school full time again.

Starting in 2004, with the advent of internet video, I became aware of speedrunning. It was not unlike what I used to do with friends and the kids at the hospital. Gave me the warm and fuzzies to see something I did to pass time during some particularly dark periods of my life out there in the world. I always kept tabs on speedrunning, swear I watched everything I could find on SDA. But I assumed I'd be no good, or at least not good enough to post videos.

So in 2011, I became aware of Games Done Quick. I had to have another heart surgery, a final revision to remove some tissue that was causing my heart to grow, and ended up being out of work for 3 months recovering. Watched the whole event in awe. Wow, folks are actually doing this for charity now. Heck I know doctors affiliated with MSF do my exact surgery in developing countries. Warm and fuzzies. I cried when it was over, then quickly realized there was tons more to watch, and spent most of my recovery doing just that. So I donated a little every year after that. Still thought I could probably never do this myself.

So now it's 2018. I have an auto immune disorder that causes nerve pain and muscle twitches. A life time of surgery and rare diseases will do that to ya. I stare at my reflection in my CRT TV one day, and it dawns on me that I literally have nothing to lose. If I suck, it's the pain and twitching. If I don't, it's in spite of it.

So I look up a few games I know here, realize that I know a few secrets that haven't been found, and a few strategies no one is using. And I go for it. And it turns out I can do it. Perhaps I'll never be capable of a 5 minute Super Mario run, but hey it's fun and it's something. I especially love it when folks beat my times with strategies I developed, something I really didn't expect to enjoy to be honest.

My wife probably thinks I'm crazy, but she's been rather supportive through out, and I swear I'll turn her eventually. There's some two player games I need her for! =P

So in short I'm here because I love this. Whatever this speedrunning thing is. Truly believe there's a lot of good in this hobby, and in this community.

Halfheartedly yours,

Krayzar =P

PS: If you're reading this and you're STILL on the fence about whether you can speedrun... YOU CAN! DO IT, DO IT NOW! You need not beat anyone but yourself. It's about doing YOUR best, not beating the WR! I will go out of my way to help you if I can!

Just to give you an idea, my streaming computer is 7 years old and streams pretty much everything wonderfully.

It has the following: i7 Intel, 6 cores 24gb of ddr3 1066 ram NVidia 760ti GPU A solid state drive over a sata connection

In 2011, it was state of the art. Bought it as a present to myself after heart surgery. Now, my work laptop beats it handily at nearly everything, including gaming.

Point is, anything with a recent i5 (or AMD equivalent), 8gbs of RAM, a halfway decent GPU, and a solid state drive is very capable for streaming. Unless you are trying to play cutting edge PC games at max settings (which for speedrunning is a terrible idea anyways), it should be fine.

Yeah, I gotta agree. If it's not listed on one of those, there's a good chance it's not even remotely interesting.

Well, which consoles are you thinking of capturing? That's where to start really. There's a lot of different options depending on what you're looking to capture.

Gotcha, cool! That's what I'd prefer! Sorry if I was unclear!

Just making sure I understand, the 2 player weirdness and single round settings/damage settings are legal? Only the difficulty and time settings are required?

Hey @AquaBlake, currently the rules would seem to allow for some pretty extensive settings changes in D:NW.

For example, with rounds set to 1 and Damage set to Max, you avoid the 2nd round AI algorithm upgrade and can easily take advantage of the extra damage to:

1. Abuse attack priority and trick the AI into either killing itself on your attacks;
2. Or getting locked into a corner and not changing its algorithm in time to escape or defend.

While it makes for some interesting strategy and is certainly a lot shorter than a probably average run of 15-20 minutes (in my estimation), it might not be particularly fun to watch. Then again, comparatively, D:NW, isn't particularly flashy or fun to watch to begin with.

Here's a test video of what I mean:

There is one other novel property about the game as well that's built into the Arcade versions and PS1 port. Like Street Fighter II, you can have a second player interrupt an arcade match any time after you select a character, and if the player is defeated with a character you haven't yet faced, that character is eliminated from the list you have to face to get to Hutzil/Phobos and Pyron. This allows for a likely 8 to 10 minute run or lower, but it's pretty boring to watch.

Here's the video of what I'm talking about:

What are your feelings on these?

I personally think both of these are a bit cheap and uninteresting for a run, and shouldn't be allowed. You could make the case for the damage settings actually causing time loss in the later fights by making it easier for the bosses and some characters with very good AI (like Morrigan and Lord Raptor) to combo you into oblivion before you can get a move in edgewise.

That said, the AI in this one cheats rather extensively. Even on level 4, it uses frame perfect priority counters and executes specials without inputs for them (this actually leads to some moves being done under normally impossible circumstances on occasion).

Personally I think the difficulty should stay where it is though. While 4 is much more challenging than any other difficulty setting in the series, it makes for a very exciting watch and forces defensive play against a few of the characters, something not seen in any of the other games in the series.

We need a bit more info. OBS is generally not the problem I've found. What are you using for capture? What are you capturing? What is the resolution you are capturing? Are you using hardware or software encoding?

There's a dozen more questions I could ask, but these are probably the most important.

Honestly, emulation should be allowed, via separate category or same category, and the PS3 version and XBox version should be separated as well. This is literally an unplayable/noncompetitive game for folks that didn't originally buy the XBox360 version.

I'm all for playing the best version of something, but in this case, the only ACCESSIBLE version is the PS3 version. There is no XBox 360 emulator out there that plays this game accurately, and to add insult to injury Xenia, the furthest along emulator is intentionally gimped to only ever play the game in Demo mode, which wouldn't be valid for a run.

I'd love to do a run of this some time, but this would be what's stopped me so far. I own the PS3 version on real hardware, bought it before it was delisted, but the fact that I can no longer even play the best version, emulator or hardware wise, is a motivation killer.

Willing to bet this is the reason why there's no runs here any more as well. This is a great game. There should be more folks running it.

I think your approach is wrong for different reasons. Yeah sure you could get a WR on those games, but would you enjoy running them?

Would you be happy competing against yourself? Would you run the game again and again because you like it, even if you already had the record, in the absence of competition? Would you try to build a community around the game if you could, would you try to draw others interest, be supportive of other runners who would like to run it? Basically, do you care about the game?

There's nothing wrong with going for a World Record on a game no one plays if you honestly enjoy the game, but if you're just doing it to have a gold icon next to your name, there are easier ways to get that. Like buying gold star stickers at a dollar store and writing your name next to one of them, for example. =P

And just to add, personally, what I find most fulfilling about this hobby is the routing, and the community. I likely will never be the fastest at any of this. My hands are crap and it's just an impossibility due to some medical stuff right now. But damned if I can't show some folks who are way better at execution than I am a strategy or two. I'd much rather be the guy who broke the game wide open by finding a glitch or strat than the rotating cast of WR holders!

Well, I'm still waiting on Castle of the Winds: https://www.speedrun.com/Castle_of_the_Winds

The current oldest run is from 2018-08-13, now two months old. Like I said last time, I've reached out to both mods on Twitter and Twitch, and still nothing. I believe @Liv reached out to @brossentia as well.

I'm sure @brossentia is just a bit busy right now, but I think we really need at least another active mod on this.

If you have a 32 bit Windows OS like XP or Windows 2000, you can also run the program natively, but this might be a bit difficult to come by for most. And even if you do have the OS, not everyone has a spare PC lying around to run it on. But if you're somewhat technical (AKA can Google your way into using OBS and a streaming setup), you can probably use a Virtual machine!

I've included two links here for virtualization software that are free for personal use. There are others, but these are probably the easiest to use, and the most cross platform supported, for all of you linux folks. I'd personally recommend VMWare Player, because it tends to just work, and isn't currently developed by an evil Patent Troll (shakes fist at Oracle). https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation_player/15_0 https://www.virtualbox.org/

If for some reason in 2018 you are still using a 32bit copy of Windows 7, 8, or 10 (or you just have easy access to one of these), there is a way to enable 16bit support still though!

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/enable-16-bit-application-support-windows-10/

Press Windows key + R to pull up the run menu, then type: optionalfeatures.exe then hit Enter. Expand Legacy Components then check off NTVDM and click OK. Run Castle of the Winds as you would on Windows 3.1, or any 16bit supporting OS! Laugh as you play CoTWs natively on Windows 10!

Tyrian 2000 It's literally free, fun, and deceptively punishing to speedrun.

One of my favorite items in Castle of the Winds is the distillation of water, a useless potion. You can drink them though, just like any other potion. It's just so absurd. I used to collect them in a chest as I played, just for fun.

I toyed around with suggesting just finding one and drinking it for a misc category, but that's too quick. They're pretty common, especially in Part 1, and it might be a bit more interesting to watch if there was more to it than getting lucky on the first level of the mines.

My idea would be finding 5 Distillations, then drinking them all, in either part 1 or part 2. The one rule is, they have to be identified BEFORE you drink, as it adds the need to identify somehow, and prevents people from just grabbing every potion they find and chugging them. That would be harder to verify, and probably a little less fun to watch.

Part 1 has more of a chance to drop them, but part 2 has the identify spell and the detect items spell available from the beginning both of which you can utilize to find them. Heck because map level scrolls reveal all items, refreshing levels that way might be the easiest way to find them in part 2.

I'm going to try a demo of it some time this week and I'll post it here, but let me know if it sounds interesting! With all the weirdness in this game, I bet there's at least another misc category that could be thought up...

Yeah, I just accepted it too! I've seen it on so many leader boards, even some pretty well known ones, so I just assumed it was how things worked! LOL.

Any good at fighting games? Runs are usually under 10 minutes and are usually about AI manipulation and a little chance.

There's also plenty of roguelikes and strategy games that range from under a minute to around 15 to 20.

I personally have very limited time to run lately, and this is what I do.

Oh yeah! And welcome!

Just to add, the timer is really just for you. It usually helps to give you some perspective on how you're doing.

Sure there are a few games out there that require it, but I think the general consensus is it's for no good reason. =P

I too have some pretty severe budget requirements but I recently did construct a low cost Standard Def speedrunning setup. Maybe this will help...

I use an AVerMedia EZMaker 7 which you can usually find for about $30 in the US, but I'm not sure how available it is in your locale, Brazil. It has composite and S-Video, and for me, works flawlessly over a standard USB 2 connection. My computer is 7 years old too, so it's no spring chicken on that side of things. I use S-Video, but some console S-Video cables are pretty expensive these days, ranging from 20 to 50 bucks USD on some, assuming you can find them. I was lucky to have bought a few of them back when I purchased my consoles, and while the quality is nice, it's certainly not necessary.

The PS3 should have come with a composite cord though (the Yellow, Red, and White RCA connection), assuming they didn't take that out of the package in later revisions. PS3's composite really isn't terrible too, compared to some other consoles, and certainly more than serviceable for speedruns!

If you can find one and afford it, try it out! Might work nice for you as well.

Here's an Amazon link with some info, it's not for your location, but it might help: https://www.amazon.com/AVerMedia-Definition-Composite-Cyberlink-C039/dp/B00603S1OS

I should also mention that this card is pretty much plug and play with OBS. You can just install the driver and ignore all the software it comes with.

Hey @AquaBlake, supposedly there's a way to fix it so that runs on different platforms properly obsolete each other. Someone mentioned it here: https://www.speedrun.com/Speedrunning/thread/jec9a

I am a mod on another game and I could probably take a screenshot of the settings in case you can't find it. Figured I'd mention it in case my multi-platform runs bug you as much as they do to me. =P

Well, uh this is an odd one, but I don't know what else to do.

I have more than a few runs I've submitted to: https://www.speedrun.com/Castle_of_the_Winds The current oldest of which from 2018-08-13. One of the recent runs beats a current WR, and another is (as far as I know) the only gauntlet style run ever done.

I've contacted both mods and while the Super Mod of the game originally said they'd take a look on twitch about two months ago, they still read as not having been online in 10 months and my recent attempts to contact them again about a week ago have been met with radio silence.

The first few runs I submitted were eventually verified by @brossentia the game's only other Mod, but he's kind of a busy guy. I reached out to him on Twitter last week after waiting a month and a half, but I don't think it's quite fair on him to be the only active mod on this.

The other active runner on this game @Silentsigil would probably make a good choice for a Mod. He's been around longer than I have. I am a Mod on Masters of Orion 2, I understand the site fundamentals, and know the game very well, so if it has to be me, it can be. I just think he'd be more deserving.