Yeah, kicking opponents also gives a slight speed boost. Weapons probably are not really useful for speedrun, but fun regardless. :P The obvious choice in career mode is Cydney because with 1000$ starting cash you can get Killer Rat bike earlier and she has best starting bike.

As for the categories, the "Thrash Mode" which is the arcade one could be used for those seperate Level 1,2,3,4,5 categories, otherwise you would just always chose the Vipera bike in the career mode, kinda boring. The different tracks (either only the longest from level 5 or all) as IL board would be more fitting for that. I think you don´t neccessarily would need to put those Level 1,2,3,4,5 categories into misc, there is probably enough room. And "Big Game Mode" aka the career mode should be the full-game category.

Is Level 1 (and possibly other levels) limited to start from career or menu? The menu only gives you a certain bike while in career you have the possibility to buy another. Also if you chose a woman character (only career mode) it gives you slight speed advantage on some bikes.

Wouldn´t it make more sense to limit individual level runs to start from menu only and have the career mode be a seperate category itself because of the things above? (I´m talking about PC version I forgot to add, don´t know about others)

Indeed it works, nice find! And in case you do some attempts, look up the updated rules if you haven´t yet.

Just so other potential runners don´t miss it, recently (as of the 1st October 2018) the new timing method was introduced for the any%, any% no EE-glitch and Wang Cars category. This one is based on the ingame frame count and is more consistent than the frame rate limiter of the game, because the actual frame rate fluctuates with the game frame limiter enabled (usually between 30 - 30.3 fps) probably due to lag that can occur on different PCs because of various reasons. And this is a problem since in the any% categories it is more or less a matter of frames where you need precise timing. You can activate the counter using the powerpatch which you can get from the Resource section and ticking "Show Cycle" in the debug menu.

Real time is still used for the other categories however because it is a pain in the butt to calculate all the menu times or pauses manually in full runs or such where people might want to save and reload frequently. You still need to have the frame count displayed though because it can help detecting potential tempering with the framerate or replay system that is in the game.

It was brought up on discord, so i write it up here again. Recently the runner Sektor reminded us, that there is an inbuilt framecounter in the game if you check "Show Cycle" under the debug options, which you can enable in your gta2 manager using this: http://gtamp.com/GTA2/powerpatch.zip

Having some runs with this enabled we noticed a difference in real time compared to actual framecount of the game. The runner hipp0cat did some tests in residential to verify that: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zt0fSMN6kMkEbDtFcIEvss0hfo548YxdI7WZ9MJ90O4/edit?usp=sharing

Frame = ingame framecount, Time = real time, Exp. Time = expected time if one frame would equal 0.03333.. secs (30fps).

As can be seen the actual fps are inconsistent (are between 30.1 to 3.3 fps most of the time) and can give you an advantage of up to 0.3 secs in even a short run like residential any%.. I also did a quick test with disabled frame limiter and instead using dxtory to limit to exact 30fps. The result was that the ingame framecount was consistent with the fixed fps.

So to avoid having these varying fps having an impact on the actual run performance, I would like to suggest the following:

1.) All (individual level?) runs should have the ingame framecount enabled from now on

2.) The ingame time will be calculated by dividing the framecount with 30 (exact 30 fps for simplicity). Example: 1326 frames / 30 = 44.200 secs ingame time

3.) Because some full-game runs also go into menu and there is no counter available i think these options would be possible:

• A: ignore it and give penalties if someones is deliberately too long there or game crashes
• B: just time all the time spent in the menu
• C: use Real Time anyway ignoring the possible disadvantages

Since I don´t think it would make sense to make such decisions on my own, it would be appreciated to hear the opinions or proposals of other gta2 speedrun community members about this issue.

The old three year old WR was 1:15:09. Tezur0 still needs to beat that first. :P About the date, basically what Tezur0 said, I wanted to improve it first. But since i don´t want to do such long runs in the near future i decided to upload it anyway..

Modified version for gta2:

First of all old school gtas like gta1 or gta2 don´t have any percent counters, unlike the 3d era and later games. It is more an "All Goals" instead of "100%". In some later gta games like SA or V however there are percentage counters, but not every side goal (like completing "beat the cock" missions) counts towards the actual percentage. In old school gtas it is a similiar case, because some goals are listed in the pause screen, while other possible side activities like delivering cars to cranes or getting all bonuses are not. So to avoid any confusion or other arbitrary stuff, only the goals listed in the pause screen should count towards "100%"!

The goals are:

• (Total/Gang) Missions Passed: Each unique mission needs to be completed. Bugs that have you get double mission completes for the same mission don´t mean that you can do one mission less.. and neither if the counter is broken and doesn´t add up the completed missions anymore. In the special rare case where you can get a "Job Failed!" and "Job Complete!" at nearly the same time which might break the mission counter somehow, the following is important: If it somehow screws the possibility of completing each unique mission not counting the mission where it happened, then your run is rip. ;)

• Kill Frenzies Completed: Each unique "Kill Frenzy" needs to be completed as the menu says. Unlike in the gta1 games the completion is a requirement for this goal to register.

• Tokens Collected: Each unique token which is depicted as a gta2 logo needs to be collected.

• Target Score: You need to at least reach the appointed score, which unlocks a blinking pink marker that points to the level exit. Since it is a level based game (where you are supposed to unlock next levels by having target score and then finishing the level), going to the pink marker and leaving town is an additional requirement, which marks the level as completed.

See this topic: https://www.speedrun.com/gta1/thread/a051t for a detailed explanation.

See this topic: https://www.speedrun.com/gta1/thread/a051t for a detailed explanation.

Since some questions arose, a clarification about what counts towards "100%" and also what counts as a major exploit for the recently added "Any% NME (no major exploits)" category.

1.) Clarification on 100% category: (last update: 26.08.2018) First of all old school gtas like gta1 or gta2 don´t have any percent counters, unlike the 3d era and later games. It is more an "All Goals" instead of "100%". In some later gta games like SA or V however there are percentage counters, but not every side goal (like completing "beat the cock" missions) counts towards the actual percentage. In old school gtas it is a similiar case, because some goals are listed in the pause screen, while other possible side activities like delivering cars to cranes or getting all bonuses are not. So to avoid any confusion or other arbitrary stuff, only the goals listed in the pause screen should count towards "100%"!

These goals are:

• Missions Passed: Each unique mission needs to be completed. Bugs that have you get double mission completes for the same mission don´t mean that you can do one mission less.. and neither if the counter is broken and doesn´t add up the completed missions anymore. Same thing also accounts for the next goal.

• Secrets Found: Each unique "Kill Frenzy" needs to be found as the menu says, completion is optional. So collecting them is enough, which makes the game register this goal (once, if no bugs happen). Whether you complete it or not doesn´t matter in this game!

• Target Score: You need to at least reach the appointed score, which unlocks a red marker that points to the level exit. Since it is a level based game (where you are supposed to unlock next levels by having target score and then finishing the level), going to the red marker and leaving town is an additional requirement, which marks the level as completed.

2.) Clarification on Any% NME category: (last update: 21.05.2020) There are four known major exploits in this game and most of these were used in the regular Any% category which led to the creation of this category (to avoid all that crap and make it a more appealing game for speedrunning). So the category forbids the (ab)use of the following glitches/game mechanics:

• unlimited combo multiplicator: When exploding/killing multiple cars or peds in a combo, the score multiplies by 2 with each kill. However there is no programmed limit to the combo multiplier, so you can get extremely high scores with many cars/peds. Note: you normally won´t get any huge combo multipliers unless you deliberately go for it (stacking cars or blowing up a group of people in a mission for example). So any deliberate use of it will result in an invalid run. Even an accidental occurence which so far was never observed will be assessed by the mods and probably result in an invalid run too. ;)

• infinite score glitch: Blow up a cop car with cop inside, push the car on edge of a slope so that it partly is in air and shoot a rocket to the wall where the cop car is from below.

• early level exit: In "Tequila Slammer" level you can exit the level without reaching the target score and any red marker appearing. Apparently no programmed checks whether requirements were met exist.

• grilling cops: Kiling a cop with a flamethrower gives $10,000 base reward. With high score multiplier and even low combo multiplier it boosts score to a huge amount very quickly and is hence considered a major exploit.

The right place for this seems to be here: https://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/be179

Try to ask there. ;)

Looking at the board, the categories with the most runs are "PS1 1on1" and "N64 any%" with each 4 runs. PC board is empty now, but with "PC any%" you would have at least 3 valid runs with those two that got removed and Aku95s run. It is more than even "N64 1on1" which appears to be the main category... just sayin. ;)

Funny enough, the only two other PC runs on the leaderboard that are under "1on1 Kombat" were played on the Novice tower too. Maybe you should try to submit it there, even though thats not what the rules there say, haha.

Thing is the game is supposed to run on 20 fps. Also the BEL_Loader doesn´t work for my GoG version, it crashes the game. I personally wouldn´t mind the Retail version with 30 fps as extra category, but before I would make such decision I would like to have more opinions first, preferrably from runners of this game.

Turn the apple upside down and it becomes a different apple, we understand you, yeah. =))

But jokes aside, as example the non speedrun.com boards for NFS HS display only the quickest track times, which is a way of having a narrow board. Didn´t see anyone ever complain about it. That said, we made our points and in the end its up to the mods to decide.

And weather doesn´t? You can perceive it as you want, but in the end it IS the freakin same track with just different options. Put the variations into variables and people will always see the quickest time on the board for the track, THAT is the point.

If a track is quicker backwards i rather would like to see that instead of the forward one. Don´t forget that you can filter out by variables so it still would be possible to see best backward/forward whatever times only.

@Paragleiber: Backwards or not shouldn´t matter, might as well create extra categories for mirrored or weather/ night etc.(possibilities in NSF3/4) that way and blow out the boards for every possible variation. That doesn´t change the fact that it is still the same track and people care for the quickest time, be it backwards or not. Makes only sense to seperate if the car physics are different or you can alter them with tuning or nos imo.

how? you would have one board less to worry about.

Why not make forward/backwards a variable instead? That way you would always see the quickest lap on the boards, no matter if backwards or forwards is faster.

In this topic different versions and their differences are discussed.

#Arcade In general all revisions have following default values:

• energy max: 180
• difficulty: Normal
• match count: 2
• ranking mode: on (not sure if it makes any difference)

The differences are in the minimum settings: Rev. a

• energy max: 100
• difficulty: Easy
• match count: 1

Rev. c, d and tb

• energy max: 160
• difficulty: Easy
• match count: 2

Rev. tb

• additional team battle mode (2-5 fighters, default: 3)
• energy max: 180 (default: 200)
• extra option "health recovery", either variable or full (describes how much the health bar refilles after beating an opponent)

#Dreamcast Only US version tested so far (differences to arcade version marked in bold):

• energy max: 160 (normal mode and team battle, default: 200)
• difficulty: easy (normal, hard, hardest)
• match count: 2-5 (default: 3)
• time limit: 30 (15, 60, no limit)
• team battle: 2-5 players
• health recovery (team battle): same as arcade, but has an extra option "none" (not useful)