Hello everyone. In my latest upload of the autosplitter I made, I included a feature that allows Livesplit to measure In-Game Time in Hocus Pocus. With that, I corroborated that I've always been "losing" real time due to different loading times (which depends on the computer).

I added an In Game Time column to the leaderboards if anyone else wants to use it. The places will still be ordered by Real Time since the autosplitter is pretty new, most runs are on RTA, and I don't know if people would like to change to IGT.

On the next weeks I'll try to get the static addresses of the steam version and maybe other DOSBox versions so the autosplitter can be more accesible.

Pandora~

So, as some of you might know, DOSBox has an option for key mapping. This allows players to change the native key configuration (controls for moving, shooting, jumping, etc) to either any key on your keyboard or even to a controller plugged into your PC.

While this option can be more comfortable for playing, it also allows the player to do unfairly easier setups for bonus glitches (in both keyboard and controller).

On the other hand, one can also do "instant" bonus glitches setups using macros, which it's also super broken.

My opinion on this is to ban both macros and key-mapping. I think that's the healthy option otherwise using macros would be a standart to get top times, then just adding more unnecessary stuff for newer players.

I want more opinions before making the desicion though.

Pandora.

Hello!

I decided to expand the leaderboards to also have individual levels.

The timing method for SNES is:

• Timer starts when the password is selected and ends at the fade to black at the end of the level (this way the loading is always consistent).

Edit: Rules for other platforms

The timing method for PS and Saturn is:

• Timer starts when the password is selected in "Load Game" and ends at the fade to black at the end of the level (this way the loading is always consistent).

The general rules are the same than for Any%.

Hello!

Since there's no Discord for Lost Vikings 2 I decided to put a channel in mine's where we can talk about it.

https://discord.gg/2MEVgp9

The new category: 'No Items' is now available in the leaderboards. The rules are the same of any% plus not being able to use ANY item through the run. Is it notted that you can still use savestations for healing though.

Is it a pretty fun category since it gets rid of item luck farming.

I'm interested in being a Moderator for this game. I'm currently doing research, routing and runs about it.

I have experience with undeveloped games (you can see on: https://www.speedrun.com/Hybrid_Heaven or https://www.speedrun.com/hocus ).

I like to give cool aesthetics to the game page and I also make guides and glitches videos about the games I run.

Hope to see your reply @RantronBomb cheers, Pandora

Hello there. I plan to speedrun this game and I noticed there's no ruleset yet (that's common on games without runs on leaderboards =x).

We should do a ruleset :D. Some stuff to take on account:

• When the timer starts and when it stops.
• Allowing emulators? (consider there are no runs yet and also the game is rare).
• Should we allow special moves/cheats? (there are 2 sets of special moves in the game, one in level STRT and other in level HRDR, both break the game A LOT, also the STRT specials allows you to skip levels entirely!).
• Allowing glitches? (Idk if there's any =P)
• I guess we wont allow passwords, but this should also be on the rules just in case xd.

pd: As I said a couple of months ago, there's only one recorded speedrun of this game and it uses only the STRT special moves, without using the level skip mechanic (quite arbitrary category =x).

Anyways, hope to see some answers x)

Hello there. I've been thinking a lot about categories lately and I think I kinda reach a dead end so I would like to hear some opinions in the matter.

First of all: Any% will remain as the main category with the current ruleset. The discussion in this topic is regarding categories that are not Any%.

Also keep in mind that I will be pretty technical in some parts of the post.

Ok so, I'll order my ideas as following:

• Name and current ruleset of the current categories.
• What I was thinking when I created the category.
• What are the downsides and inconsistencies of the category.

Category: All Moves (estimate 3 to 4 hours) Ruleset

• Same rules of Any%, plus:

• Perform and land every* move of the game at least once .

*note 1: This includes moves you can't get explicitly: Kick Reversal, Head Kick Reversal, Rolling Savate Kick, Jumping Axe Kick, Rising Uppercut and Charged Punch.

*note 2: Because we can't learn every single move in the game, the requirement for the category is just land all of them, meaning is not necessary to learn reversal techniques: Knee Kick, Shoulder Toss, Reversal Elbow, Brainbuster, Bridge Suplex, Side Throw and Lift Up Vertical Drop.

When I created this category I thought in some sort of 100% moveset. You see, in this game there's no really a % of completion. Items are just consumables and one of the few things that the game keep track of (other than general stats) are 'moves' or 'techniques'. I wanted to create a category that demands getting all the moves. The problem was that it is actually impossible to get every single one (here, "getting" means learning, you get hit a certain number of times in battle by that move, then you have access to it's name and skill level counter in the pause menu).

Technical part: The game moveset consist in 14 Punches, 20 Kicks, 40 Techniques and 9 Special Techniques. Every move except for the Special Techs can be done manually when fighting. The 9 Special techs can only be done through reversals, counter and special combos.

Only 3 of those 9 can be learnt from enemies, these are: Knee Kick, Shoulder Toss and Reversal Elbow. Even while you can't directly use them in battle, they WILL show up in your pause menu with their skill level after bieng learnt.

The other 6 Special Techniques are the 2 reversal kicks (floor counters) and the 4 combo finishers. There's no enemy in the game that does the combo finishers, and while you can get hit by reversal kicks, there seems to be no way to learn them (I tried getting hit more than 100 times in a row in a max level file in emulator. To give an idea, the tech that takes the longest to learn is Back Neck Lock, requiring 20 hits, and the second longest is Toe and Face Lock, requiring 10).

So ¿what's the big deal? Well, the thing is that the game actually allows you to perform reversal and counter techniques and special techniques without learning them. In that sense, the only moves 'useful' (or meaningful for a category) to get are the ones that cannot be performed otherwise. The thing is that the very existence of reversal techs makes a category like this super hard to define. For example: some normal Techs can be done through both attacking and reversal, such as Bridge Suplex, Brainbuster, Side Throw and Lift Up Vertical Drop. When doing that reversal, your character will actually increase the skill level of that tech, even before learning it, even without having it in your Pause Menu!

Basically I had two options:

1- The importance of the move is having it unlocked in the pause menu: With this one you only have to learn every learnable move in the game (14 Punches, 20 Kicks, 40 Techs and 3 Special Techs), it doesn't matter wether you use them or not. This keep the rest of the special techs out of the equation.

2- The importance of the move is the performance: With this one it doesn't matter what your Pause menu says, what matters is to perform and land every single technique.

I basically chose the second option months ago because I thought the game learning mechanic was inconsistent with special techs, and also because I wanted the finishing combos to be part of the run. In top of that, I still think the concept is quite inconsistent and also it would be a little lame to 'have' to do every single move, since a lot of them would just look bad or wont do anything (depending on how you level up) and if it is just for 'showing off', then the enemies already did those moves a couple of times when you were trying to learn them.

Category: Max Battles (estimate 7 to 8 hours) Ruleset

• Same rules of Any%, plus:

• Kill the maximum amount of Hybrids possible (332 battles).

• Ring Erasers are not allowed to skip battles, but they can be used on respawners to get extra grind.

I created this category to show off the maximum amount of fights possible in the game. There's actually one more battle in area 2, but you have to choose between a path with one Naos, or a path with 5 Seginus and 1 Kitalpha. For this reason I called this 'Max Battles' instead of 'All Battles'. Also, at the time I thought that it would be pointless to allow Ring Erasers out of respawners since the point of the category is to beat every battle (note: the amount of enemies in a respawner does not decrease when you use a Ring Eraser on them).

Any problems? Yes. Today I discovered that 332 IS NOT the maximum amount of battles that you can get in the final screen of the game. In theory you can get a much bigger number, maybe up to 600, and in practice on a normal run you can get a consisten 336 and then go up to 340 or 350.

How? Well, the thing is that the game counts the amount of battle you 'enter', not the amount of battles you 'complete'. So, it is no new that Ring Erasers out of respawners increase the final amount, since after using the item, the Hybrid is gone forever from the overworld. But on the other hand Ring Erasers don't decrease the amount of enemies in a respawner (you can use infinite Ring Erasers in a respawner, and it will never deplete).

So for me it was obvious that delete hybrids for respawners didn't increase the total amount of battles (because you don't even level up when isung an Eraser). BUT THEY DO INCREASE THE COUNTER. So basically if you obtain an Eraser in every single battle before Area 9, then you can use all those in the Area 8 respawners and increase the counter to way more than 332 battles.

So, how do we fix this? One option is just forget about the counter and call this a "Max intended battles". In this case I would ban ring erasers in respawners so we have 332 battles at the end (that way is also way easier to know if the run is complete) and probably allow ring erasers in battles out of respawners because whatever.

Note: naming this category 'Max storymode level' is also inconsistent since raisers change the way Offense, Defense and Speed level up through the game. We actually don't know what is the maximum theoretical level in storymode. That's why I would now allow erasers out of respawners, since the level at the end is already inconsistent.

TL;DR: Any% will remain the same, but the other categories are inconsistent and kind of lame. Since nobody is running the other categories, I want opinions on how to make better ones or just get rid of them.

I found this by accident

I just finished a proof of concept for Max Battles% in Ultimate. I barely achieved sub 9 hours (8:56 IGT).

So my thoughs on the category:

• It is a marathon category. 9 hours is a lot, and maybe just 2 of those are overworld (or even 1), the rest is pure battles.

• In Normal difficulty it would just be about endurance, because it's hard to die when you level up a lot. On Hard and Ultimate the challenge is super crazy, because you can't die on single-segment. Just to give an idea, I died around 5~6 times in the prrof of concept.

• Area 3, 7 and 8 are the hardest in both endurance and skill, because the respawners mean A LOT of battles (the 4 respawners at the end of area 8 make 80 battles in total!).

• This time I tested going full punches and techs. It worked relatively nice, slow in the beginning, then fast when you get 5-move combos. But then I realized that my body and arm offense didn't when over level 14. So there might be a cap for body part offense, something like 'no more than X levels in between certain body parts'. The main reason to go for punches + techs is that when you don't have advantages, you can use a tech into a neck lock and just repeat neck lock over and over

• A better route would be to use kick combos and still level up body through techs and just neck lock to level arms. This way might be possible to extend the damage cap on the last Areas.

PD1: I'm gonna edit my streams to get the segments of the run and upload that to my youtube channel (editing 9 hours xd)

PD2: I hadn't uploaded more guides because I was working on this. Also I'm still trying to make my documents more friendly, but it's hard. If someone wants to see the raw documents anyways I can share them on my discord

I'm doing some notes for running Any%. I started with getting info about all the possible maps one can get, so I run into PSO-world and I saw like 5 variations of forest 1 and 2.

But then on gameplay I just got 3 variations. So ¿Do the other patterns only appear in missions?

Thanks ;)

I'll be uploading some documents that I have been doing since last year in the next days/weeks. I wont upload them inmediately because I need to present them in a more friendly way so they are understandable.

These documents may include: Datamining of the game, Enemy behavior, Skill level growth, Routes for different categories and some other misc stuff about the game.

All (or most) of them will be in drive's google sheet format.

For those who don't know, 3DRealms launched a lot of games on steam, including Hocus Pocus (http://store.steampowered.com/app/358290/Hocus_Pocus/).

It is NOT a different version of the game though. It is NOT even a "more official" version. I actually bought it and is just a folder with DosBox, the Rom of Hocus Pocus and a cool .exe that sets up the game for you.

Cool thing about it: if you have problems setting up stuff like DosBox, this "version" does it for you... well, not absolutely because it has different source for the sound engine, and if you want the original sound you need to do a bunch of stuff to configurate it. It's still pretty speedrun friendly because it already had all the good set up for DosBox to emulate it at proper speed.

But yeah, I mostly wanted to say that they literally put a folder with DosBox and a rom and started selling that in Steam xd.

Ok so I finally got my adapted N64 to start running and experimenting with my Japanese copy of the game.

I did a test with the resolutions and having jumper/expansion pack. It seems that expansion pack alone cuts a little bit of lag even on low resolution (almost unnoticeable). But the great concern is high resolution and high resolution letterbox.

For fast read all be calling Low Resolution LR, High Resolution HR, and letter box HRLB, and from this part and on all the test were made with the expansion pack.

It seems that HR and HRLB save time over LR in parts were you normally experience lag (they kinda "cut" the lag). For example: going from "gain control of Diaz" to the first door saves around 1 second in HR and HRLB.

On parts were there's normally no lag, all three methods seemed equal. To test this I used the stairs holding up (getting diaz in and out of them) for a minute and I count the nunber of times that diaz repeated the action. All three, LR, HR and HRLB had 27'ish repetitions.

So now the real talk: HR and HRLB potencially save real time (probably not game time, but you never know in this game xD), BUT they look super arkward on the screen, it almost feels like the game is cutting frames, making the game difficult and maybe even unhealthy to play.

My thoughts in the matter is that HR and HRLB should be banned for player's health sake. And btw, just having the expansion pack seems to cut very little lag even on LR.

PD: if anyone can corroborate this (although several people on the internet sais HR is unplayable) or bring similar experiences on other games with similar issues, that would be very helpful x)

Pandora.

Melonax requested images material from the game. I recover sprites of monsters and items, as well as the backgrounds of the game while ago, here are some shared drive folders with those files:

Items and stuff: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15JkHtpeBTfrROiJMYyDJA123YOQErZgB

Enemies: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1At1qu1Ab2aNlSctccjyx6Rau8Gph8kd9

Random images: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NXHKenAXCmS8bFw4lLN-llFjjATMd2Da

Backgrounds and environment: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1a4qpNlrdQNoO6zFZ1rL0-8ox7k1Gx19Q

Enjoy, Pandora

If you want to talk or discuss about this game in Discord, you can join the Pandora's Box (https://discord.gg/XCXwuZ6) and use the "Hybrid Heaven" category.

Hello. If anyone want to discuss or talk about this game on discord, you can join the Pandora's Box (https://discord.gg/XCXwuZ6) and use the "hocus pocus" category.

Today I made an experiment/hunt glitch to try to find a setup to get both keys at the beginning of the level. I expected that this setup existed because there's also glitches for Rapid and Laser shots, but just never did the proper testing, until now.

Here's a video with the full experiment (very long and I forgot to put my keyboard display, but I uploaded anyways as a documentation of the test):

And here's the short version with just the results and some explanations:

With this we can avoid A LOT of almost every level.

I'll be working on re-routing the different categories.

TL,DR: just type 'L' 12 times and you'll get both keys

With the brand new gamebreaking glitch, we need to redefine the rules or categories of the game. I see two options:

1: Just merge everything, and allow everything except cheats

2: Make an Any% category which allow everything except cheats, and convert the old categories to "All Stages" in which is not allowed to have accidental wrong warp or the new save warp (and of course, no cheats)