I was half hoping the video would be so old that I'd be included. I'm really happy for all the guys who took the game further though.

Like I've personally done speedruns of RPGs (Only ARPGs on this site but I had finished and WIP traditional ones as well on my twitch) but I think they are weird and have a lot of subtypes in terms of VIEWER experience (beyond the obvious Caterogy subteypes like Any% 100%, etc)

I think my biggest problem with RPG speedruns ... is that a lot of them seem fun to watch exactly once, and then never again, as while making the speedrun route had a lot of creativity, its execution very quickly has little to no deviation from the path allowed - As a viewer my favorite types are Rougelikes and glitchless runs of "primitive" rpgs because of this - because they feel like the most intense (yes reseting for RNG in (a pokemon speedrun) is frustring in its own right but its the excitement of DYING completely versus a series of 10~ second losses due to heal skip / crit-less battle ranges -- I feel like I've never really been interested in any of the "path to becoming overpowered > A battle rest of game or the "total control (manip or job class combo) type speedruns. - It's cool to see them once in like a marathon when it's a game I've played myself and remember taking forever - but trying to watch a 2nd speedrun of that same game just KILLs all the excitement while a 2nd speedrun of an action game,etc is still just as much fun every time.

A: - Underflow glitch or similiar available - these are Low Grind speedruns where the runner obtains almost ALL of the Killing/survival power for the rest of the game very early, even if there are hours of the run after the glitch, the fights are low variety push-overs B: - Job/Skill Tree combo Type - speedruns where the action battle decisions are VERY simple, but the "setup and party building / level progression" is really important - Some of these can be very crazy, but in others the combo comes too easily and turns the game almost into a Type A. C - Quick Grind speedrun - Grinding in a speedrun is pretty different from grinding casually, since it tends to be done "all at once" in a purpose-built part of the speedrun. using either special high XP enemies (metal slimes in dragon quest) or Retriggerable fights (reusuable chest traps / battle tiles, and sometimes mini bosses) or more rarely Low/no animation areas - Pirates in FFA --- These speedruns tend to have a mix of low-level "nail biting" areas and post grind "easy/reliable" areas, although sometimes if the grind is "just barely enough" then the lategame bosses and stuff can still be interesting. D : The Rougelike speedrun - Tend to optimize stair to stair movement and avoiding fights altogether - Rougelikes of the "classic" type are also low level speedruns because the scaling of Item/Scroll use is independent of charather stats and just uses the base spell damage/effect. - Tend to burn items for normal combat instead of the playstyle of Casual Rougelike players. E : The "Marathon safe Rougelike speedrun" - Tend to clear entire floors to hoard as many useful item as the inventory limit allows and only and use the ANY% stair rush strategy for brief periods (when inventory is temporarily full or on specifici floors with low XP enemies) F : The Manipulated speedrun - almost exlusive to NES RPGs and SRPGs (Strategy RPGs) (some SNES and PSP RPGs apply if their reset state or step count works (FF4 / Etrian Oddyssey) - These speedruns either feauture a total knowledlge of enemy counters when the player moves the same way every time - or the total knowledge of ALL RNG (Golden Sun / Etrian Oddyssey) - This allows for low-level speedruns that are absurdly improbbably by a casual level or even the standards of other human speedruns - critting every battle, getting low accuracy Petrify attacks to hit all the time, tricking bosses to use their status effect/taunt over and over instead of their real attacks, etc - SRPGs like Fire Emblem tend to fall into this category by default due to using Enemy "decision tags" instead of true AI - so players will always know that the enemy will react to their units being in range or 1 tile out of range the same way (compare with the slot machine AI that people speedrunning Real Time Strategy games have to put up with) G: The "primitive" low grind - Depending on the game can be super exciting (if it's an NES/Genesis game that REALLY was never developer intendedfor low level or boring (due to being possible due to low difficulty) - For me personally an extra requirement is that it has to be a game that has 0 to no job classing/skill system and just boil down to stats and spells (buffs no more than 1 level) and dungeon/boss design that feautures AI that just doesn't care - no responding to player action, just a straight up 25%spell25%basic attack25%skill25%status every turn for the entire battle.

I know nothing about it - but I'm happy to see Konami's Soccer get support over Fifa -

I see Career mode as most likely for a speedrun canidate but sometimes games like (Master of Magic / Sid Meier's Civilization) have speedruns where they just win a basic scenario

I could have sworn there was a speedrun of the PC version of this with a bunch of wall-clipping shenanigans, but maybe I was thinking of the first game.

Most impressive to me

• Super Monkey Ball 1 - Master% Super Precise levels all over the place in a heavily physics based game, and unlike SMB 2 you can't skip some levels in a world.
• Blast Corps - All Platinum% - Getting even 10 platinums in this game took me longer to do than 100% lesser games (and I mean casually) - It's less amazing if you haven't played this game itself, but the Platinum scores are literally based on a Time Trial competetion between the beta tester/developor group and are absurdly fast, and seeing someone actually get them all in less than 2 hours is real crazy.
• Descent (1995)- It's hard for me not to nominate all the DoS FPS like Doom(1993)or Blood, but this one is kind of the king of them all in terms of how insane it is (despite being a subgenre and not a Pure FPS) - You probbably know that these games tend to add speed for each movement, so strafing and moving straight at the same time allows a movement boost - Well add in a third Axis, and you have a speedrun with always on triple movement at the cost of having to move diagnolly and at least slightly up/down at all times (and contact with walls causes damage in this game). It's also insanely mazy - I can speedrun Doom badly in my freetime after watching it in a marthon and checking a few guides but I'd never dream of Descent. also Like Doom, their are some nasty enemy types. (I have Descent and Descent 2 a little mixed up, but suicide bombs, homing missle enemeies, invisble things, and the item thief ship come to mind) Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - (All Goals) - Because of the End Run command and lack of cutscenes, this is a No-brakes kind of speedrun and it's especially impressive that they mostly combine all the goal into a single run of each other. I think it's a good case of a community speedruning a game that's not inherently that hard to 100% casually, but they've run it so much that they've optimized it to really tight levels. X-COM (1994) Superhuman+Ironman - I kind of find the older runs (2016-17) to be more interesting than the full yolo of more modern X-COM runs, but it's one of the bitterest runner vs RNG struggles I've ever seen.

General Category for Rougelike Speedruns - My favorite 3 are - Lufia 2: Ancient Cave / Azure Dreams / and Doom the Roguelike

Lufia 2 is very strange as a rougelike, because it switches between Rouge cave-map movement and traditinal turn-based fights when you actually bump into enemies. It's also unexpected that it's so interesting, because the main story mode of Lufia 2 is an incredibly gentle and low difficulty RPG. However, the Ancient Cave enemies scale in an incredibly nasty way, especially in the ~ 1ish hour of speedrun watching 4 people race and all die is completely normal Ancient Cave experience.

Azure Dreams is more normal as a Roguelike other than the 3D - it's all tile based movement AND combat. It is mostly interesting because it's balanced around the player "grinding" by leaving the tower and coming back multiple time to receive incremental semi-permeant stat buffs instead of actually 0-40 in a single trip. Speedrunning this comes down to low-level shenanigans and avoiding enemies using whatever AI tricks are possible.

Doom RL - Doom RL is a so called "coffee break" rougelike, so it is over in minutes. The Melee build is kind of OP for all lower difficulties, so anyone playing on Normal (Hurt Me Plenty) or below is basically just grinding to get good stair luck. People playing UV or Nightmare in a speedrun of this can basically die at any time if an Arachnotron/Mancubus shows up at the wrong time and they kind of have to make tons of calls on when to be safe throuhout the entire game. I wish more runners played it in the Ascii mode than the graphic mode because it would make it easier to relate to how the game looks when I'm playing it on my own computer lol.

RIght now 3 main co-op games are of interest to me

Monaco: What's Yours is Mine (semi-stealth heist game) The Escapists 2 (Sandbox style Prison Escape Game) Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (Kind of a shoot em up, but with a ship controlled by platforming around to pull levers/turrets on the inside)

I also really love Overcooked 2 and Moving Out but woudn't speedrun them due to how their timers work and most of the speedrun just making sure to beat all the levels on the first try.

Spade and Archer - a prequel to The Maltese Falcon - good detective pulp stuff

It would be in Edit Layout > Layout settings > Timer > Timer Format , but I think you would need to download an extension - the default will let you take your choice of no miliseconds, 1 decimal or 2 decimal, but doesn't go any higher.

I've been in 4P records where some players were non-members, you should be fine - and you can change it later fairly easily if they do join later.

Tros of Samotharge

it's a Sword and Sorcery pulp in the vein of conan the barbarian, but in a pseduo "hellenic" setting instead of the usual.

Connect Laptop to your Router with an Ethernet Cable - I thought it only mattedered for online multiplayer game's but it really helps streams too -

I've submitted tones of laptop (no ethernet) wifi runs, but the quality is atrocious - I think you can get away with it better if you do Super small categories (Like Individual Level things or NES games that might be over in 15 minutes) --- Anything 30 minutes + is bound to have dropped frames on a Wifi-only Laptop stream.

When I was in Grade School My favorite Drink was Big Red, then in High School it was Grape Soda, and in College it was Tang (I found the stories about it starting with Nasa funny)

Right now.... I think I'd say - Ale 8 # 1 , Ice Water # 2, Mr. Pip #3, Grape Soda #4, Cherry variants of Sodas #5, No real order after that.

The simplest option might be to just take the bathroom during the run.. The 6 minutes of the charather standing still / pause screen might look bad, but it won't disqualify a video on the "makes honest attempt to finish game effiecently" rule. In terms of a big JRPG it's probbably less of a timeloss than a single bad boss fight or town menuing anyway.

If it's Video Cuts only - I would expect a website like this to be full uncut. Can be nice when watching speedruns on youtube etc, but I guess the runner doesn't really need to do in that case since the viewers could fast forward on their own.

If it's Save + Quit - Just make sure the category is explained - Is the Save + Quit being used to give the runner a physical break and ALWAYS timed, or is it a Fully Segmented Run where each segment is "perfect" and all the failed segments are simply not part of the run.

My favorites

Overall Super Monkey Ball 1 , Tony Hawk's pro Skater 2, X-COM UFO Defense(1994) FPS Doom, Doom 2, Final Doom. Blood, Descent. Descent 2 , Quake, Quake 2, Star Wars: Jedi Academy Racing F-Zero GX / Crash Team Racing RPG Lufia 2 (Ancient Cave) Dragon Quest 3, Phantasy Star 4 Puzzle Super Monkey Ball 1, Super Monkey Ball 2, Pokemon Puzzle Leauge, Tetris the Grand Master 2D Platformer Mario 3, Super Mario World, Megaman X, Super Metroid, Castlevania 3 3D Platformer Super Mario Sunshine, Rocket:Robot on Wheels RTS I love almost all RTS speedrun, but I understand that they are very hard to follow from a viewer perspective Starcraft 1, Total Annihilation, Myth 2, Command and Conquer (Tiberian Dawn) Age of Empires 1, Homeworld 1

I would say overall my preference is for speedruns to be as raw as possible - Games with lots of glitches or zips can be fun to watch every once in a while, but they don't give enough adrenaline to really come back for repeat viewings. This is fairly obvious with me loving the NES block of any marathon(giving minor games a shot after the big guns is worthwhile). It also affects how I watch 3D speedruns, I used to like Ape Escape and Banjo 2nd after Mario, but with infinite jumping / Cutscene Warp and flying into the floor as a bee I don't find it as fun anymore. For RPGs, I prefer really brutal damage-race type speedruns over speedruns of games that have "stat underflow" glitches or overly complicated "combine XYZ job subclass/materia/etc to gain superpowers" Something like Final Fantasy 10 or Unlimited Saga Can still be impressively underleveled, but it isn't quite the same as "your healing will literally run out if you fight the boss longer than 8 turns" and I need practically need a guide in front of me while watching to follow it. Sticking with 8 and 16bit RPGs is also an easier time commitment. - Quake and Star Wars are a little bit of outliers in the FPS category as they are more fun for Rocket Jumping than the raw speed of the other old school FPS games.

One of the manuals claims it's for Murder Death Kill (after the famous movie quote) but the game's themselves are just called MDK

They are mostly 3rd person shooter with a ton of arcade-like gameplay.(fast paced, strafe heavy stuff) The 1st game is pretty interesting in that you get a retractable parachute (combine with stage design that includes air updrafts and things) as well as an interesting sniper gimmick that CAN be used in normal gameplay as well as for the sniper puzzles- The 2nd Game has three charathers (dividing up its 12* stages) The stages designed for the original parachute sniper guy are the longest and most fleshed out though. The other charathers are basically to divide the puzzle sections from the acton sections instead of mixing them as previous.

Their is some division among fanbase about which is the better game (they're done by different developers) MDK 1 has more "surreal" levels and "quicky" humor, while MDK 2 has more setpiecy levels and "characther driven humor" and arguably the 3 playable charather gimmick.

Speedruns of both have a mix of damage tanking and Clipping out of bounds. For me personally they're easily my favorite 3rd person shooters of any kind, although If I'm in a good mood I sometimes talk positively about Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, although that's more of a flawed gem that is carried more by it's humor than it's gameplay (the limb destruction and poession mechanics are so-so interesting)

MDK 1 and MDK 2 -I think some ports have subtitles like MDK 2 : Armageddon, but it shouldn't be too hard to find both of them.

When I did all the offline IGT runs 2 years ago I actually used Warrior of Discords over Barbarians - My basis for it was that I could retrieve them with Call to Arms after destroying Spires and that unlike Barbiarnas the Sorceror's Abode could always reach all ~8 of them instead of it's kind of sketchy range with Barbarians

I have been planning a new strategy for a while now, but haven't completed a run with it - The core idea is "hero monitoring" and actively dismissing heroes to keep the Total Hero level under 40 the entire time. .

I tend to avoid In Game Cheats in my speedruns, but for this one I justify Manic Mode to myself on the basis that this game has a specific cheat list elsewhere (the store bought thing) and doesn't treat Lockers as being part of it.

It is a bit of a shame about the chipmunk-ness it causes to the audio since I really like the music and sound effects in this game, but my number 1 priority in speedruning is to make it fun and comfortable to run.

For SDK 90% of the time I just use a few resources

1: Checking Scripted Events Majesty > Properties > Browse Local Files > SDK > OriginalQuests > GPLMX > Rules > Epic Quest Scripts for scripting on southern maps, Quests 1-3 for Northern maps

2: Checking Map Spawn Patterns Majesty > Propetires > Browse > Local Files > RGSEditor From Editor - Open > (Questname.q) NOT Questname.mqxml - Go to Quests tab - Check Force Patterns to see potential Layouts (Pre-rotation) if a location is set to 1 and their are multiple 1s on the map, it can spawn at any of them.

3: Checking specific unit designs and specific building timers Set -gpldebug as the launch option Press _ underscore during any level, I mostly check specific buildings in the Tracking menu as their stat page tends to contain all milisecond values and such.

I can't give you a comprehensive guide on how to use the tools for levelmaking or mods I mostly use it to get information

Of course even with the knowledge, a lot of levels I still use Brute Force luck to handle (or the revelation restart map 20 times until I have a mental "feel" for it method) It is most helpful with things like Trading Posts found in the wild which tend to have few locations (once you find enough landmarks to orient what your current in-game "north" is relative to the unrotated force pattern map. In the levels with the most spawn variation (Brashnard's Sphere and Legendary Heroes) I still find it helpful to know that the game operates with 25 internal "grid points"

I think Gambling is indeed a lot better than people coming from Cyberlore stragies made it out to be...

It seems to me that they were under the impression you needed to get lucky multiple times in succceson, but really you only need 1-2 wins before you have the resources needed to quickly barbarian crash a level

As for the improvable levels -

Money isn't a problem for Ixmil... someone once did a analysis of the Cyberlore forums, (now lost) but with the SDK files we can re-explain the problem of how long teleport vs short teleport works.

I feel like while Ramsrock's 6 day clear prepares a large economy, he doesn't really use it, while in your 6 day clear, while your gambling hall makes you build a far larger kingdom in the same amount of time... due to luck with hero response to the flag you don't get the effective value of your gambling hall gold - only 1 guild's worth of barbarians respond of the 18 that could be there.

For Tomb of the Dragon King - The money would allow a small improvement to be made by adding some wizard offense, but I honesly think that a larger one could be done via more intensive use of the Barbarians defending Guild on Rangers AI to immediately get them on monster lairs (faster than their attack flag AI does) - I use it on 1 of the three lairs --- but hadn't fully commited to it as I wasn't sure how well it worked. It also takes about 2 minutes to set up the elves and then 40 seconds of build time for an 800HP Krolm guild when you can just find them in the wild within half the time with aggresive Leading of the Ranger.

The other ones have fairly obvious benefits to the gambling hall - I would add to them the upcoming Balance of Twilight (Paying to ressurect the wizard from Mausoleum is mandatory and costs almost as much as Deal with Demon)