For a few months now I have been tinkering on the possibility of maybe having these two categories on the leaderboards.

The All 21 Big Life Potions seems like a good enough category to try, given that in the optimal Any% run, you might not even grab a single potion, so going out of your way to take them all will certainly add a different spin and routing speedrun-wise.

100% category, I feel would be very interesting and challenging to try, because, in my mind (and based on the existing 100% PoP1 DOS category), 100% would be to kill all the guards, defeat at least once the ones that are immortal and cannot be knocked off-screen/killed by a trap and drink all the potions in the game (including the warp and kill one, the latter only needed to be drank once). It's quite a lengthy challenge, but one that I think might be fun and worthy to do runs.

There is some interest by at least a few runners for both categories, so maybe we could consider add those categories to the leaderboard after completing a run for each.

When I got the WR in March of this year, I had watched the 33:31 TAS and the current 3rd-5th place runs to take what I could from them, but I couldn't do them all, so I developed some slower but safer strats for some guard skips/shortcuts. So maybe this runner didn't know how to do certain strats or failed them during the run and went for others/improvise on the fly. That happened to me in Level 19, I failed one of the jumps because of the nerves of being in WR pace. I should also point out that this runner is also playing in the japanese version of the game, where the jingle skip is not optimal as there's no Konami jingle, and the shortest jingle available is a bit far away. It is still optimal for level 19 skip tho. I agree with GMP that any info of this port, speedrun or not (like development for this port), it's hard to come across even by searching. I didn't know about the speedrun community until last year and I was doing mods for this SNES game for almost three years.

Recently I did an All Bosses Classic run for FDS Metroid in which I got 29:28.934, which is a bit faster than the cyberpod3's run of 29:29. But I observed that in cyberpod's run, it's running the Nintendo GameCube Japanese port of the game, where the loading times are much more shorter.

I did comparisons between it and the NESTopia UE 1.51 emulation where I run the game with, and discovered that in each of the seven areas where there's loading times (Entering Norfair, Entering Ridley's Area, Exiting Ridley's Area, Exiting Norfair, Entering Kraid, Exiting Kraid and Entering Tourian), from the first frame Samus disappears on the elevator to the first frame the next area is drawn, The NGC Japanese version takes between 2.817 and 3.000 seconds (with most areas clocking at 2.817 seconds), while on the emulator it takes between a whopping 23.941-24.191 seconds (with 24.066 being the most consistent clocking between areas).

By the end of the game, going with the most common clocking, the total time of loading adds up to around 19.719 seconds for NGC and 168.462 seconds for NESTopia (2 minutes 48.162 seconds).

Because of the big discrepancy of loading times between versions, I would suggest for future runs to maybe utilize the time NGC takes to load between areas, so that the timer between the different versions is as small as possible.

I've got that kill very few times because of the brief frame window and specific position you the veggie has to hit Wart (I actually thought it was one frame though).