Just to mention it here too, we have now split the "Any% (HAP Skip)" category into 2 subcategories, depending on your version of the game. Check the news post if you want more information.

I am not sure how 100% works in the game, I think some people have tried routing stuff but I've never seen a completed run. But if someone was to come up with a rule set and do a run I (or another mod) would very likely be OK with adding it to the leaderboards.

Sorry for the delay in getting stuff set up.

For "Any% (No HAP Skip)", I added a subcategory called "Version" which is either "Original" or "Plus", and assigned all the runs I could find that should be assigned to "Plus". This physically puts the two different versions on their own boards, basically. The only other changes I could think of making to this are:

• Renaming the subcategory values to something else, as I'm pretty sure they did patch the skip before the "Plus" update came out; maybe changing it to "v1.04"/"Later"? I'm up for discussion about that.
• Adding a console split, as I assume there are still parts that are slower than a (good) PC; this idea probably applies to all the categories anyway.

For "Any% (All Cases)", I found out that the "Plus" update adds an additional case ("MALICIOUS SOFTWARE (GENERAL)"), and KitLemonfoot even does it in their WR. It's a minor case which KitLemonfoot mentioned a while ago in the Discord channel that they hadn't wasted any time getting it, so for now I've just added an annotation variable (same as above, "Version": "Original"/"Plus") so it's a little more obvious. I have also assigned the runs that needed to be assigned. The only change I can think of making here is:

• Renaming the annotation and it's values to something else, not exactly the same as above but something like "Case Count": "15 Cases"/"16 Cases", as there's nothing stopping you doing only the "original" 15 on the "Plus" version; it also describes the split a bit more I feel.

For "Any% (HAP Skip)", I made no changes, as this can't be done on any other version besides the oldest anyway.

Some more random thoughts post doing all this: it is a bit weird to have 2 categories which are very similar (No HAP Skip and HAP Skip) and then split one of them it's into subcategories, over just putting them all in 1 category with multiple subcategories. Even if we wanted this, I'm not sure if it's easy/possible to merge categories together on this website.

For now I'm leaving things as they are until I get some more input from anyone who wants to give it.

They could just be reassigned by a mod, or you could edit them and then a mod re-verifies them, both the same outcome.

Just as a heads up to say (as a moderator) that I've seen this post, but as I've not played the game and want to probably remove myself as moderator (see this post), I don't really want to implement it myself. Maybe Pure_Retro_CO could be a new super moderator and do it?

Hey there, I was DM'd about this so thought I'd reply in this thread instead so it's public.

Just as a heads up, I've not played this game myself and am only a (super) moderator because of being grandfathered in from The Simpsons series, as I imagine all the other super moderators are too, so I'd actually rather not do this stuff myself and give up the moderator role, but as I'm active on the site I'll share what I think about this at the moment.

I could just add them but if they're actually different games, having them on the same board (at least in the current condition) would probably be a bad idea. This is from my experience in other games.

Sorry for the delayed reply, and I'm not sure if there was a reason to make a new thread but I shall continue the conversation here anyway.

For the record, I haven't played the "Plus" edition too much, but it sounds like having "original" and "plus" would work over having "old(er) patch" and "current patch"? I forget what patches existed between those, but I feel it's very unlikely someone would return to a patch between 1.04 and the first "plus" version patch.

I'm happy with us adding something for the new version, should we just split the categories we have right now with an "original" and a "plus" variant? I know that wouldn't apply to the "HAP Skip" category though, but would apply to the other two, correct?

Late reply and I am not the writer of the guide, but I assume maybe "checkpoint", referring to the teleporters?

Sorry for only noticing this a few months later, but if you want to merge in your changes could you make a Pull Request on GitHub, if you understand how to do that?

Just a follow up, but you can run the game just fine if you install it, use the files from the "Crack" folder and also delete any of the files named "protect" (protect.dll, protect.exe, protect.msg). The installer itself doesn't install the StarForce DRM, only launching the game does (from my experience). I also own the game physically so nothing to do with the download that we had.

I can also confirm the access code still works for me too, although I did enter it before but re-entering it also triggers it again. Also I think the way "beta" branches on Steam work means if it was removed for you it'd be removed for us too.

We could add this if a run is done of it yeah. That or add it as a sub-category to normal Any%.

I just separated console and emulator into their own sub-categories, mainly because of loads making times not as easy to compare, and we have a few emulator runs, including one recently.

Nice, that's good to hear, I'm currently downloading it myself to check but I'd be surprised if it didn't work fine. It makes sense to patch (and I'm surprised it wasn't done sooner but I expect it was harder to patch than the HAP skip).

I haven't been keeping up to date with development of the game, but if the update brings in more gameplay or variation maybe it could be a different category? Right now I think just keeping Any% (in this case, Any% HAP Skip/No HAP Skip) to whatever version is the fastest makes sense. I'd still like to see more people run All Cases if they want a fuller run experience. ;)

(For a good recent example of "whatever version is fastest": GTA San Andreas recently got a big skip for Any%, but only if you play on the pretty bad Windows Store version, but it's the fastest for Any%.)

New category seems OK, will submit my run myself. Only thing I wanted to double-double check is that there were only 15 cases, but that is all I can see in the "data\misc\casefiles.ini" file as I said above.

Only thing I'll note is currently you can only downgrade your game on Steam, itch.io's version only let's you get the current version IIRC, although I asked the devs and they said they'd look into it. The command I used in Steam's console (if you want to note it down too) was "download_depot 844590 844591 2428060794436943001" which should be the oldest Windows 64bit version which I assume would be the most common.

For the time being you could put a variable on it? We've got so little runs doing that wouldn't take too long.

I properly routed and got a good run of All Cases now:

Two points:

1. I Alt+F4 when the video starts playing just after the Mindcrash, because doing this and opening the game again is faster and still advances you to 20XX. If this is allowed it could be used in the Any% categories too.
2. Due to the fact I already used a lot of what I assume are developer oversights/sequence breaks in All Cases before 20XX, in 20XX I just used the HAP skip to play Outlaw, although I still have to wait for Sam's emails to do those cases so just means I didn't have to wait for the extra emails.

EDIT: I submitted some Any% HAP Skip/No HAP Skip runs that use the Alt+F4 skip so if that needs to be discussed it can.

Does this effect carry over if you close/reopen the game? I can't remember off the top of my head but I'm not sure how much I like it due to it (from what I can tell) being something pretty major you have to set up before the timer starts. My current Any% (No HAP Skip) PB does use it though and I do like it, I just wish/wonder if there's a way to trigger it after the timer has started.

I wanted to submit a non Any% (No HAP Skip) category to ESA so I tried doing an All Cases run myself, current (bad) PB:

My rulings are to get through the whole game while having all cases that you can have in your "Cases" tab closed; from what I can tell this is 15 if you include the hidden ones? I'm going by reading the "hypnospace-outlaw\data\misc\casefiles.ini" file, only other ones in there are a couple of debug cases and a few hidden ones near the end of the game that IIRC are only used to trigger emails. You can of course accidentally lock yourself out of getting all the cases if you go ahead too early, but that's speedrunning for you.

I myself run on the oldest version of the game (v1.04 I think? It's displayed on "boot up"). I have it via itch.io so have the old download from that; you usually can downgrade versions of games on that using the itch.io app, but it doesn't seem to work right now for this game. I've posted in the official Discord and maybe the devs could help us.

You can also download an older version on Steam although so far for me this takes a while because the download speed is fluctuating a lot.

Technically the game is DRM free from what I can tell but I'd rather be able to downgrade officially instead of having to share copies of the game.

EDIT: My Steam 1.04 did finally finish downloading, it seems that the itch.io 1.04 is a slightly older build even though it has the same version number, not sure how major the changes are but I think it's some minor cleanup.