Extra Course is apparently a run starting from a fresh Extra Course file, but the problem is, in order to get a fresh file of Extra Course you have to get a silver medal on every course of normal course with that file, so unless you play on emulator, you will have to do that EVERY SINGLE TIME, which takes about 40 minutes. It might as well be part of the speedrun. None of the other categories for this game have times, so I'd like to have them changed to something more reasonable in the event that I or someone else should like to attempt a longer run of this game at some point.
The categories I think should be:
Any%: Timing from OK until final hit on Dedede. Any% Extra: Timing from OK, through unlocking Extra Course, until final hit on EXTRA Dedede. 100%: Timing from OK, through getting a Gold Medal on all normal and extra courses, until final hit on either Dedede (normal Dedede is faster).
The Timing rules I listed were english adaptations (no credits) of the Japanese rules I found on the nico RTA wiki, here http://niconamarta.sakura.ne.jp/index.php?game=cmd=read&page=%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC%E3%83%93%E3%82%A3%E3%83%9C%E3%82%A6%E3%83%AB
I'm personally of the mindset that whatever someone wants to run and time themselves doing is fine as long as names don't cause confusion.
I guess a full suite of categories would have 6, 2 each (any% and all golds) of normal course, extra course, and both.
The fact you don't have to spend 40 minutes before every run if you play on Emu is a huge advantage for Emu and I think is reason enough alone to drop any run of just the Extra Course. Can you imagine? Shit I messed up in extra course 1, reset! ¤40 minutes later¤ Messed in extra course 1 again! ¤switches to emulator¤
Adding the other two categories is a good start I guess. There's a potential problem regarding which Dedede should be fought. I think the all golds category should be allowed to fight either Dedede, while the all courses category ought to fight Extra Dedede. If it were set up like this, then I could safely ignore the existence of the Extra Course categories... but I don't think those categories should exist at all. 40 minutes before every single attempt is just ridiculous. The problem is that the category doesn't start at the beginning of the game, like if you were to run MM without first cycle... except at least in MM you could set up a race file.
You could use a gamesaver to make a save with a prepared extra course and then remove it. The save will remain available as long as you don't interrupt power to the game saver (I leave mine plugged in all the time anyway)
The fact of the matter is that regardless of if they're being run now, someone has in the past and I feel it's in the best interest of the game to include those times.
Yeah this is definitely better now than the way it was.
I investigated getting all the gold medals... Optimal speedrun strategies obtain gold on 5 of 8 Normal Courses, and 6 of 8 Extra Courses. Normal needs to score 5 hole in ones to get all golds, and extra needs to score 3. Each of these hole in ones cost less than 2s each. Optimally speaking, an all golds run should be faster than an any% Normal + Extra run b/c Extra Dedede adds more time than the hole in ones do, lol. But of course the real challenge from all golds is not failing to reach the cutoff, so you'll probably want to throw in maybe a half dozen extra hole in ones in both courses...
I'm just curious how the timing ended up at 36:34 for r0bd0g's run. I think I just finished a run that's 4 seconds faster, but I'm not sure what points I should have stopped and started the timer. He timed his own run from OK to Last hit on Dedede at 36:40 and I timed mine at 36:36. Just want to clarify before I submit.
My run's recording loses 6s somewhere between recording and playback since it was recorded first on VCR. I explained this when I posted the run on the SDA thread, which was the very first place I posted it, before I knew this site tracked this game, so I had tried to be up-front about this anomaly. If you compare your credits to mine, you will find that I lose a handful of frames; it's subtle but by the end of the credits you can mostly tell it's happening. The splits you see to the left on the video are the actual splits created during the run. But even that says 35 seconds because WSplit rounded it up from 36:34.80.
If you disagree with me using the real timing of this run and not the timing from the video, consider that the video could have just as easily been sped up -- would you replace my timer with the time of the video in that case? Whoever changed my time, please change the time back...
Hey so if we're going to accept runs of extra course starting from completed files, we should update the rules. You should know that a file which has been just started will have a few seconds advantage, so if it's truly allowed then it should be a fully completed file.
Also the new normal+extra run beats regular Dedede but the rules state extra Dedede in that category. In all golds, the 100% run, I think beating either makes sense, but if the goal is to get through extra course then I think it makes sense to fight extra Dedede, so IDK... Maybe we need to have further discussion than the crappy discussion we had before.
