You have come to the right place for meme cats! :FakeyKraid:

Indeed it's a classic, probably the best known NES code besides contra code. So that'd be 205 missiles, 5 tanks, every item except ice, Kraid and Ridley dead...

Yep that'd end up being iceless + zombie glitch for the fastest route, and there's a safe route to get ice and that e-tank for a fill-up. So yeah could be fun, definitely accessible and a nostalgia trip. We had an Iceless category in the Before Times (pre- cat extensions) so it'd be cool to have iceless back in some fashion.

I was thinking Deathless for this one. Justin Bailey was well-known to kids everywhere, but I never Up+A'd as a kid.. so maybe deathless would give more of a "classic" feel. Plus it gets boring seeing that same stretch from Brin-start to Tourian for the nth time, so a trek from Norfair to Tourian would be a nice "change of scenery".

Anyhoo my vote is Yes and Deathless. Let's see what the rest of the gang thinks, maybe bring it up in discord #categories-and-rules...

Truth.

Haven't had a chance to read this until now... this is fantastic! Thanks so much for sharing this information, Koh.... and for the hard work you put into the complete map of enemy index #'s. All sorts of enemy manipulations are now in our grasp. Very eager to play around with this.

Thanks for the emulator information, DD, that's a super useful link. Looks like BizHawk is an ideal choice actually, I had just never heard of it until now. I'm glad that this can be narrowed down to just the inputs. Awesome stun lock research, dude. I think from other info we've gleaned from discord, this is shaping up to be about 1) use of turbo and 2) mapping of multiple inputs to one button.

I've heard Freya is interested in continuing to run the game, and I hope she will stick with it. DD: What specific recommendations do you have for Freya that will help put this incident behind her and allow her to move on to comfortably submitting future runs?

Thank you for posting this for discussion. When I first viewed this run I got the impression that something was "off." There are many instances where it appears that inputs are being entered much faster than I'd expect from a controller. I suspected that either A) emulation had been slowed down at certain points to allow for TAS-like inputs, B.) keyboard inputs had been mapped to the controller in such a way that multiple inputs were registering from one button press or C) that an actual keyboard was being used to allow inputs not normally possible with controller.

One overall red flag is that in the audio commentary, no button presses can be heard at all. Even w/ a headset I would expect to overhear the occasional button presses in spots where there is no vocal commentary. This suggested to me that audio was recorded over the video after the fact, which implies that the actual gameplay was not live and could have been tweaked with emulator tricks beforehand, outside of real-time.

The gameplay itself raises questions in several spots. The first is a very difficult backwards shot at 0:48 that the runner does not appear to be very surprised by. There is a frame-perfect avoidance of the hopper (after the 1st Kraid clip) at 2:00. I've never seen this approach of purely AVOIDING the hopper before, as the logical approach would be to shoot the hopper and gain a damage-delay to ensure some degree of success. There are then the frame-perfect tricks of the Ripper boost at 6:06, post-ice quickmorph jump at 9:37, two very tricky and unlikely metroid avoidances/freezes at 13:16 and 13:19, and a perfect escape door at 16:15. While none of these is impossible on their own, the combination of seeing all of these tricks in one run, again w/out much surprise expressed by the runner, is questionable and suggest that perhaps emulation has been slowed down to get a successful result at these difficult junctions, which is essentially TASing, OR that something has been done to allow faster inputs. I see the very best runners pull these tricks of all the time, but seeing them all together is what strikes me as odd. Similarly, the dramatic and very unlikely sequence of events in the bridge skip at 11:50 suggests the same.

The lynchpin of this really is though, the Kraid lock at 4:06. Locking up Kraid so that he cannot move is a TAS trick famously performed by Lord Tom, and requires very specific inputs. My understanding, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong, is that this requires a very specific pattern of shots, timed to one shot for every X frames, to achieve. It is not currently known to be possible for a human player with a controller. As this is a completely revolutionary technique, I would want to see the runner show live video of this with the screen and controller in view so we can confirm it is legitimately performed with a controller and without TAS-assistance. Here is a case of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, or at least something better than a screen dump.

There were some comments made in the discord channel that also raised eyebrows. One was the apparent admission that 2 (presumably duplicate) inputs were being mapped to one button. I would think that this was grounds for disqualification on its face. I also noted that the runner said they were using EmuHawk for emulation. I'm not familiar with this particular emulator and would prefer to see runs done on FCEUX, which is universally considered to have the most faithful emulation. Real Nintendo hardware would of course be ideal

I do believe this runner has a grasp of some of the skills necessary to pull off this route, but there are too many questions about the execution right now for me to believe this is 100% authentic. The Kraid-lock especially is just impossible without TAS assistance as far as anyone knows, and really must be demonstrated under circumstances that can verify it's being done in real-time without TAS-like emulator functions. The sequence of multiple Very Difficult and/or Lucky stunts is also suspicious. I would invite Freya to stream some runs live, with both the TV/monitor and controller in view of the camera, to demonstrate (and allow others to verify) that these difficult tricks are being performed legitimately.

ETA: I forgot to mention that because of the suspicion of abnormal keyboard-to-controller mapping, that any live runs conducted would need to clearly show the input map settings, for verification purposes.

Not an official speedrun.com answer, just my thoughts:

1. Foremost, the FDS metroid has different RNG which result in a greater variety of enemy and enemy projectile patterns. The FDS-troid's patterns are also closer to true randomness, changing patterns as often as each cycle, vs. NEStroid which basically sets one cluster of enemy patterns on startup/reset/death. These meaningful gameplay differences imply that it probably should be treated as a separate game for a fair comparison of WR times.
2. I don't believe Metroid1 is as popular in Japan?? E.g. on nikoniko.com, the japanese youtube/twitch, I usually can't find more than one (or any) videos of FDStroid gameplay even if I search metroid メトロイド in kanji.
3. Might be a pain to do runs on original FDS hardware b/c the belts were designed to break after 1.47 seconds of use? ;) ETA: In short tho, it's a good question but it just doesn't come up as an actual issue that much. ¤shrug¤

Late chiming in but... If there were a wiki I'd contribute with tutorials or w/e now and then. And I check the discord channel often enough that if shika or anyone else had Q's I'd help. I've played around and experimented w/nestroid all my life so explaining tricks and other game mechanics is my kind of geeking out. Even though Darch explains stuff way more clearly than I. :)