Hello,

After hearing some feedback from several community members, I wanted to bring up a few potential rule changes that we can discuss if they should be implemented. I'm looking for thoughts from runners who already have times on these boards.

NES Trilogy, Famicom Trilogy and Pentathlon Currently, these categories have a fixed game order. I have had several requests asking to make the game order free like most of the SMAS categories are.

Super Marihour Implement a 30 second penalty-free threshold to switch between games like most of the other categories do. Current runs would be retimed to remove up to 30 seconds between each game. Removing the switch times between games puts more emphasis on the gameplay rather than having an advantage or disadvantage due to your setup. People playing on emulator or hardware using flash carts and AV switchers would definitely have an advantage over someone who has to physically swap cables between three different consoles.

Decathlon This is mostly just my suggestion, but I have thought of suggesting we add some "break time" that can be utilized for these extremely long categories. I don't know what a reasonable amount of time would be, but sitting for 8+ hours and getting penalized for taking a bathroom break or wanting to get up and move around occasionally seems a bit brutal to me.

Let me know your thoughts on these potential changes, as I'd like to have community feedback.

My personal thoughts:

• I like the idea of free game order for the trilogies and pentathlon since being able to play tougher games first (or even games like smb3 with the hands), and getting the hard stuff out of the way first would give those categories more replay value to compete for faster times.

• I'm not much of a Marihour runner, I think the 30s buffer time between games isn't all that bad. I think the loading times were kept in to stay faithful to darbian's original rulesetting, however implementing this change to Marihour would be no different than what happened with the first 3 categories.

• The break during the Decathlon categories is a great idea. I think 5 minutes is a good time to consider since it seems like a basic break duration.

i agree with mars. being able to play the more difficult games first would be a nice change.

As the creator of Trilogy, I do not agree with changing the game order rule. These categories were intended to be played in fixed order (release order). Fixed order is essential to the spirit and basic definition of the categories. Also, there are years of runs using fixed order. Free order would need to be a completely new subcategory.