One of the normal conveniences of using an emulator over console is that you usually do not have to sit through a BIOS screen. As a console runner, I do not have this luxury. (I am far from done with this game. I am just focused on other things at the moment.)

Effective today, NEW runs will be required to either enable the GBA BIOS or be assessed a time penalty of four seconds per reset during the run.

Considering how many times resets will happen during the current route, this will add up quickly. This new rule is simply in place to level the playing field. As a rule, I find that emulators should never have an advantage over console.

If you are unable to locate/dump the GBA BIOS, Google is your best friend. That is all I can say.

Any objections to this rule should be placed in this thread.

Not in this game, I'm afraid. Even I have to press the Reset button on my Gamecube in order to restart the game.

I may be able to help out, though. Check your Twitch messages.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I have recently had to transition multiple groups of main categories within the same game mode to one main category and multiple subcategories for organization's sake. As far as I'm aware, I could only change the categories on one run at a time. If I had the ability to edit multiple runs at once, those transitions would have been made a lot easier.

The leaderboard has been updated to be more consistent with other games' boards in the series by combining existing categories and creating subcategories. If you use LiveSplit's World Record component, you will have to change your Splits to point them to the right category again.

In your Splits Editor, change your Run Category to the game mode, then change the Game Level and Exploding Lift variables that come up in your Additional Info tab to the right level and scroll option. In addition, in your Layout Editor for the World Record component, you should have the box checked for Filter Leaderboard by Variables.

@TARS Game URLs are case-sensitive. You have to capitalize the C to get to the game page. I feel like this issue has been pointed out before, but I don't know if anything was going to be done about it.

As it appears that skipping the final cutscene doesn't really make a difference in the completion of the run, I will go ahead and make the change. Anyone that has an issue with this should Tweet at me and I will reopen this thread for further discussion to organize thoughts.

I had this series leaderboard created to accommodate my GBA run. I will fully admit to having never played this game before.

It's not explained in the rules why all of the characters' final cutscenes are allowed to be skipped except for the final one. Having watched runs that do and do not skip the final cutscene (The impetus for this question is that a run currently in verification skips the final cutscene.), there does not appear to be anything extra that happens when you finish all of the characters' paths.

@Atroz You entered the Mystery Tournament, didn't you? nes has been active on the Discord server: https://discord.gg/0SkzT1cQUcIwiujq

This feels like the most appropriate place to add a value I found in NTSC-U:

(from BizHawk) 1D07E0-1D07E3 - total starchips

@Mopsi According to his Twitter, NoirVenom3 has been pretty active on YouTube: https://twitter.com/noirvenom3

The 1P Stadium main categories are currently being converted to subcategories under a main 1P Stadium category. Until LiveSplit supports the variables, the World Record functionality within LiveSplit for these categories will be broken. Apologies for any inconvenience.

EDIT: I feel like I have myself to blame for my tendency to make absurdly long posts. Honestly, paying attention is a lost art. If you have too short an attention span to comprehend the entire post, then that's a "you" problem.

I could care less about "enjoying" speedruns. I have done plenty of runs of games that not a lot of people necessarily enjoy running. Every game I have taken on I have approached with the chief objective of improving my own times for my own amusement, not to enjoy the game. I enjoyed enough games as a kid and felt like I wasted so much time in the process.

If I'm analyzing what categories are appropriate for a speedgame (and I have had to do this at least twice with Mario Golf: Advance Tour and Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom along with several other speedgames I have pioneered), I'm not looking at the people that run the game (because they usually do not exist at that point). The people that play the game now may not necessarily be the ones playing the game in 5-10 years. My chief concern cannot be with the community. Growing the community would be nice, but it would be an ancillary benefit to my true objectives: analyzing the game itself and advancing the speedtech. As sacrilegious as that anti-community-sounding stance may come off, I'm just trying to look at what the game has to offer. I cannot disagree more with the idea that categories should be based on community interest because communities create stupid categories all the time, such as this: http://www.speedrun.com/fnaf1#1987.

When I see the gameplay of this game, I find that the currently established categories ask some very compelling questions. The fastest way to play through this game uses the PocketStation and duplicates cards. What would the game look like if we didn't have access to these things? What would the game look like if we had access to all of the legally obtainable cards from the beginning? What would the game look like if we tried to get all of the legally obtainable cards in one file? Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon dominates the other runs so much--what if we couldn't use it? What would that game look like? I would also posit the question of what the game would look like if we had access to no dragons at all and still managed to complete the game. These questions interest me.

The question of RNG manipulation vs not having access to it does not interest me. Looking forward, I get the impression that these runs would merge at a point to becoming indistinguishable from each other. However, this impression is met with the reaction of "You're wrong" from people who are unable to explain to me why I'm wrong and criticize me for being an outsider. First off, I can't be that much of an outsider for having done runs of other Yu-Gi-Oh! games, including one that could be considered a spiritual successor to this in terms of gameplay in Sacred Cards. Secondly, I am making plans to start running this game by the end of the month. I will be spending a great deal of next week practicing the manipulations.

And finally, TELL ME WHY I'M WRONG! I am open to considering that I am mistaken about the differences in the gameplay--and I'm not talking about the mindset going into the gameplay or the skillset needed to execute the gameplay. I'm talking about the differences in the way the game itself is being played. I want to be told that the manip and/or no manip routes are more than just summoning a bunch of dragons and praying that you don't get hit by a badly timed Gate Guardian or Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon at the end. I want to be told that the game will react in a fundamentally different fashion to these differences. I want to be told that the extra gameplay involved in no manip is valuable to the advancement of the speedgame.

I feel like most of the people came into this discussion knowing why this was a question that needed to be asked. I came into this discussion wondering why this was even a question and tried to take it to logical extremes to point out its absurdity. I want to know why this should be a question. I want to know the merits of each decision and I have yet to see a merit to making a separate no manip category.

It should also be made clear that no one is legislating how the game should be played. The game itself should dictate that based on its coding, not on its intent. This is just a decision on how to organize a leaderboard. The leaderboard should not have an impact on how to play the game. I will start doing runs with manip no matter what decision gets made here. I cannot see any value in ME playing the game manipless with any intent of going the fastest I possibly can because I find it to be a waste of MY time (so if people start doing races of a no manip category, you can count me out), but that doesn't mean that other people can't see value in THEMSELVES playing that way. I just think that the leaderboard should be game-centric, not people-centric, primarily because my experiences with creating leaderboards from scratch on this site have had to be done without the input of runners that did not exist.

@Exarion This is not convincing. As I see it, in both cases, you are farming for cards in Free Duel without access to card duplication in order to complete the Campaign by winning the duels in similar fashions (Get THTD/MBD and pray that you avoid certain cards). The only gameplay mechanic more certain to be used in a manipless route is the Passwords, but nothing in the proposed category rulesets would preclude a manip route from using passwords.

This was my concern in my inquiry as to the difference between manip and manipless. My perspective just from watching the two different styles of runs was that the runs were trying to use the same means to accomplish the same goal, that there was only a difference in scale in what was used in those means. So far, that perspective has not changed.

When I half-facetiously suggested whether separate categories would be made merely for a difference in scale in something that was used, the response I got was, "that's stupid to say" and nothing else was made of it. So how does another suggestion of separate categories based on a mere difference of scale generate at least three pages of forum discussion?

That said, I have no problem with adding a Yes/No variable to the current NoCD leaderboard, though I find it to be a wasted effort.

Reminder that my primary speedgames, the Puzzle League series, have several different categories for each game and I have enjoyed playing the games in each of those different ways.

I do want to have something clarified based on likely misinformation on my part: what is different about manip NoCD vs no manip NoCD? The other categories have notable differences and promote different objectives. Right now, it just looks to me that manip and no manip are trying to achieve the same means to the same end. Does the extra farming promote fundamentally different gameplay? What gameplay is worth preserving in a separate category? I'm grasping at straws trying to find quality answers to these questions.

I just don't find no manip to be interesting as a category. It's part of why I have stayed away from this game all this time. (That and I do not have the kind of available time block to commit to being able to finish such a run.) I have seen enough runs for me to determine that no manip has no appeal to me. That was most damaging to my prospects of getting involved with this community. I tend to revel in games with RNG and, even as a YGO fan, the RNG of this game is a massive turnoff.

As someone who comes from a series of games where the most appeal from a running perspective has been in the hardest and most random categories, I find the idea of a no manip category to be baffling because I see no upside to that. The euphoria from overcoming so much RNG is exciting as all get out, but the most satisfaction I ever got from a speedrun was figuring out the Sacred Cards manipulation and managing to apply it to a run on console. Does any runner of that game ever bring up the idea of making a no manip category? No. Then again, that's not a community that I would ever describe as "vocal." The word I would use, instead, is "stagnant." It's disappointing because advances in a speedgame should not turn people away, yet it's an advance in this speedgame that is doing just that. #FMisDED

I am getting the sense that my sensibilities as a future runner of this game clash a lot with the status quo of runners that would rather continue to fight against RNG in their own way in the face of information that could potentially help them with, you know, running the game. I just want to go fast. That's my primary goal. I also want to explore how fast I can go playing the game in interesting, different ways. No manip runs just don't look interesting to me in their current form. But wait, don't tell me: it should be a separate category because it shows off more interesting, intellectually challenging gameplay. Right? Sure, just keep calling that extra farming "interesting" and "intellectually challenging" and "fun" because I will never use any of those words to describe the differences between manip and manipless. I see no merit to even make a notable mention, much less make a separate caregory.

But what's my opinion worth, anyway? I don't even run the game. Yet. And that "yet" is only because of the manip. And that manip is poised to create a rift in this community. Funny how that works like that.

Zero manip is also a "level of manip." Thank you for making my point for me. (And for taking one of my facetious points seriously.)

I am wondering where this discussion will go if/when a solid-ish full game manip is found. Should you start having separate categories for various levels of manip? What if the manip route ends up resembling the no manip route? And where was this discussion when I completed my Sacred Cards run with my brute-forced full game manip?

I'm being half-facetious there, but this discussion appears to stem from people unwilling to change with the times and wanting to give their not-fully-serious-about-going-fast runs with no manip the same weight and recognition as the fully-serious-about-going-fast runs with the manip. (Let's face it, if you have the option to control some of your luck and you don't take it, the objective of going as fast as you can through the game cannot be your number one priority.) I, for one, could care less. In fact, this was the kind of development I was looking for to finally get into this game. I had no interest in running a game with so much RNG--I have plenty of those runs and am now looking for ways to mitigate the RNG in those games. This is now the kind of game I can actually start to get behind as a speedrunner. Maybe I can get motivated to start running sometime this year, perhaps when people who actually know the game can refine the route further.

You can get rid of the stop timer in this game by pressing B, A, L, L at the first intro screen. Since this is not standard, it is banned from most categories. This notice is here because it was not explicitly stated in the rules before now. Apologies for any confusion.

^ Same. It's at least a Chrome issue. Displays properly for me in Edge.

May my thoughts on the 100k Marathon debate be consolidated here:

100,000 is a number that was a thing for races as long as I have been in this community, probably due to it being the maximum score in Tetris Attack Endless (99,999). I have done several a 100k Marathon race, particularly from when I first entered this community. Its popularity, however, has waned significantly in recent years, thus on this leaderboard it has been kept as a miscellaneous category for historical purposes, if nothing else.

Since doing a memey 100% run (which has no category on this leaderboard because definitions have not been agreed on) and since this 100k debate has started, I have given the importance of this 100,000 score some thought. There is a case to get to 50,000 points as soon as possible as the game will trigger its credits sequence for every Marathon playthrough of at least this score. There is a case to get to the maximum score as soon as possible for the maximum challenge. There is even a case to do this in either 2D or 3D mode, despite those runs probably playing the same way as each other.

In my mind, any number in between those values is arbitrary. As an outsider to the Super Mario 64 community, I find everything between 0 Star and 120 Star to be just as arbitrary. To me, the reason those intermediate categories get held in such high regard is because the community as a whole makes them important through races and RTAs. It's a matter of popularity.

Applying this reasoning to 100k Marathon, I find it to be a matter of popularity. Three years ago, the case would have been made to make 100k Marathon a main category on a leaderboard like this because it had been a popular category. Nowadays, it's not a thing. It deserves some form of recognition as a defined category that has been done in the past, but the community has not held in as high a regard since.

At this point, there is also a distinction that needs to be made--one between the importance of a category and the skills needed to execute it. From my experience, Marathon has never been looked at by the community as a whole as a category to take super seriously. Even when 100k was frequently raced, it was always more or less a fun race, something to take the edge off after the numerous S-Hards that were done at the time. (It didn't do enough to prevent burnout, though.) That said, there was always a great appreciation for what it takes to play Marathon/Endless mode well. We would make sure to tell everyone in our group every time xatmamune went live with Tetris Attack Endless runs because he would always wow us with his skills. Despite the time I have put into versus mode runs, Marathon is not something I could ever hope to do well no matter how much time I put into it. For that reason, I will probably never take Marathon mode seriously.

As far as I'm concerned, one of two things has to happen for Marathon categories to end up being main categories on this leaderboard. Either the less arbirtary thresholds (50,000; 999,999) need to be taken more seriously or the more arbitrary thresholds (100,000; 250,000; 500,000; whatever decides to be a "thing") need to be more popular with multiple people. Absent those criteria, I couldn't make any Marathon category a main category in good conscience.

IT SHOULD BE MADE CLEAR, HOWEVER, THAT THIS IS NOT MY DECISION AND I DO NOT SPEAK FOR THE COMMUNITY AS A WHOLE. No one person can speak for this community as a whole and no one person can expect anything to change without the blessing of others in this community.

Let me isolate this point in response to blinzer's commentary on this subject. I love to see the Marathon and Time Zone modes done well and believe that they deserve whatever attention they can get. My experience with this community has shown that they don't get that attention, though. That attention has usually gone to all of the 1P Stadium categories. Hard mode, in particular, gets several beginner runners involved.

I also have the opinion that the difference between a main category and a miscellaneous category is not one of skill--it's one of activity.