That is a good point. Some characters don't have end dialogue, but they are pretty rare.

My guess is it's because Ashe and Lyon are benefiticial and easy to get, and Deneb actually makes the run interesting in terms of alignment management.

There's certainly room for other categories. I know at least a few folks have routed a Devil run, and certainly a few of the other endings are achievements in themselves to do fast. Just don't think there's much interest or significant differences to justify adding much more than what's up.

Just an update - I ended up trying saving and reloading with the wand:

About 1 out of 4 tries produces a trap door. About 1 out of 20 trap doors are a 5 floor drop.

You could get lucky, but on average this eats more time than it saves.

The rules for for Best Ending are definitely not correct. Historically speaking, what you've seen in @Dragondarch 's and Brootus' runs is the predefined rules for the category, not what's listed.

Dragondarch brought this up in another thread here that has gone unanswered, and stated: [quote]The rules that have been in effect since Brootus' run was done are: Compete all 29 Maps. Obtain the World Ending. Recruit all special characters except Galf (since he conflicts with the World Ending).[/quote]

Best ending includes getting all of the optional character dialogues at the end of the game, which does make sense for a 100% like category.

As for the SNES classic, I'd assume it's not acceptable, but we'd have to see what people think. It's not a game that comes standard on it, and I can confirm the problem you're seeing. Canoe (Nintendo's on board emulator) is not a perfect copy of the Virtual Console emulation in a lot of situations. Other types of emulation seems legal though, and I can confirm that Bizhawk, SNES 9x, and BSNES run this one with relatively low system requirements and are all accurate enough for the SNES version.

As for Dragondarch's latest runs? My guess is with the rules here on SR.com apparently in the wind, there's not much incentive for him to post his. They could easily be beaten by someone who isn't following the SDA defined rules, so why bother.

I've been working on some item drop manipulations for this game myself and that's my current feelings as well.

All of the mods are volunteers, so it could take a while. Usually you should try to contact the mods for a game. You'll find that most the the time they'll get back to you rather quickly. Every mod should have links to contact methods right below their avatar/name.

If there still is no answer after 3 weeks (21 days), and you've tried contacting them directly or they don't have contact methods, you can post in this thread for help: https://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/63nr7 Just keep in mind that the site mods/admins won't be able to help you if you haven't made a good faith effort to contact the game's mods or it's under the 3 week time period time.

Welcome!

Just remember, any run is worth submitting! You need only compete against yourself if you want, but I'm sure you're worthy as is!

Well, I tried it:

Got lucky and found a wand with decent charges on a Part 1+2 run and decided to test. Out of 12 charges, only 4 spawned, and only 2 were more than a single floor. 5 floor drops are very rare, but are pretty much the only way this saves time. I guess it's possible with save scumming, but personally, I wouldn't base a run around getting one of these wands. I might experiment with save scumming it next time around.

^ THIS.

Security is like onions and ogres. The more layers, the less likely an attacker is going to want to defeat it. It's a deterrent. Just because something CAN be defeated doesn't mean you don't bother to implement it. If that made sense then why bother to lock doors?

[quote]On a final note and a bit of a TLDR: The site itself was never hacked. The users were. To enforce tighter security, we're looking into 2FA for users for your own safety as this is the second time in two months where several people have been compromised over using the same password on multiple different services.[/quote]

While I'll go to bat for anyone involved in the maintenance of this site, I find this a bit disingenuous. Users were hacked because there wasn't anything stopping them from using old passwords that are known to be insecure again and again. 2FA is needed, but more than anything else, enforcement of password changes needs to be a thing (as I think you are saying it is now after a re-read). If that was in place before, we wouldn't have had this happen again to some of the same folks it sounds like.

You can't trust users to follow good security practice. Everyone knows this. The responsibility for enforcing good security practice is always on the designers.

Cool! I have access to the P2 version of this, so I might see how it stacks up to the current runs. Unless there is something wacky with the IGT or settings, it should be comparable if not a little slower.

How did you get started here? What/who lured you in?

That's a long and complicated question, but the gist of it is I always was "speedrunning" ever since an extended hospitalization when I was 8 years old. I'll try to be brief.

I was recovering from Kawasaki's disease, and there wasn't much to do at the hospital, but some kind soul had donated an insane amount of NES consoles and a ton of the exact same games. Since there wasn't much variety, I and the other kids in the ward started to make a game of trying to beat things as fast as possible. We weren't very good (the best time I ever got in Super Mario Brothers was over 20 minutes), but it was fun, so it became something I tried to do with any game I really liked.

In 2004 I became aware of Speed Demos Archive and watched everything there religiously. At the time I never thought I was good enough to submit anything. There's a lot of reasons for that. I have a heart condition that required surgery as a child. Among other things, the surgery, while absolutely necessary, damaged my coordination and motor skills in my early life, and (intentionally) left me with half a working heart. I grew up with some mild physical limitations, and ended up fearing anything remotely physically competitive. Despite being pretty good at certain games, I never felt like it was enough, so I just watched.

In 2011 I'd by chance caught one of the first GDQs while I was out of work recovering from a revision to my original heart surgery. Watched the whole event in awe. Wow, folks are actually doing this for charity now I thought. Heck I knew doctors affiliated with MSF do my exact heart surgery in developing countries. I cried when it was over. Caught every single one since then. Still thought I could probably never submit stuff myself.

Then, seven months ago, after years of sitting on the sidelines, I finally decided to try. I have an autoimmune condition now, probably at least somewhat related to my rather complex medical history, and it dawned on me one day that I literally have nothing to lose. If I'm terrible, it's the pain and twitching from the condition. If I'm not, it's in spite of it. That's what pushed me over the edge at least.

The other more important side to it is the community. Early on, seeing folks like @halfcoordinated, @brossentia, and dozens of others from all walks of life, all across the world out there breaking games together convinced me I wanted to be a part of this. It's competitive, but also insanely collaborative, wildly inclusive, and endlessly creative. And then there's the obscure and zany community memes! ...whispers ORB...

What's the most important thing in speedrunning? Whats the ultimate goal?

FUN. Community. Personally for me, finding hilarious ways to break things. I've never had another hobby where discovering something made me laugh so hard I hurt myself. Using your bizarre Liam Neeson style skill set to raise money for charity. I guess getting/keeping records is a close 4th or 5th, behind everything else good about this.

Do you play or just watch? Why do you like it so much?

I play and watch. I don't know why I like it really. I like optimizing things, breaking things, and finding creative and often rather dumb solutions to problems. I guess speedrunning encompasses all of these things. The community is a big factor for me as well, as I noted above. There's so many odd and quirky folks playing and running equally odd and quirky things in utterly bizarre ways. And that's a good thing. People seem to genuinely respect each other a lot more here than in other niches of competitive gaming as well.

How has speedrunning and/or this community impacted your life?

I find it's helped me get back into playing video games in general. Mostly because of my autoimmune silliness, I haven't really wanted to try playing anything long, taxing, or requiring twitchy reflexes, which for me was basically everything. I was more than a little depressed by the fact that something I used to love tended to cause me physical pain. I won't lie, it still hurts a decent portion of the time, but I find it's a good distraction to have goals and folks to help out and talk strats with. I've met some pretty cool people as well.

Actually, just noticed someone submitted a run with Geese a few days ago. According to the tier list, him and Zero are the most broken in the game, so even Shin Akuma and Serious Mr. Karate should be fine.

Do kinda wonder about the legality of the "plus" version still though.

Here's the wiki page I'm referring to: http://wiki.shoryuken.com/SvC_Chaos:_SNK_Vs_Capcom

I did a little research on the shoryuken wiki and it looks like all of the arcade selectable characters are tournament legal, including Geese (the birds in the man costume).

There's even a few hacks that backport the character select screen from console versions that are used on Fightcade, though I think it adds something to be able to pull off the codes manually.

Then again, the PS2 and XBox versions appear to be legal and have these characters selectable, so perhaps it would make sense.

There are extra characters in the console ports that aren't normally playable in arcade, so I have no idea how to handle that, but I guess it helps that THEY are only selectable by codes.

I'm rather interested in running with Dimitri (#Darkstalkers%) so I'm interested in the stuff @Tenka mentioned as well.

While I understand where you're coming from, there's plenty of folks that have very low tech runs and little access to internet, and still manage to submit full videos. Keep in mind that it doesn't take much. Reduce your video quality as much as you can, film with a cheap digital camera. Go to an internet cafe or some place that offers free wifi.

Some games might accept cut up runs that overlap (like I think you are trying to say), but many won't for top times - you'll have to ask that game's community.

I'm all for not necroing, but this specific thread seems fairly timeless.

Weirdly enough, mine is Super Metroid. I love that game. Used to have a fairly competitive PB back in 2006, but age and will have dulled my abilities.

I might do a run for fun one day using my old route.

From what I know about the game, that might be a long run. Might be why no one has tried it. Who knows, maybe a skip could shorten it up a bit.

For fighting games, my early attempts are practice.

I usually do a bit of research, choose a character or characters I think might work and map out what attacks and chains are most efficient to use if frame data exists. Then I do some in game testing just to make sure that the data is correct, and that my strategy would work. After that, it's just attempt after attempt after attempt until I get it right. I don't reset, no matter what the time says initially. Occasionally if I find I don't like the current strategy for an opponent or it's just not working as intended, I'll purposefully lose rounds to have more practice. I could save state in an emulator on that particular fight and practice that way, but I find that it's usually more variable if I don't do that. I end up learning more about the AI patterns, and that's really what it's about in the end: gaming the AI.

Usually takes me about 50 to 100 attempts to figure things out, but keep in mind, some of these games I've been playing for close to 20 years, so mileage may vary. Sounds like you're doing fine, IMHO.

I actually play this. I've had a copy for years and recently I managed to rip the disk, add the English translation and burn it so it's playable on a softmoded PS2. I have some video of me going through the first 2/3 of the translation on real hardware up on YouTube.

I'm a huge Berserk fan and unfortunately the translation ranges from a bit inaccurate horrifically so at least when compared to the source material, but tolerable enough for playing through. It's also at least intelligible, so you can enjoy the story.

You might be disappointed in the games speedrunning potential as I was though. The combat system is slow, and focuses a lot on killing 100 of something over and over again to move the story along.

It can be fun though as the battle system is fairly interesting in itself, albeit slow to unlock. The cut scenes are also skippable as well.

A glitchless run could probably be completed in 4-6 hours. If you do ever decide to speedrun it, count me in on the community. I'd love to pick this one apart!

Light Spoilers

No you don't get to play as Casca or any other characters at any point even though there are some flashbacks. That leaves my dream of playing as Casca and Serpico religated to the somewhat inadequate and occasionally cringey Muso Berserk game for PS4.

Sigh... One day there will be a game that does Casca justice.

Yep, you can, however the RNG to get a starting map level scroll and a decent weapon and rings is already brutal. All this on top of good RNG for 25 floors and good RNG with monster spawns, and good RNG for the wand of Create Traps and then finally good RNG on the wand charges and trap spawns and then trap doors that drop more than one level to make it worth it... We're talking amounts I can't even begin to estimate.

It could work and potentially save time, it's just extremely unlikely for all of this RNG to line up. Close to impossible without some outside influence to manipulate it. I've tried to execute RNG manipulations at an OS level before, but I've never been successful. It may be tied to system variables, in which case manipulating them might be illegal for a run.

Without a clear understanding of how RNG works, it's unlikely it'll be possible this way.

Like I said though, I'd love to be wrong! Please feel free to give it a try!

Yes? Both I guess. Depends on the game.

For most, the games the community is the product of a few people collaborating initially. Sometimes they aren't necessarily terribly skilled yet, they're just doing things that completely changed the paradigm. Often repeatedly in short succession.

Occasionally, a TAS and a single very talented runner that attempts and succeeds at something that was thought to be TAS only is what starts a community around a game.

Usually later strats are much more of an amalgamation of a ton of effort of from a ton of people.