Proposal for new category: "No Hoodlums%" (in aid of boosting entertainment)
6 years ago
Zeeland, Netherlands

Hey peeps!

As a long time fan of the game, I was looking to get into speedrunning R3 aswell, however, I felt like the categories didn't really suit me. - Any% has just way too many ridiculous skips (making for a not so fun experience when playing & watching + hard to get into as a new runner!), whereas Glitchless still requires you to do horrible RNG shoe and the horrors called Desert Of The Knaaren and Longest Shortcut.

So, here's my random thought; How about a category where you have to kill ALL hoodlums (excluding the final boss with the random walkers, including taunting André, including Hoodoos)?

The idea here is that you can allow all the cool skips from Any% to skip major areas, BUT, you do force the runners to play through a lot of the game, making for a nice (hopefully entertaining) hybrid between Any% and Glitchless. - You can skip all the annoying bits; No more Longest Shortcut (no hoodlums there) & Desert of the Knaaren becomes cheese, but pretty worlds like Land of the Livid Dead, Hoodlum Factory and Summit Beyond The Clouds remain to be played properly (most of the time).

I think that this would be a great way to create a more enjoyable category for both the runner aswell as the viewer and I'd like to hear what other people think. - I'll try to throw together one of these runs soon-ish to give an impression in order for it to be destroyed 2 days later.

I have no idea how hard this is to pull off, but I'm going to try anyhow. Perhaps this is absolutely ridiculous (let me know if that's the case so I'm not wasting my time!); That remains to be seen.

Let me know if this is something worth looking into! Suggestions for a proper category name are always welcome too! ("Obliterate%"? "Extinction%"? ...) :)

~Gavin

P.S.: Apologies if this isn't the way to put out proposals like these, but I'm really new to this site & I have no idea what the usual "workflow" is here. - Feel free to let me know! :)

Edited by the author 6 years ago
Nandii likes this
South Holland, Netherlands

i like your idea but im not really seeing this as a speedrun catagory

Zeeland, Netherlands

@ShadowWolf: Could you explain your "train of thoughts" a bit more as to why you don't think this will be suitable as a speedrun category?

North Holland, Netherlands

one of the biggest things you have to take in consideration is: Will people have fun running this apart from you, like if its a dead category then there is no reason in making it. there was a conversation about this a while ago already in the rayman speedrun discord. but overall we understand all teensies being a categorry and hundo because then you get to see more of the game but all hoodlums is going to be so anoying seeing how much hoodlums there are, this means its almost the same as no major glitches because you need to kill the hoodlums causing you not to be able to skip about 80% of what you do in any%.also no major glitches is not that popular like I'm the only guy who runs it once in a while. so you gotta understand, do people like it and will it be run? thats the reason why it isnt there already.

Nandii likes this
Belgium

Don't let a leaderboard come in between you and a speedrun. Just do the speedrun if you think you'll like doing it. It doesn't have to be on a leaderboard.

pixel likes this
Zeeland, Netherlands

@Thextera: Ah, of course. - I'll definitely still try and do this! :)

@Wizboy73: I see your point; The "All Teensies" already is very similar of course. I totally overlooked that category. :S - I feel like a lot of the hoodlums are centered in one area of a level, but that might just be me not really remembering it correctly (especially the later stages might be very annoying). - I personally don't think it'll be a lot like No Major Glitches, as you can still skip areas that don't contain hoodlums, but I get the point where that category isn't being played a bunch, so this one won't be played as much either, as it shares a bunch of similarities.

To everyone: I'm going to make a little run of this, see what it feels like & if I had fun, I'll probably stick to that type for myself. - After I've done a run I'll post some impressions here (hopefully soon-ish) about what I liked and what I didn't like and how similar it turned out to be to existing categories (I'll check out the All Teensies and see the skips they do there aswell).

Thanks for the responses! :)

Zeeland, Netherlands

As promised, although a little late, I'm going to post about what I thought of this run after routing it a bit. I routed all the way up to DotK, so I'll be mostly mentioning that. Also note that this is about the PC version, so I was limited to just a few tricks to make things work.

The quick answer to my own question here is: Even if the run would become a thing, it still wouldn't fulfill the goals that I had in mind when I thought of this at the start. The point of this category was to create a hybrid between Any% and Glitchless% and, in contrary to what you might expect, this actually requires very many tricks, much like in Any%.

The reason for this is rather simple: You need PCM literally everywhere. It's the way to speed up your fight, but also your way to still play through the game (as you need to visit most areas) after you've defeated the hoodlums. Although I must admit that it was great fun to cheese Master Kaag with the infinite rocket, having to do so many PCMs with so many different timings one after another quickly becomes tedious; When you miss one, there's no option other than to restart, or play the game as if it was Glitchless (which is slower). (+ the fact that the controls mess up and that the camera control is awful in PCM = Not that much fun :S)

The amount of hoodlums in the game doesn't seem that horrible. Yes, there are plenty of hoodlums, but at least 95% of those are in the main areas. You barely have to sidetrack to get them all and even if you have to, you can still turn that into one smooth path by using a trick (such as a superjump), to drop into that sidetrack, only to return to the main area rather quickly.

To me, "All Teensies" as a category seems to actually fulfill the goal that this category was supposed to have just fine, and that would be the actual category of interest to me in this case, so I might try something there (although no runs exists yet for All Teensies on PC iirc).

So in short: Although this category had some interesting different routes that you'd never see in any other category, the huge amounts of PCM required just makes it really hard to run this game consistently (and not really fun at all), especially when you're on different hardware setups all the time!

Hope that informs you all. Thanks again for the responses and have a great day! :)