I'm new here and am attempting a speedrun at Columns III on Hard, which has four times on this site. I'm just trying to beat the lowest time right now - still the American record - of 34:45 to win eleven two out of three matches of Columns against opponents placed within a pyramid, in search of a secret treasure said to be buried deep, deep inside the piramid [sic].

I also hope to get Stack Columns, a game released for arcade only a year later in 1994, while I'm going to have to figure out an alternate recording arrangement for it since MAME doesn't have built-in recording. Though being new, I'm going to have to wait a week to request that game. There's a "quick play" from RoyTheDragon that I found on YouTube that gets by far the highest score I've seen here, and would make a decent speedrun, even if skipping cutscenes didn't go quite perfectly.

I am also figuring out things about how the opponents use their "crush bar" attack in the games which raises your floor and lowers theirs if it had been previously raised when they use it, as well as break your current piece if you have one falling, and have put up a post on the forum for Columns III in hopes of getting it to life.

I don't really like to use glitches that skip major parts of the game, so "glitchless" or "no major skip" runs also appeal to me. Fortunately for the Columns games, and probably a lot of other puzzle games including Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, there aren't really any exploitable glitches to be had here! If one is discovered, it would probably have to become a new category, even if there's only one time on it!

With games with few or even no times, standards of proof would probably have to be slightly lower so there are times. The more players there are, the more likely it becomes that someone will cheat, since it's that many more chances for someone to be a cheater! Also, a run like completing Columns III on Hard is very difficult to complete at all, given the difficulty of the final opponent in this mode - the sphinx - to beat at all, even given four tries and some items In the case of where I stand right now, I can use the Fusion emulator's built-in video recording to record it, though it's possible to pause the emulator without the video acting up at all in terms of what looks like a legitimate, single-segment run. Though th e advantage a player could gain from this is slight for this game. The Columns III game on this site did in fact accept the bottom time without video, probably since it at least had a witness.

I would like to hear your thoughts on speedrunning less popular games and getting good new games and speedrun modes up on this site!

I'm just gonna answer the part about my thoughts on speedrunning less popular games. It's fun learning a new speedgame but after a while, it gets boring really fast. The reason behind this for me personally is the lack of runners. If a leaderboard lacks runners, then the game's speedrunning progression will get slower and loses its potential of being a pretty decent speedgame. When the progression gets slower, the runner(s) will lose motivation with the speedgame and decides to stop running it and start moving on to other games. That's why you won't see runners (who enjoy running obscure games) run only one of those games. They will run a lot of them since they will lose motivation with them eventually and they just enjoy speedrunning in general.

About getting good new games and speedrun modes:

1. Find good games
2. Setup a leaderboard through here https://www.speedrun.com/knowledgebase/supporthub

Running less popular games is what I do for the most part. Nothing that I run yet is even close to being mainstream.

The issue of a game's community, or lack thereof, is why I like the threads advertising games in need of runners so much. You get to help smaller communities grow and get to check out games you don't see every day.

Oddly, though I got into speedrunning thanks to glitches and glitched runs, I myself often lean more towards running glitchless categories. I'm not as good with execution as I am with routing, so I suppose that plays into it.

Some general pointers as a moderator of a somewhat unpopular game:

• Your top priority should be finding/ building a community around the game. Fresh eyes on a route will do wonders to find stuff you couldn't have figured out on your own. Making a discord server for the game is usually the best, as you can chat rapidly that way.

• Be proactive- often, there are runners for your game who just are not involved with speedrun.com for one reason or another. Go to their twitch chats, youtube comments, etc and encourage them to join in your community forum/ discord to contribute to discussion (don't be too pushy, of course).

• It's good that you are aware of existing speedruns, like "Roythedragon". Be aware that you can (and should) submit runs from runners unaware of speedrun.com on their behalf. However, if a runner explicitly tells you to remove their run from the leaderboard, you should remove it or anonymize it. More info here: https://www.speedrun.com/knowledgebase/moderation-rules

• Just because a game is less popular doesn't mean verification standards should be more lax. Murky rules and cheated top times can turn away new players just as much as excessively harsh verification rules. You need to strike a balance between competitive integrity and accessibility; stuff like handcams or requiring runners to stream is probably too much for an unpopular game.

• In the same vein you ought to be cautious about making too many "glitch categories" and the like. Just because there can be a category for something doesn't mean there should; too many categories in an unpopular game will fracture the player base. If there isn't much interest in the "glitched" category, it may be better to just ban the glitches than to make a category no one plays. You can always create the category later if more interest picks up.