ILs?
8 years ago
North Carolina, USA

can each level in the 10 mario challenge courses be an IL and the NWC courses be in there as well?

Lower Saxony, Germany

Making the 10 Mario Challenge Courses and NWC stages individual levels takes a lot of the charm and legitimacy away from those runs.

For example: Doing NWC stages in a reverse order (4->-3->2->-1) would always be faster compared to going the intended order (1->2->3->4), because of the loading times.

The same is also true for 10 Mario Challenge Courses. An individual route for those stages would simply cause into different loading times and a reverse run as the most optimal strategy.

In addition to this aspect, there are certain things in a 10 Mario Challenge Run that proves wit's legitimacy rather easy. With the current run you have:

  • A very defined start and finish (no confusion about potentially missed levels)
  • Constant loading times (no timeloss, because of wrong map orders)
  • A constant life bar and progress map that comments your run (making it harder to splice).
  • A small element of RNG in the order of the played maps, which doesn't affect loading times and proves the legitimacy of the run further more in combination with the progress maps.

If you're looking to have accurate splits, then you split after Run 1, Run 2, Run 4 and Run 7.

I can see the desire for some to go for their own routes. But in both categories levels are so short, that those mentioned issues are rather big. So why cause problems like that, if you can just go with the intended route?

The only "issue" that you'd solve by having levels in a different order is that you would remove the tutorial (removing 2x30 Seconds of idle time) and make runs possible without having to reset your savedata.

But those things don't affect the speedrun itself. It's only something that makes it more comfortable to reset/restart a run.

Besides, I don't see the need of making a 4 Minute Run for NWC and a 40 Minute Run for 10-Mario Challenges even shorter.

When you're looking for a short speedrun, you'll go with NWC. When you're looking for a medium-long (small marathon) speedrun, you'll go with 10-Mario Challenges.

I agree that it'd be nice to have more categories. But sadly, SMM doesn't allow for a lot more , if you're looking for constant (non-RNG) results.

The only other category that could work, is beating the tutorial + the initial 10 Mario Challenge. But this would be just a 7 minute category that's very easy to optimize.

Lower Saxony, Germany

I do understand it ;)

But I don't think that the question is supposed to be creating 60 unique "runs" for every level. That'd be.. weird.

United States

If not that for ILs, what about the Mystery Mushroom courses? They, unlike the ones previously mentioned, are yet to make an appearance for any category.