So I recently picked up Spyro 2 for the Get Yourself Speedrunning race that just happened, and while learning/practicing it I found an interesting glitch that has been discovered before but I haven't been able to find anything regarding allowing/disallowing it in speedruns. Whenever I was playing in a save file that had collected the permanent fireball and all the other abilities by watching the final cutscene in the theater in Dragon Shores, if I quit that game and started a new game without the memory card in, I would start the game immediately with the permanent fireball ability in Glimmer. The other abilities - headbash, climb, and swim - did not carry over, strangely enough. This glitch seems very similar to the Furnace Fun Moves glitch discovered recently in Banjo-Kazooie, where you game over in one of the clock minigames in Furnace Fun in a separate file, and when you start a new file, you can carry over all of the abilities learned in that separate file to a new game. That glitch was allowed for that game, and I'm wondering if starting with the permament fireball would/should be allowed in this game. I think it has the capacity to save a ton of time in pretty much every category (I've only run 40 Orb at this point so I'm not entirely sure about the others), but it also seems to be similar to a New Game+ type of run. I'm also not sure if this files under the category of a cheat, like entering in button codes on the start menu to gain all the abilities, change color, etc., so I was wondering what you guys thought about its use in a speedrun.

Hey Joester, it's nice to hear that the GYS race sparked some interest in running Spyro 2!

I hate to break it to you but we're fully aware that you can carry fireball across to a new game. You can do this by attaining fireball in Dragon Shores, quitting out to the main menu, then starting a new game. I guess we should clarify this in the rules of each category but we don't allow this in standard runs since getting fireball as part of the run adds an interesting element to routing the game and also in executing runs.

Also as you rightly stated: runs that start with fireball from the beginning are classed as NG+, since you have to play around with things outside of just booting up the game and going right into it. If anyone submitted a run where they start with fireball from the beginning then we'd filter it into the NG+ version of whichever category they ran (although no-one runs NG+ categories so we don't have leaderboards for them right now).

If you wanted to run the game with fireball from the start then by all means go for it - just be aware that there's a lack of competition since the vast majority of people stick with the regular categories for this game. :P

Yeah, I thought so. I hadn't seen anything anywhere on it, which is why I was wondering. Thanks for the reply!