What would be the best ways to find the MOST active video game communities for specific games? I could make a couple guesses, but how would I find which ones for sure? Never involved myself in any of those before...

How about a game that you like? If you don't like the game there is no way you are going to spend a lot of time on it.

@Picante"“It’s just not gonna feel as nostalgic,” Ware tells GamesBeat when we asked him about the problems with the modern display technology. “The pixels will be sharper on an LCD, but they may not be 100 percent accurate. Colors won’t be quite as vibrant.” Additionally, Ware explained that the refresh rate on an LCD may not play well with an old game’s code that is expecting a much more responsive CRT monitor. It could cause unsightly screen tearing that looks like one half of the screen is occasionally redrawing before the other."

There are a lot of very good TVs and monitors out now with super fast refresh rates and a huge range of colors. No tearing and super vibrant colors. Old classic games have never looked better. Get a cheap knockoff LCD I could see some issues though. Getting that old nasty CRT look though might require some finagling and filters of some kind.

Well at least in the US where I live almost everyone I know has stopped using the desktops. Statistics also show a fairly rapid decline in usage. Also look at other countries and what people have are smartphones, not desktops. Powerful Desktops with the full OS will not disappear anytime soon sure, but they pretty much will. People will probably be hooking up their phones to a monitor and using that, in fact people already do that.

But you also have to consider the current trend of the decreasing popularity of home pcs. Things are moving towards a mobile and cloud infrastructure. Mobile means phones which also means that they are less powerful that what a game console can do when they are the same gen really. But the specs go up with time, I am sure there will be a way. A mobile infrastructure Which will affect the emulators since many are written for Windows versions. We may need Virtual Machines for the older Windows versions and Linux/Apple emulators) moving forward. The game preservation scene is alive and well you just have to look for it. The preservation of the physical media and consoles is not terribly good considering that the things break with time though.

Huh, well first thing is there is a 2 hour difference between your runs. Is that ALL coming from RNG? That is a pretty big difference to be honest. Why not send him a message and ask him why? Leave a comment on game comments etc. it was also verified by a moderator why not ask him as well?

Another thing is that there is a language difference here, I was originally thinking it was a language text difference, but not TWO hours. He mentions Snes 9x EX for Android which sounds weird. This may be an emulator thing too.

lol yea Baten Kaitos 100%. It is that long for some stupid item right?

There is a 22h "speedrun" for final fantasy 6 no sketch run. Also somehow a 16 hour run was accepted for mario 64. That is probably up there.

Yea that would be very cool. I loved this game as a kid!

If you are trying to WR it then probably any of the more popular speedrun games simply because of the amount of work done on them.

Let me throw in McTyson's Punchout on NES. It has been optimized over the years to the point where the whole thing is insane. Especially the whole "who can knockout Tyson in Round 1 the fastest" where people literally run Tyson for years for only 1-2 second improvements. Apparently it requires massive luck and many frame perfect dodge and punches. It seems fairly over the top imho.

If you are trying simply for a speedrun-like time then probably the hardest games on the hardest settings would be good candidates similar to Ninja Gaiden on Master Ninja. Or really shitty hard games like ones for early PCs.

Of course there are differences between segmented and single segment. And some other categories seem especially difficult. Like say Super Metroid on SNES in Reverse Boss order for example.

I also was reading about some PC games that need special configuration so they do not crash. Those I guess would qualify as well.

I think this thread is not going to accomplish much. If it was trying to motivate more people to run a certain game with neat tricks and stuff that would be one thing. Speedrunning at least for me as I see it is making a tribute to a game that I got a lot out of earlier on in life. What other people want is not going to convince me to spend massive amounts of time on a game.

With that said I ran a ps1 game Silent Bomber a couple years ago, had it accepted by SDA, and would love to see someone beat that time. Here is the link to the first video.

If anyone is interested in playing this ps1 gem contact me and I would be more than happy to assist.