Game Name: Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse System: Sega Genesis Category: Any% Gameplay Estimate (excluding ending and bonus content): 00:23:00 Ending/Bonus Estimate: 0:03:50 Possible Donation Incentives: Sample run video (strongly encouraged but not required): http://www.speedrun.com/run/6yj42k7y

Description: Mickey Mouse buttstomps his way through a quest to collect the seven rainbow gems to save Minnie. There's lots of small movement optimisation and a chunk of RNG in the mix. There's a possibility of making this into a race with Tenebrae, and this being part of a larger Disney block assuming the other games in the series get submitted.

For the fights we need to do for the goal, the progression of moves you need to do is as follows:

STONE HEAD 1 Stone Scissors

SCISSORS HEAD 1 Scissors Paper

PAPER HEAD 1 Stone Scissors

STONE HEAD 2 Paper Paper

These are fixed, so do not forget to learn them or have them ready!

Assuming there's time in the schedule for it, I'd like to suggest an additional game: Game: Castle of Illusion HD Any% Estimate: 40 minutes Runner: JohnUK89

For equipment, I'm looking into bringing the following:

RGB modded NES Toaster (NTSC) with Everdrive N8 & 2 controllers Hacked up Mega Drive (Effectively NTSC, though only RGB out works properly) with 2 controllers, MS converter, Mega Everdrive and Master Everdrive and whatever carts I can fit into my backpack Wii U (Only has MK8, WindWaker HD and Shovel Knight, but they're fun, right?)

I have cables for all the above consoles, obviously.

My PC (5820k, 16GB RAM, GTX780, SC512 capture card and a clean-ish install of Windows with just games and capture stuff ready to go), and a 21.5" 1080p monitor to display stuff

I'll be getting the train down from Newcastle, so there's not much more I can realistically get to and from the event, but I hope what I can bring is helpful.

You can pop me down on the confirmed list too - I tweeted at you what game I wanted to run, but if you need me to add an email to that I can do so :)

I'll start with the positives; that way you all get to pat yourselves on the back about stuff. Bear in mind that I wasn't at the event, I was an off-site moderator.

Tech:

I have to give a massive thank you to the entire tech crew. You all know who you are, and you all were proactive in fixing the issues that came up through the marathon. The loss of the Dreamhack PCs could easily have killed the streams entirely, but the vast majority of the runs went off without a hitch, at least from a viewer's perspective.

Runs:

The variety and quality of runs this year was great. There truly was something for everyone, and this feels like it is exactly what ESA should be about. The vast majority of the runners were good to watch, and marathon luck only struck badly a few times. Very well done to everyone that showed off their speedgames this year.

CBenni and Sirstendec:

I feel like these two guys need their own shoutouts out of everyone that was off-venue. Both guys put in a lot of effort to make the marathon work, CBenni with Moobot and the tools he provided for the moderators to use, and Sirstendec with the excellent FrankerFaceZ integration. Both worked really well, and I hope the viewers also appreciate the hard work both have put into this. Having these for future events will be great, too.

The chat moderators:

All of the chat mods did a great job this event. Both on-site and off-site moderators communicated with each other well, especially the guys that were using Slack. I have great respect for you all- Twitch chat is not a nice place to have to wade through when it is at its worst. I feel like the number of unwarranted timeouts was incredibly low, and the chat most of the time was not that bad a place to be.

For all the good there was, there were some issues that I can immediately place, so here they are:

Night Shifts:

The lack of people moderating the chats at night was a problem. It often felt like I was the only guy around at times, and this is obviously not any individual person's fault. It would just be nice next year to perhaps have more people available in timezones that are compatible with EU night shift.

Also on the topic of night shifts, the Twitter account was very sporadically updated at night, with it again feeling like I was the only one doing it for long periods. I don't know how many people actually looked at the ESA Twitter account during the marathon, but if we are going to do the updating thing next time, it needs to be consistent through the whole thing so people don't miss runs.

Hosting:

This was a big issue. I understand that there was no vetting on who hosted, but this proved to be a problem as people ended up doing a lot of self promotion during their host time. It could have been a lot worse - and I won't name names of who did it, but it is something that could be looked at and perhaps vetting could happen for that next time around.

Dreamhack PCs:

This one was unavoidable. The Dreamhack PCs not being there for the streams meant that several of the more CPU-intense runs (Castle of Illusion HD and SWAT 4 come into mind, though I'm sure there were others) were turned into slide shows, with the stream crashing entirely during SWAT 4. As I said in the pros, the tech crew were great in doing what they could with the resources they had available, and hopefully next year more powerful PCs will be obtainable so we can attempt something like 9 player SWAT 4 again.

Twitch Chat:

I don't think I need to say much here. We all know what Twitch chat is like at events. I think we did okay in dealing with the worst of it, but it was still pretty bad.

Overall, this was a great marathon. Yes, there were issues, but there always will be; noone can be expected to take account of everything. It was so good, that it has made me absolutely certain that I will be going next year, wherever it ends up being. Thankyou to all the runners, viewers and behind the scenes guys for putting on a great show.

I would like to volunteer for chat moderation and any other miscellaneous tasks that don't require attendance at the event. A bunch of you can already contact me on Skype if you want to hash anything out, and I can pass along other contact details for closer to the time if that would help matters.

I can submit for Castle of Illusion (Genesis). It'd give me incentive to improve my time, too.