Hey, so I checked every single game that has a category here, and I can now say that the leaderboards are a complete mess: Half of the games either aren't available, or they are just too dumb/not speedrunnable.

I made a list of the games that don't make sense on this leaderboard:

1. Extremely Dumb Games Pokemon Art Academy You can't really speedrun this, it's just clicking continue for over an hour. Really dumb and boring speedrun to do. Pokemon Roll Call Rhythm Game This isn't even speedrunnable, it's an autoscroller for a song, which is also extremely easy to complete and has a max score, which doesn't make sense for a highscore category. Pokemon Say Tap Exactly the same as Roll Call Rhythm Game
2. Not Available outside of Japan Pokemon Mezastar Pikachu Great Surfing Adventure Wobbuffet Fell Down Tug of War Tournament All of these 4 games are for arcade machines that are only available in certain places of Japan. There is no rom or emulation available for them, which makes them almost impossible to be played, let alone do a speedrun of.
3. Obscure Platforms Pokemon Hiragana and Katakana Adventure in the Maze Big Sports Meet Sega Pico and Advanced PicoBeena are quite obscure platforms that are also only available in Japan. There are no roms for "Adventure in the Maze" and "Big Sports Meet", and the rom available for "Hiragana and Katakana" is unplayable given that it doesn't emulate the book with the letters to choose from. Eevee Tamagotchi Again, extremely obscure platform that is also only available in Japan. Obviously, there is no emulation or anything for this and it's almost completely impossible to get one of these to run.
4. Games that aren't available anymore Pokemon PC Master This game is lost and there is no way of playing it, except for a trial version that only loads until the menu, without any gameplay at all. Pokemon Virtual Fest This was an event at a VR game that isn't available anymore given it was a timed event, so it's literally impossible to do a speedrun of this. Pokemon Dream World Servers are down, the game doesn't exist anymore, it's impossible to speedrun it. Gold Rescue Team This game is also lost, there isn't any way of playing it. Fishing Rally DS Another lost game. There is already a leaderboard for the Unity remake so it doesn't really make sense that this one has a leaderboard too. Rumble Rush Servers are dead. Pokeduel Servers are dead, and the only run on the leaderboard isn't even a speedrun, it's just a guy that recorded himself playing and then claimed WR since he is the only one that recorded a full run like that. Pokemate Another lost game.
5. ??? Pokeball I literally don't know what this game is supposed to be. If it's one of the pokeball flash games, then it's fine, but if it's that Pokeball toy thing then it's incredibly dumb to include, since it falls into the same category as the Eevee Tamagotchi thing.

All the games I mentioned are completely unnecessary and/or dumb and just make the leaderboards messier and confusing. My proposal is to delete most of these categories I mentioned, if not all, or at least discuss what can be done with them, cause in it's current state the leaderboard is just a disaster.

The other games I didn't mention are fine and should remain on the leaderboard imo. Thanks.

(Also sorry for the long post).

https://www.speedrun.com/aladarsadventure https://www.speedrun.com/dinosearch Here are some DVD player games already added to the site. So yeah, a platform could be added for them.

Hey, so I posted this in the discord but I got no answer: The 1P 1 Maze Emulator WR by Keglton has something weird going on at the end: When he reaches the end the whole maze starts flashing, but the maze shown during the flash is different from the one he completed. This doesnt happen in other runs as far as I've seen. Basically the road that he did during the run is shown blocked when the map starts flashing. I don't know if that's normal or not, but if it isn't, it might be a cheated WR(? What do you think about it?

So basically TL;DR: The runner seems to have tried to achieve a WR through loopholes of the rules instead of putting actual effort into the run, then tried to argue his way into the leaderboard when told that didn't count.

Again, and this is important for every runner and mod: Obvious things shouldn't be adressed on the rules. The rules shouldn't have to tell you that you are not allowed to manipulate game files, you should already understand naturally that's not allowed. If in doubt of something, always ask the mods before doing the run.

As a mod, sometimes you don't include something in the rules because of how obvious it is: For example, I don't need to clarify on the rules that the run should have video proof, or that the frame rate should be good enough. Yet I had people that submitted runs like that and of course I had to reject them. It's not me abusing my power and trying to keep first place, is just trying to make the leaderboards better. When a run features a glitch that might drastically affect the gameplay, then it makes sense for the mods to at least discuss if that should be allowed, or if it deserves a different category than the original category. As Pear said, given that you are part of the community for the game, you should discuss with the 2 mods what to do with the run. The most logical thing here would be to create a separate category allowing that glitch. Unless of course the glitch is done in a really weird way that depends on hardware, or something like that, that might create a big advantage over other runners. But yeah, either way, you need to discuss it with the 2 mods, aka the "community" of that game, as small as it might be. And what would be good to know is the reason for why the glitch is banned, maybe that explains everything better.

Hello, it says on the rules that emulators are banned? What is the reason for that? I tried the game on DeSmuMe and it works fine. I was planning on doing a run of this game, so I would like to know if emulators are actually banned and why. Thanks.

Yeah lol, it's kind of a weird game, guess it's kind of confusing given there isn't any explanation of the game besides the manual, which isn't that clear anyway.

The correct category should be something like this (I mean the rules): "Complete X levels as fast as possible. You must clear every single line. You can lose lives but those don't count towards the level count. You are not allowed to continue from a game over (losing all 3 lives and get the curtain thing)."

As I said on the other thread, the question is if that counts as "completing the level"? Given that you lose a live, it doesn't really count as actually beating it imo. And the giant curtain is a "game over" screen. So what I think we could do is make separate categories like "Any%", which includes losing lives, but doesn't allow a game over, and a "100%", where only fully cleared levels count. The other option is to just simply not count deaths as a "win", and of course the run doesn't count if you get a game over. Idk, those are the two options I thought about.

Basically tl;dr: Getting the curtain should not be allowed. Maybe make separate categories for counting deaths as "wins"? Or just directly not counting them either.

I mean, should we allow "losing" a level as part of the speedrun? Cause what I was doing was to try to clear 100% every single board (without losing lives). I thought that was what you were supposed to do. But given you did lose on the levels. Should we allow it or not?

What I meant is that each level is completed when you clear every single line, which is why it's so hard.

In your 3 levels run on medium you didn't actually "win" any of the levels, you lost a live on every single one of them. That's what I meant as in why it's so hard.

Yeah, the "2 blocks at once" trick works pretty well. The thing is that the flashing bars spawn at random, and the bars also grow randomly, so two can grow really fast in two opposite sides of the board, and it makes it really hard to control them.

The thing with the middle is that if the bars touch the middle you can only destroy them if they flash/blink, but again the blinking is random, so you can wait the whole timer and the bar might not blink, and then you lose a live. And if both sides touch the middle then you are basically screwed.

Also if the level ends with bars in the middle it counts as a lose, since you lose a live.

Sounds good. Yeah, there isn't much info about it on the internet, but I gave it a lot of tries and the best I got on Slow was 5 levels, and losing 2 lives in between, so imagine how insane the other 2 difficulties are. It seems it's mostly random, I didn't found a consistent way of clearing the board so far. Sometimes it works a way, sometimes it doesn't. But yeah, 5 should be quite the challenge, but it definitely looks more possible with some grind than completing 10 levels. Thanks!

Hey, so I was trying to complete some runs of this game, but some of these categories are actually extremely hard, and really close to being impossible. Child difficulty is really easy and simple, but it's really hard to get past more than 3 levels in any of the other categories. 10 levels is just ridiculous and not really suited for a competitive speedrun. I think 10 levels shouldn't be a category, and longer categories should either be 3, or 5 (even tho that is still a lot, it's more feasible to do in a speedrun rather than 10 levels.)

The other option is that I actually suck at this game, but I honestly feel the game is just really hard. Anyway, what do you think?

Oh alright, good to know. Thanks!

Also about deleting this board, have you tried contacting a site mod now? Rules might have changed and maybe they accept the request now, even if they didn't some time ago. Also maybe try getting rid of all categories, I think empty boards without categories get deleted anyway after some time, or at least the chance to getting it deleted increases.

Hey, so the page that seems to have this game says "Download not Available", and doesn't let me download the game: https://delicious-fruit.com/ratings/game_details.php?id=10570 Is there any other place to get this fangame? Or am I doing something wrong?

Hey, so I looked up this game and it seems to be an interactive mini-game for those old 2000s DVD Blu-ray menus. I was wondering if there is anyway to play this game (and DinoSearch) without having a physical copy of the movie DVD. I mean, if there is a way to play this on an emulator or something, or a place to download it or anything like that, cause I couldn't find anything online.

I was wondering what the category was about? Does it mean to just play a random song? Cause if it's like that, then it's not really a speedrun, there is no way to go fast. Also it doesn't really make sense to only allow actual Arcade machines. This makes it impossible for anyone that isn't in Japan to try this, given that's the only place there are Arcade machines for it.

Basically, I think there is no actual way of speedrunning this game, and it's almost inaccesible for most people, so it doesn't make sense for it to have a leaderboard here in my opinion.

Another small detail, but that it also affects the searching, is that if you sort by player or runner count it only counts Full Game runs. For example, if you sort by player count, it will say that this game ( https://www.speedrun.com/angry_birds_pop ) has 0 total players, even though there are actually 36 players, but they all did runs of ILs. This happens on every game that either doesn't have a full game category, or that no one has done a full game run of it. It can make things a little bit confusing if you are searching for games using these parameters.

And regarding the same thing, it really doesn't make sense to sort by player/run count if it's only going to show me +50 pages of games with 0 players. Let's say I want to check games that have more than 50 players. There is no way of looking that up unless I click on the "Load 50 more" button 200 times until my page freezes because of how many games it's showing at the same time.

It would be great if either it showed an option to do a more detailed search for these variables, or if it the games would show up in different pages in a similar way to the forums, instead of having them all appear indefinitely on a single page.

Yeah, I agree with that. I speedrun a lot of small games and I always find a lot of cool things around them, whether there is a competitive leaderboard, or I'm just the only runner.

I think my argument for deleting the board had more to do with the availability of the game, and how problematic it is to access to it in a speedrun context, rather than how "weird" it is. After all, the game looks indeed speedrunnable, so I guess we'll just have to wait for an emulator to appear xD.

Yeah, I guessed the point of this leaderboard was just if you casually happened to stumble upon this game, and that it was not meant to be aiming for a good time, or grinding or anything like that. But still the whole point of a leaderboard is to actually make a competitive thing out of the speedrun, which doesn't and won't happen for this game (Unless as you said, an emulator is found or something), so it still doesn't make much sense to have a leaderboard for it, even tho you can speedrun casually if you happen to be on a flight.

But honestly this is just me trying to take this a bit more serious. I don't really mind what happens to this board I just thought it didn't make sense honestly. And as the others said, the whole leaderboard is just hilarious right now. The platform, the rules, the categories. Even the forums. My previous post even looks like a copypasta lol.

Anyway, do what you want, you are the mod anyway. And I was not mad with you or anything, just confused by this leaderboard.