My favorites

Overall Super Monkey Ball 1 , Tony Hawk's pro Skater 2, X-COM UFO Defense(1994) FPS Doom, Doom 2, Final Doom. Blood, Descent. Descent 2 , Quake, Quake 2, Star Wars: Jedi Academy Racing F-Zero GX / Crash Team Racing RPG Lufia 2 (Ancient Cave) Dragon Quest 3, Phantasy Star 4 Puzzle Super Monkey Ball 1, Super Monkey Ball 2, Pokemon Puzzle Leauge, Tetris the Grand Master 2D Platformer Mario 3, Super Mario World, Megaman X, Super Metroid, Castlevania 3 3D Platformer Super Mario Sunshine, Rocket:Robot on Wheels RTS I love almost all RTS speedrun, but I understand that they are very hard to follow from a viewer perspective Starcraft 1, Total Annihilation, Myth 2, Command and Conquer (Tiberian Dawn) Age of Empires 1, Homeworld 1

I would say overall my preference is for speedruns to be as raw as possible - Games with lots of glitches or zips can be fun to watch every once in a while, but they don't give enough adrenaline to really come back for repeat viewings. This is fairly obvious with me loving the NES block of any marathon(giving minor games a shot after the big guns is worthwhile). It also affects how I watch 3D speedruns, I used to like Ape Escape and Banjo 2nd after Mario, but with infinite jumping / Cutscene Warp and flying into the floor as a bee I don't find it as fun anymore. For RPGs, I prefer really brutal damage-race type speedruns over speedruns of games that have "stat underflow" glitches or overly complicated "combine XYZ job subclass/materia/etc to gain superpowers" Something like Final Fantasy 10 or Unlimited Saga Can still be impressively underleveled, but it isn't quite the same as "your healing will literally run out if you fight the boss longer than 8 turns" and I need practically need a guide in front of me while watching to follow it. Sticking with 8 and 16bit RPGs is also an easier time commitment. - Quake and Star Wars are a little bit of outliers in the FPS category as they are more fun for Rocket Jumping than the raw speed of the other old school FPS games.

One of the manuals claims it's for Murder Death Kill (after the famous movie quote) but the game's themselves are just called MDK

They are mostly 3rd person shooter with a ton of arcade-like gameplay.(fast paced, strafe heavy stuff) The 1st game is pretty interesting in that you get a retractable parachute (combine with stage design that includes air updrafts and things) as well as an interesting sniper gimmick that CAN be used in normal gameplay as well as for the sniper puzzles- The 2nd Game has three charathers (dividing up its 12* stages) The stages designed for the original parachute sniper guy are the longest and most fleshed out though. The other charathers are basically to divide the puzzle sections from the acton sections instead of mixing them as previous.

Their is some division among fanbase about which is the better game (they're done by different developers) MDK 1 has more "surreal" levels and "quicky" humor, while MDK 2 has more setpiecy levels and "characther driven humor" and arguably the 3 playable charather gimmick.

Speedruns of both have a mix of damage tanking and Clipping out of bounds. For me personally they're easily my favorite 3rd person shooters of any kind, although If I'm in a good mood I sometimes talk positively about Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, although that's more of a flawed gem that is carried more by it's humor than it's gameplay (the limb destruction and poession mechanics are so-so interesting)

MDK 1 and MDK 2 -I think some ports have subtitles like MDK 2 : Armageddon, but it shouldn't be too hard to find both of them.

When I did all the offline IGT runs 2 years ago I actually used Warrior of Discords over Barbarians - My basis for it was that I could retrieve them with Call to Arms after destroying Spires and that unlike Barbiarnas the Sorceror's Abode could always reach all ~8 of them instead of it's kind of sketchy range with Barbarians

I have been planning a new strategy for a while now, but haven't completed a run with it - The core idea is "hero monitoring" and actively dismissing heroes to keep the Total Hero level under 40 the entire time. .

I tend to avoid In Game Cheats in my speedruns, but for this one I justify Manic Mode to myself on the basis that this game has a specific cheat list elsewhere (the store bought thing) and doesn't treat Lockers as being part of it.

It is a bit of a shame about the chipmunk-ness it causes to the audio since I really like the music and sound effects in this game, but my number 1 priority in speedruning is to make it fun and comfortable to run.

For SDK 90% of the time I just use a few resources

1: Checking Scripted Events Majesty > Properties > Browse Local Files > SDK > OriginalQuests > GPLMX > Rules > Epic Quest Scripts for scripting on southern maps, Quests 1-3 for Northern maps

2: Checking Map Spawn Patterns Majesty > Propetires > Browse > Local Files > RGSEditor From Editor - Open > (Questname.q) NOT Questname.mqxml - Go to Quests tab - Check Force Patterns to see potential Layouts (Pre-rotation) if a location is set to 1 and their are multiple 1s on the map, it can spawn at any of them.

3: Checking specific unit designs and specific building timers Set -gpldebug as the launch option Press _ underscore during any level, I mostly check specific buildings in the Tracking menu as their stat page tends to contain all milisecond values and such.

I can't give you a comprehensive guide on how to use the tools for levelmaking or mods I mostly use it to get information

Of course even with the knowledge, a lot of levels I still use Brute Force luck to handle (or the revelation restart map 20 times until I have a mental "feel" for it method) It is most helpful with things like Trading Posts found in the wild which tend to have few locations (once you find enough landmarks to orient what your current in-game "north" is relative to the unrotated force pattern map. In the levels with the most spawn variation (Brashnard's Sphere and Legendary Heroes) I still find it helpful to know that the game operates with 25 internal "grid points"

I think Gambling is indeed a lot better than people coming from Cyberlore stragies made it out to be...

It seems to me that they were under the impression you needed to get lucky multiple times in succceson, but really you only need 1-2 wins before you have the resources needed to quickly barbarian crash a level

As for the improvable levels -

Money isn't a problem for Ixmil... someone once did a analysis of the Cyberlore forums, (now lost) but with the SDK files we can re-explain the problem of how long teleport vs short teleport works.

I feel like while Ramsrock's 6 day clear prepares a large economy, he doesn't really use it, while in your 6 day clear, while your gambling hall makes you build a far larger kingdom in the same amount of time... due to luck with hero response to the flag you don't get the effective value of your gambling hall gold - only 1 guild's worth of barbarians respond of the 18 that could be there.

For Tomb of the Dragon King - The money would allow a small improvement to be made by adding some wizard offense, but I honesly think that a larger one could be done via more intensive use of the Barbarians defending Guild on Rangers AI to immediately get them on monster lairs (faster than their attack flag AI does) - I use it on 1 of the three lairs --- but hadn't fully commited to it as I wasn't sure how well it worked. It also takes about 2 minutes to set up the elves and then 40 seconds of build time for an 800HP Krolm guild when you can just find them in the wild within half the time with aggresive Leading of the Ranger.

The other ones have fairly obvious benefits to the gambling hall - I would add to them the upcoming Balance of Twilight (Paying to ressurect the wizard from Mausoleum is mandatory and costs almost as much as Deal with Demon)

I tried to speedrun this like 2 years ago in between Kid Mystic and Sleepless Hollow... Pretty sure all my twitch videos expired though

All I really remember is that I tried to play the game at double speed as much as possible.

However some levels I deemed - too unpleasant to play on double speed - so to save the long "menu" time of going back to the Spismall to turn off double speed just for one level and then go back there a 2nd time to turn it back on, what I would do was do all of them First -- I mean I would enter all 4 worlds, JUST do those specific levels, and only thenwould I stay in Caverns to get my first key..

My splits were labeled Car Levels > Cavern > Shopping > Ice > Desert > Forest > Asylum

I'm pretty sure that Car levels also included things like "walk on thin plank near water" and that Jetpack over Cracked Ice level (Mold Porridge) --- Shopping was just the section after getting the first Key and turning on the Manic Mode Locker.

I think there was a weird thing where in Caverns you only had to do a set number of levels to open up the boss instead of all of them, so I figured out which ones were slowest to decide which ones to skip.

I kind of like the text-only tradition of older communities

Even today, when picking up a 2000s era game, I find it fun to route around beating their claimed times (despite having no video guide), since it makes me feel like I push the game a lot harder than what I would judge to be "fast" on my own.

I also feel like the tightness of the communities made trust-in-words work fine... much better than something infamous like a In-Game- time trial scoreboard or an XBOX live leaderboard.

RTS or Bust

One day there'll be an all RTS charity marathon.

We'll probably let in Citybuilders and Tactics games in as our side event blocks though.

I'm still seeing it start at 0:05 and ending at 23:12 on youtube.

I kind of believe this can be crushed though --- I built the outpost and built/demoloished temple of krolm to make tons of barbarians for defense (they move to outpost which still holds 6 and I pay the lowest cost for each temple instead of scaling cost) , but probably could have put that money toward getting started

Torqueshton claimed there was some weird variability to it when he was grinding for the Begginer levels.

The SDK files suggest that IGT is done in ms (presumably milliseconds), so a day there is 60,000ms

In my personal experience I think a day usually takes 70 seconds.

In this specific case I think I probably just mistimed my original video - It's hard to watch the timestamps on twitch, and bcause I didn't think anyone would be interested I didn't export it to youtube like usual.

For me personally...

Monaco - Multiplayer Runs can be killed hard by one player of 4 going off script, either intentionally or due to lagging out and rubber banding. Monaco - Singleplayer Runs … have more competitive ILs and thus are even stricter about having good RNG with Coin spawn and enemy spawn. One of the more notorious in the community are "bathroom coins and vent coins" which are coins that spawn in 1x1 tile areas that normally you wouldn't even reveal.

Majesty : For an RTS - Majesty has ONLY randomized maps, and then hero AI is randomized by decision tree (I've found the greed values for 1/5 map distance pretty well though), and then combat is also random (low rolls vs high rolls when dragons are involved means instant death!) Having a hero randomly decide to fail a fear check, or a Rat cycle through all his other options and attack your castle, reseting the AI of literally everyone to defend it are just a hint of the many ways this game can destroy you. This game is a slot machine of terror for the normal ILs, but then some levels are even extra spicy due to factors like teleport spawns (Ixmil/Darkness), using the greed value of enemy charathers instead of your own (Siege/Urban), having to rely entirely on spells for an entire level and thus their own damage range (Rescue/Crown), and most recently, frame perfect tricks that require temporarily turning the In-game-speed down to pull off (Trade Routes/Dark Forest)

Kid Mystic ./ Sleepless Hollow / Dr Lunatic - My biggest problem is that there is a LOT of stuff to memorize (100 Brains in SH, about as many Candles/Brains in the other two)… Dr. Lunatic has a handy menu screen % tracker, but in SH if you come up short when you get to the 100 Brain door at the end, you'll have no idea which part of the game you missed a Brain in and need to backtrack too. KM also has a low HP glass cannon thing so some of the later fights used to cause resets but I think I got over it.

Star Control 1 - Arilou can input read. Sometimes they die to their counters, sometimes they will wipe you without taking damage. All the Alliance ships are pretty mean, but they are the biggest reason why the badguy half of the run takes 2/3 of the total time despite having the same number of missions as the good guy half. Star Control 2 - The first 9 minutes of this are on-rails to meet the best cycle of the Arilou portal opening. I reset this a LOT because having to wait an in-game month is about ~3 whole minutes in real time. Star Control 3 - Dialog based game overs - I believe that their is at least 10 during the run(Vux,Owax2,Exquivan x3, Harika,Plexor,Precursor,Herald) It makes it very hard to mash through the conversations despite the Very easy combat (overwhelming player force) and lack of movement tech compared to the other games in the series. Also to continue the meme... Arilou conversations appear to be just optional in a casual playthrough but I found through testing that they are secret "time gate" event triggers for some of the actual mandatory events in the game, so during the routing process I had to find out how to force the Arilou events to trigger so that everything else would trigger on schedule.

If it weren't for the RPGs and my compulsion to play hardest difficulty (only problem here being Mario Kart I think) instead of easy for any% I could do it.(badly)

Seems more apprioate as a "relay" event than a single runner thing though.

1. Monaco: What's Yours is Mine … for speedruns at least; It's longevity for me is mostly due to the multiplayer community. I really like speedrunning in a group more than solo (solo with active discussion with other runners is also more fun than solo w/ no other runners).

2.My favorite game... Roller Coaster Tycoon or Majesty:Fantasy Kingdom Sim... with other RTS games and City Managers as runners-up... I would say that my favorite 2 are kind of outliers in their genre. RCT I like because it very naturally encourages you to make your own fun … if you just wanted to beat the game it wouldn't be too amazing, but almost every level has some pre-built setpieces, which makes it into a kind of competition between you and Chris Sawyer (the developer) … you haven't REALLY beaten a level until you've built something more creative than him. It's the reason I go against the normal popular consensus and like RCT1 > RCT2 … too many flat sandbox levels takes away that "compete with developer" feeling. Majesty is a very fun kind of godsim with high charather independence (think dwarf fortress or rimworld when you don't give commands and let large communities do their own thing) … As a speedrun it is kind of like playing an entirely new game since you try as hard as possible to play it as an RTS even though the game limits "unit commands" only to the indirect bounty system that heroes have a choice to follow or not follow.

3 No. Someone crunched the numbers for Monaco:What's Yours is Mine, and it turns out that my cumulative ILs were the 4th highest in the community. But I feel like in terms of skill I am more like 8-11 - I feel like my strength there is patience and being able to repeat the same line on a restart (my reactability and creative on the fly decisions are quite low though)

I found it when I checked the … drop down text menu by the run. It just wasn't showing the Thumb up / Thumb down verify/reject buttons by default.

The accept and reject button don't appear on such a video as far as I can tell

It annoys me because I am stuck with a pending action notification but can't do anything about it.

As a fan of RTS speedruns already I am happy to see the sister genre of grand strategy get represented.

My experience with runs no one has done before has been getting accepted fairly easily (even with pretty poor video quality tbh)

I think the only thing that'll really red flag it is if non-speedrun content is in the video, or if you go out of your way with bad cropping (default youtube studio / OBS / twitch UI fullscreen will prevent this)

I have runs that have commentary/splits and other ones that are In-game sound fullscreen only.

There are still plenty of bandicam speedruns on the site even. I don't see a video quality rejection unless you accidentally crop the screen to 1/4 blackscreen or something

For adding games in a series that is partially represented -

I've done this with Star Control - Originally only SC 2 was on the site (due to being cult classic) but I added SC1 and SC3 myself - I first added them as individual games, and I only later applied to add them as a series after coming to an understanding with the SC2 page mods (namely that SC2 vids would be higher video quality than what I passed in the other games lol)

I bought this for my family during the quarantine and we have fun, but I get bodied -

We've traded factions every game, and I've managed to get 4th place in 4 player games with all of them.

I want to keep at it because everyone else has fun, but I think I need time to figure out strategy so I can stay on their level (because 1 bad player could feed VPs and swing the game).

There was that Oceanhorn game on DS that was a straight up Phatom Hourglass Clone - I think the current WR even includes some unintended deaths.