Currently, the challenges and news appear before the games for some reason. Why is that?

Or games that could be much more entertaining to run or watch if they didn't have glitches?

Either because exploiting glitches takes much less skill than not using them, is less entertaining to watch, makes things luck-dependent, breaks the flow of the run etc.

In order to do things like getting a lot of dashes in a row while being under water.

Do extra lives and other pickups that show up on a map, count towards 100%?

Except instead of time, your speed is measured in score?

I mean, you have to have the same mentality. Good movement, some speed strategies etc.

Does that consist of getting just all the gold stars in levels or you need to kill every monster in addition? Or something else as well?

The ones where score leaderboards of various games are shown.

Basically, what about a category where you collect every unique invisible coin in the game at least once?

That category would take speedrunners in places where they don't usually go.

Or you can go even further and make a category where you collect every unique non-enemy coin in the game at least once. This means coins lying around, invisible coins, coin block coins (I wonder how multicoin blocks would count? Exhausting those blocks perhaps), coins from objects, coin rings, and coin piles.

That would be rather long category but at least there's no grinding.

I wonder what would be the main route differences in here compared to other categories.

Applause% category would mean that you have to do all tasks that cause applause sound to be played. Tasks such things as collecting coin rows, extinguishing torches in certain areas and removing posters.

Has anyone charted all the places where applauses happen?

Also, how different would applause% route be compared to other routes?

For various reasons. Maybe any% run doesn't look as cool or doesn't require that much skill. Maybe you'd like to see everything done fast, not just small portion of the game etc.

Meaning that you have to clear the level from as many beads as possible. In how many levels it's possible to do this? And if not could it be done with 2 players?

Wouldn't segmented speedruns mean that when the game is routed, you could go for optimal times much quicker?

They were common before but rarer now.

With single-segment speedruns, it's hard to search for individual runs if best segments happen to be in different runs.

Let's say you watch a 30-minute speedrun of someone doing crazy strategies. Then comes 15-minute speedrun that skips all the interesting parts, resulting 10 minutes of character walking in a blank space, making the run boring to watch, despite being much faster.

So, does anyone remember any instances of these things happening?

Does that make the game go faster, players have itching fingers or is there some other reason?

...Percentage-wise.

By downtime I mean the following:

1. Loading times.
2. Cutscenes
3. All sorts of "Item obtained" poses.
4. Menus and dialogue popping up.
5. Screen transitions.

etc.

This means the following:

1. Animation of Mario grabbing a moon.

2. Small unskippable cutscenes of paths opening/being created.

3. Camera panning to show where a moon has spawned, even if spawns right on top of Mario.

4. Non-instant text and having to confirm when you have to buy something.

And so on. Obviously, interruptions for when the game is loading can't be skipped.

But how much faster would any% and 100% runs be if all those interruptions would be removed or removable from options?

This means the following:

1. The time that starts when you grab a star to a time when you gain control again in the next level.

2. The times when camera pans to show a star spawning or when it shows something opening up.

etc.

How long do these take in minutes or percentage-wise in any% and 100% runs?

For an example, a category that involves yarn and rift tokens?

Could it be getting all applauses, finding all the hidden coins at least once, hitting all the blocks at least once or something else?

Any% may lead to large skips but a quite a bit of time is spent watching cutscenes. 100% may have some tedious moons.

Anything in between, one end or another?