I'm curious why the Genesis runs were removed, given that the Invincibility Cheat requires pausing the game, entering a lengthy sequence of inputs, followed by navigating a test mode menu before returning to the game. All of those steps would be obvious in a run, and using it could simply be banned... rather than banning the entire Genesis port.
See this video for details regarding the test mode menu:
It's also concerning that this action seems to have been taken without any community discussion. The SRC site moderation rules make it clear that community involvement should be involved in leaderboard management. See https://www.speedrun.com/support/learn/moderation-rules for more details.
Howdy! In talking to a few folks from the Crush community, we were thinking about exploring more of Alien Crush via longer categories.
In that spirit, I spent some time to get a 10M and 25M run together. Those point marks match the longer categories used for Devil's Crush.
Anyone else interested? So far the strats are more or less the same - bottom bonus for victory. Not accidentally draining and getting consistently good bonus redemptions seems extra important for keeping a good pace. But perhaps the top screen has strats that are worth the ramp up for larger point targets.
For any folks that like to use visual cues to retime their runs, the offset I measured from selecting "MAN" to the screen turning black afterward is 63 frames.
Frame at which I held Run to start the game:
The first frame of black after that:
- I added Genesis to allowed hardware and US as the region variant
- I updated all existing runs with that info, which means that the emu state you set on your submission now shows on the board
- I verified the backlog of submissions. A few were off by a second or two; I updated the submission before verifying.
The 8-bit versions have solo categories, and this version supports playing solo, which would be faster than playing against the CPU opponents.
Howdy @NihilistComedyHour,
I got around to dumping the puzzle banks from the following 3 versions of C64 Wheel of Fortune from Sharedata: v1 (the original release), v2 (New 2nd Edition), and v3 (New 3rd Edition). My tooling is not 100% precise, but I think the results are good enough to discuss here.
All three versions have just over 1000 puzzles (1032, 1019, 1022) . v1 and v2's puzzle banks are nearly identical; everything in v2 is in v1, and v1 has 13 more additional puzzles. I suspect this is actually a result of the dumping not being completely accurate, so I'd say they are probably identical.
v3, on the other hand, is profoundly different: less than 1% of puzzles overlap between v3 and v1/v2.
I haven't looked at the game play differences yet, but at a casual glance the versions look identical once you get to the main gameplay.
All said, I'd support either a single board for all three versions or separating v3 from v1 and v2. Separating v1 and v2 seems unnecessary.
All the Any% runs have CPU players. Is there anything permissible in Any% that isn't also permissible in the vs. CPU category as well?
The only thing I could think of would be to say you have 3 human players and play all of them yourself.
Here's my slow play:
Here's the TAS: http://tasvideos.org/2522S.html
My notes so far: Death comes quickly, and losing your power ups adds insult to injury. Oddly enough, the stronger bosses aren't that much harder... except the final boss (OHKO plus faster boss magic). The levels are the hardest part... the patterns are more dense and have harder and hardier enemies.
What's the opinion on what difficulty to play on? The default is 4, and KobePilgram's run shows the option screen to confirm that. The other runs I watched didn't show the difficulty, so I'm not sure what was used.
It'd be nice if the rules could either state what difficulty to play on or that any difficulty (or other settings) are permitted. What have y'all been playing with?
From casual observation, the easier difficulties seem to be more about AI behavior than damage values. On 1 the AI will rarely get in a special move, whereas on 4 you will almost certainly get countered by something during a run (especially during the group fights).
I'd been kicking this idea around for a while, but this week I finally sat down to do it: Strider 100%.
That means:
- All boots
- All keys
- All disks
- Slide In and Plasma Arrow
- All the tricks
- Beat the game
- Otherwise, no limits. Zip, death abuse, etc. all allowed.
I was interested in this because I was looking for something longer than any%, but without the restrictions of the Zipless and TG categories. I thought it would be an interesting routing exercise, and that it would be different enough from the existing categories to stand on its own.
Here is my latest PB:
Here is what I've learned from the exercise so far:
- Not all sequence breaks leave you in a state where you can still collect 100%. Ex: If you collect Disc 2 and kill the Zain in Kazakh in one trip, when you go to Egypt the Key 2 script trigger doesn't happen.
- However, some sequence breaks are ok. My run above finishes China in a single visit, and afterwards I finish Kazakh in a single visit (in TG that would have been two visits for each).
- You can skip the outdoors part of Africa since it is faster to go through Australia. As such, you visit Australia twice.
- The glitched Yggdrasil kill is a little different. Namely, the top of Yggdrasil doesn't work quite the same way as in the any% route. I'm still working through that, but my muscle memory from any% results in me getting stuck on the top until I jump.
In terms of flavor, nearly every level has a zip in it now, or death abuse, or both.
If this seems worth creating a category on this leaderboard, then I'd be willing to draft of the rules and help verify runs for it. If not, well, I've had fun exploring more Strider!
Since I have accidentally stumbled into the Any% category, I have a question about the Any% rules. Specifically, what is a linear warp?
From the Any% rules (emphasis mine): Can warp to any Dimension at anytime except for linear warps from stages 3, 7 and 15.
I searched around for more info about this but couldn't find anything. Anyone have more details?
How do you setup your splits and start your timer from Contra? I thought I had something decent by copying what I saw in Toad's run (-9 seconds, start timer when you mash start), but over time I've noticed quite a bit of variance on when my timer hours zero versus gaining control in Jungle. Any tips? Should I just be manually starting at zero?
I've got two rules related questions, both related to things I noticed with Gallivanter's 9:29 arcade version run:
- It appears that this run uses the bootleg romset. Does anyone know what gameplay differences there are between the bootleg and the non-bootleg set?
- This run starts with 5 lives in reserve, whereas the default lives setting is to start with 2 lives in reserve. Is it acceptable to configure the dip switches for extra lives?
Note that there are opportunities to save time via death abuse, so additional lives would confer a speed advantage.
Hi everybody! Everybody is many more people for this community than it was a few days ago, which has already led to a new Red Dragon segment and a new WR!
However, this has also brought extra validation traffic, as well as many relative newcomers to speedrunning. It has also shined a light on the lack of rules for any%.
As such, I worked with SubStylee to form some baseline rules for any%. They are based off of the rules for a much more popular NES game and are intended to keep things as fair as possible without making running or verification onerous.
You can find the new rules by clicking on the "View Rules" button at the top of the leaderboard. To introduce and explain the reasoning behind these rules, I'll run through them here.
Beat the game as fast as possible. All glitches are permitted. This is the typical definition of any%.
Turbo/Autofire and left+right/up+down are banned. This is usually assumed, but this makes it explicit. Neither turbo nor being able to hit opposite directions simultaneously were possible on the original NES controller, therefore it is prohibited to use either in a run.
If using an emulator, please note which emulator was used in the comments. This is important, as emulators vary in their fidelity to the original hardware. If a specific emulator is found to have an unfair advantage over others for this game, then knowing which runs may have been affected is required.
Using savestates to the title screen is prohibited. Use the reset function on your emulator or console and the reset must be shown on the video. This is to ensure that the run is happening from fair initial state.
If you used a flash cart (like Powerpak or Everdrive) or some other way to play the game not on original cartridge, please add that in the comments as well. Flash carts, like emulators, vary in their level of fidelity to the original carts. If you are using one, just note which one in your run comments.
Time starts when you press start at the title screen. That is, start your timer and press start at the same time. Having a good start time in your video makes it much easier to validate.
Time ends on the first frame of the credits screen (i.e. when the screen turns black after the final boss kill). This is a little harder to time exactly, but generally speaking, you should favor hitting late instead of early. Hitting late still allows you (and the validator) to look back at your recording and view the time at the transition more accurately than your ability to stop the timer at just the right time.
Timing must include milliseconds. That means two things. First, your timer needs to be counting down to milliseconds. Second, when you submit your run, fill in the milliseconds part of the time.
Due to the popularity of the game, times below 4:05.00 are treated with suspicion. To maximize your chances of having a run verified it is highly recommended that you stream all of your attempts. This one deserves a little more explanation.
In short, not all runs get the same amount of scrutiny. Mods are volunteers, and have lives outside of validating runs. As such, we adjust our approach to validating a run based on how competitive the time is. 4:05 is where execution in the run needs to be pretty polished. Much farther below that will involve some of the trickier and less accessible tricks of the game. Being able to see your attempts (both successful and failed) becomes useful to build confidence that a your submission is genuine and not falsified.
Are these rules perfect? They are not. I hope they are a reasonable compromise, though. If you have any questions or concerns, please reply to this post or catch me on the Strider Discord: https://discord.gg/VWB4vru
