Yeah I agree, crystal balls don't really feel like "items".

Okay so for now, we go with the rules as they are currently written.

I had a question specifically about the health upgrades. The rules currently state that you need to collect three upgrades, but there are actually four. Even though collecting only three of them would get you to maximum life capacity after collecting all eight crystals, is it truly necessary to collect all four to qualify for 100%?

Here's my counterpoint to the whole save/quit issue: while the refill of life is undoubtedly an advantage gameplay-wise, you also need to consider the amount of time spent gaining this advantage. First of all, you don't even have the option to save/quit unless you grab the Book of Revival in the very beginning of the game, which in and of itself takes about 20 seconds (and considering that the top three times are within three seconds of each other, that's a significant amount of time). Also, the act of doing the save/quit itself consumes time too, I'm guessing somewhere in the 15-20 second range EACH TIME that you do it, and that's not even taking into account the save points that require a detour of some sort to reach, which would consume even more time. Compare this to similar games like Zelda 1 (up+A) and aLTTP (s&q) where the advantage to doing a save/quit is undeniable, albeit for different reasons. So to me, the save/quit strat in Neutopia is very much a risk/reward conundrum, and it's one that I don't think has a large enough sample size to say one way or another that it is a distinct "advantage" in regards to saving a significant amount of time. The ironic thing is, this strat was born out of necessity to inject a heavy element of marathon safety into this run, which virtually always implies being more time-consuming.

In regards to the re-timing of when the run ends, I'm perfectly fine with that. If I may make a suggestion, I would say that time should end when the screen fades to black after the last text box is cleared; that way, you have about a good second or two after you're done with inputs so you can focus on hitting that final split at a specific time.

LOL please disregard that post of mine to which you replied. I have since obtained a PC and have been running Bizhawk on that, so we're good.

May I ask why the only approved emulator for this game is Bizhawk? I only ask because I use a Mac and unfortunately I couldn't find a version of Bizhawk that runs on OS X. I'd really like to start learning this run, but it would be a shame if I couldn't submit any of my runs.