Hello! Sorry to bother with this post but I noticed something kind of curious with the black screens while watching DonDoil's 100% run, as he seemed to get black screens pretty quickly and so I decided to investigate and went to watch another run, this time from Any% by someone else , but this time on PS4 and I noticed that the screens seemed to take longer and so I decided to time them.

Here are the duration of 4 black screens by for different runners and consoles, just as a demonstration, one when they load the game (after starting the run) another after skipping the cutscene (PS: the 2nd and the 5th did not done that so that's why there's no time for it), when they enter the first level and when they finish the first level:

1.200 1.167 1.467 1.200 1st Place (PC)

3.850 4.100 4.017 2nd Place (PS4)

1.650 1.150 1.667 1.367 3rd Place (PC)

5.200 7.600 4.867 5th Place (Xbox One)

Looking at the times, you can see that the PC has a certain advantage over the consoles, maybe 3 or 4 seconds on average. With that, I made this post more to give an idea of adding "Loadless Real Time" to make the competition more fair in relation to people who play on the console with people who play on the PC, because of this factor.

Again, I apologize for bothering you with this somewhat random post and its length, I hope you understand, but thank you if you have read it.

I definitely see your point and agree with it to a certain extent

I feel like as it sits doing a loadless real time would level the playing field to a certain degree

But I believe pc has at least one more advantage than just load times With a keyboard if you hold the up arrow key while running yarny actually runs faster, giving you extra momentum in jumps and things like that. In my run (3rd place currently) I mapped the up arrow key of the keyboard to the R1 button of my controller (as shown at the beginning of the run)

I did a little bit of testing and it looks like holding the analog stick on an angle could accomplish the same thing, but found it awkward to do personally so I didn't test it very long to see if certain jumps were possible that way

I would personally be in favor of separating console and pc to seperate boards as most games seem to do However due to the lack of popularity this game seems to have with speedrunning I feel like it would just thin the board out to much

Long story short, I do agree that pc players likely have an advantage over console players

I just wonder due to the lack of popularity and inactivity this game has had, if any such changes would even be worth it, but I'm not against the idea

First step though is discussion So you've got that ball rolling

If there was an easy way to remove load times I could see an argument for adding it, for example with an autosplitter. But I don't think there is an issue, the runs (including the record) are so unoptimized and have minutes of mistakes in them that 4 second of load time in a 70 minute run don't really matter. And we would have to force runners to set up the autosplitter. Feels like this is a discussion for the sake of discussing, rather than any practical reasons.

I also do not think there is significant reason to have separate leaderboard for the platforms, not just because of inactivity but because it's the same game - the up key trick can be replicated on console through joystick position or button remapping. It's a weird mechanic yeah, but you'd have to take that up with Coldwood. I don't think "most games" have split boards as it stifles competition and would need proper justification.

In fact, it would be a lot of work to remove all the loading screens manually, not to mention that I don't know if it would be possible to get an autosplitter to work with console runs.

But I thank you for answering me and sorry if it was a very random post, but have a nice day!