Fantastic write-up! Perhaps most shocking to me is the fact that there are 228 item wheels! I never would've guessed there are even close to that many. Although I imagine many of them are slight variances on one another. Thanks for also editing in the jump heatmap; this confirms why it felt impossible to get a jump the the second half of lap two (it literally was 🤣)

For many PS1 games, a slim PS2 with fast disc speed enabled will provide for the fastest load times. I haven't done extensive testing with Super Sports specifically, but I imagine there's at least a slight difference. Not sure which version PS2 @eednob has been using.

Yeah, keyboard controls are only really viable for emulator runs (for the reasons @New999 stated above) and in order to have the best advantage, playing on a real PS2 is the way to go since the loads are considerably faster. Since this game is pretty niche, I think both methods are perfectly acceptable, but each have their pros and cons.

There is indeed a discord, here's the invite link: https://discord.gg/X3u8RNHnkN

I edited the 1P Battle and Time Attack boards to support IGT in milliseconds. For future submissions, just leave RTA blank for these categories and just put the IGT that displays in-game at the end-screen.

Considering no one's run the Story mode in six months, and the last thread seemed like most-everyone was on the same page, I don't see the need to make any changes at this time.

Sorry I'm getting to this so late @ThrasherDBS , src didn't notify me at all about this thread (even though I mod and follow the category). Anyways, I got the ILs created, knock yourself out. I might have to revisit this game at some point here...

The changes look fantastic @RubberDuckyAssassin

Only other thing I can think of doing is just standardizing the timings for all the runs (either include ms or not). I think it makes sense to include the extra decimal places for the Classic runs, especially since some of them are so close, but its probably overkill for the journey runs.

I know I'm responsible for a few of my stream viewers getting into running the game, so if you'd like another mod I'd be happy to help verify runs if need be.

TL;DR version Full-game: submit as RTA only, no milliseconds ILs: submit as IGT only, total track time just as displayed in-game

I made some minor changes to the boards as of recent; most notably enabled milliseconds for submissions. Unfortunately I can't make different timing rules for full-game vs IL runs so for now here's how I think we should deal with submissions:

For full-game runs, put RTA only, and exclude milliseconds. Runs are currently far apart enough that ms are unnecessary, plus if runs start to really get that close, we'd probably need to retime anyway. In the future, I could see us needing to tabulate IGT for full-game runs, but I personally don't think we've necessitated that yet.

For ILs, put the IGT total time for the track as it's displayed in-game. This is obviously the most accurate method and it's super simple to submit this way. Since I imagine most of our submissions for ILs will be from full-game runs, don't worry about bothering with RTA.

Here's the video link:

Just a quick FYI,

I manually retimed the top 3 runs in Death% as the times are so close, I figured it would be worth doing. I made the starting time the last frame in which text appears on the menu screen ("Level 1: The Suburbs") and the ending time the first frame in which the health bar is depleted and the death animation starts.

By this metric, both Brienie and I started our timers slightly early and stopped them slightly late, while Zudo started their timer right on time and stopped theirs slightly early. Because of the early stop, I went frame by frame on their run synced against my timer. Here's the time breakdowns to the nearest frame; I synced all three runs up in editing software to confirm the accuracy of these results. I'll post a video link with all the runs side-by-side shortly.

kyletx500 Starting Time: 00:00.11 Ending Time (First Frame Dead): 00:32.34 Retime: 00.32.23

Zudo9280: Starting Time: 00:00.11 Ending Time (First Frame Dead): 00:32.47 Retime: 00:32.36

Brienie: Starting Time: 00:00.07 Ending Time (First Frame Dead): 00:33.80 Retime: 00:33.73

Done.

Enjoy the new category :)

I updated the Any% category rules as follows:

Finish the game as quickly as possible.

Time starts upon selecting "new game" and ends upon the fade to black after defeating the final boss.

Future runs should stop the timer at the end of the fade (once the screen is completely black) and before the final cutscene/scorecard. Hopefully this helps with more consistent timings. Since the few current times are far apart enough, I don't think there's any urgent need to retime what's on the leaderboard as of now.

Thanks for the response @1800POOPNOW and for you and @DBcade touching on a point I didn't address earlier.

The cutscenes in this game are incredibly cheesy and entertaining, and I think keeping a run with those intact could really help with getting this game into marathons like GDQ's Awful Block, Big Bad Gameathon and the like. I think that's a very valuable reason to keep the cutscene run alive, in addition to the points I made previously.

And may I just also say, it's lovely to see more people embracing this game, regardless of how they decide to tackle it.

The main reason I 'd push for the "NG+" terminology to be used for cutscene-skip runs is that that's technically what it is. I think labeling it this way makes it very obvious to anyone browsing the boards that cutscenes can only be skipped if they fully beat the game once first and have a cleared file.

Naming them "Cutscene Skip" and "No Cutscene Skip" respectively seems like a decent idea at first, but I think it also implies that there's some trick to skipping cutscenes, which as we know, there isn't. On a first playthrough, cutscenes can not be skipped no matter what you do. I just fear that naming it this way could make the difference more confusing to a new player. "NG+" is a very common terminology, and tells anyone immediately that the game must be finished once before they even have the option to skip cutscenes.

I just see splitting the boards as a win-win as it allows runners to play the way they want: as long as they're making an effort to play quickly, cutscenes or not. Freedom of choice is essentially what I'm advocating for. I'd love to do more runs of this game without the cutscenes and work at optimizations, but I see both methods as equally valid, especially when the game forces the cutscenes on a first playthrough.

Well I won't speak for anyone else, but as far as I was aware when I ran it, cutscenes were unskippable in this game, and the two runs on the boards at the time both started on a brand new game, unable to skip cutscenes. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to automatically make those runs obsolete despite the likelihood that they were attempting to play the game as fast as they could with the knowledge they had at the time.

If you don't like the NG+ tag, I'd be open to changing it to something else if you have suggestions. But technically speaking, the run would be considered NG+; it's a playthrough started with a cleared save file, and the save adds an additional feature not present in the first playthough (skipping cutscenes). Sure, it may not include a ton of of extra features or content like SOTN, but it doesn't need to.

But personally, I don't see anything wrong with separating the two different playstyles, especially since the majority of the runners established the leaderboard with runs that included cutscenes. I don't know the history of the SOTN leaderboard, but if I had to guess, NG+ has always been the common method for them since the beginning. Obviously this leaderboard started differently, and I think the other runs should be respected as they are.

I will say I am tempted to do a cutsceneless run in the future, maybe help fill out that board. I hope I articulated my stance on this matter; just trying to be as fair and respectful as possible. Nice work on the run.

I do think it would be silly to have the leaderboards share runs both with and without cutscenes, so I went ahead and created a new variable to distinguish between the two types of runs.

Any run made without a cleared save file loaded will be considered an "All Cutscenes" run since they can't be skipped with this method of play. If a cleared save file exists, the run should be marked "NG+" and cutscenes should be skipped to stay competitive in that category.

Hey there @Meerkov, welcome on in!

The language/version consideration is an interesting one since I don't think anyone has bothered to test it, although considering we skip/spam through all of the dialogue I can't imagine it would make very much of a difference. If you do decide to experiment I would be curious as to the results.

I'm no expert by any means, but from the handful of hours I've put into the game, the racers seem to be exclusively cosmetic with no stat differences whatsoever. I tried a few of them and I couldn't feel any noticeable changes in speed or handling.

I hope you do end up running this, I'd love to see another runner on the boards!

Also to anyone that is curious as to how this looks in action, I actually first saw this method used in Futurama runs, which is another game that suffers from crazy different load times.

LiquidWifi's run is a good example of how the IGT inputting works: https://www.speedrun.com/futurama/run/z154nvry