I've done some testing of the differences between the two difficulties (first option in the options menu, defaults to Normal, can be flipped to Easy).
Here's what's different on Normal that's notable to a speedrun:
- Most normal enemies have more HP. The generic trash still dies to 1 rocket or rider kick, but other things may need 2 hits; things that needed 2 now need 3.
- Most bosses take more hits the kill. The is most noticeable with midbosses and phase 1 of multi-phase bosses. The final boss phase of the stage has less of a boost, or none at all.
- Your energy regen is cut about in half during mech fights. It's no longer possible to finish fights with a flurry of offense; most mech fights require playing defensive to recharge.
- The final mech fight does not refill your health between phases, which is actually kind of a big deal coupled with the energy regen penalty above.
The last two points are the most important. While most of my mech fight strategies will still work, you'd have to spend time defending to recharge between offensive flurries; a LONG time recharging on the final fight. I wouldn't be surprised if this adds 3 minutes to the run on its own.
Of secondary importance are the other two points. More enemy HP means more backboosts while trying to rider kick through enemies, that's about all. More boss HP makes bosses take longer because at no time are you in danger during boss fights; it's just more time for no difficulty or style gain.
In general, Normal difficulty is "the same but takes longer". I personally feel Easy makes a cooler looking run even if you execute optimally in both difficulties. However, these differences make comparing runs between difficulties unfair.
For now I've added a difficulty field to the leaderboard so it's clearer. If someone besides me takes up running the game I'm more than willing to split the board into two categories.
Just noting this all for the record if anyone gets curious.
I used Bizhawk, but it's effectively the same as Gambatte. Bizhawk uses Gambatte's emucore, and I did some pretty extensive timing tests to make sure it's the same before using it for runs.
It looks like the best approach for Brawler is actually a hybrid. Since Vandaeron ran Claw and I ran Knife, we were able to see each weapon had its own strengths and weaknesses. My Knife runs would start slow then gain time on Vandaeron's Claw runs.
Claw is a movement beast. Your charge attack propels you forward faster than walking, and giving it more points doesn't give you more hits so it's a 1pt wonder and falls off hard after Boat. Knife is a boss killer, with geometrically increasing damage with every level, but it's slower than Claw on actually moving through enemies in the dungeons.
I combined the two with this skill order:
¤ Guts I ¤ Claw I ¤ Guts II ¤ Guts III ¤ Knife as many times as skill points allow ¤ If you fall between Knife tiers, dump the remaining points into Critical
Early game, I relied on the ridiculous power buff from Guts (and the ability to get 2 or 3 stacks easily) to power through things. Claw let me dive through enemy packs in Wizari that I had to stop and kill as a Knife user. Once I got the Power Wine at Boat, I already had Knife Lv2 and a decent knife weapon, I switched to using Knife as a boss killer and Claw for moving through levels.
Being capped at Lv1 Claw also meant I didn't waste SP on over-charging when I didn't have to, which was a huge problem for me going pure Knife.
Later in the game, starting at about Coldazhek, Guts becomes less important. It rarely makes the difference between one-charging an enemy and not, so you can stop worrying about it. It's still a beast to stack on bosses though because Lv4 Knife spin hits six times and each hit gets the full benefit of Guts.
The general rule for Claw VS Knife is if you have to kill it, and it won't die in one Claw charge, use Knife; otherwise use Claw.
This approach is, at worst, equal to pure claw and at best can save 3-4 minutes. Unsure because we both had deaths in our runs :/
That's what I'm saying though. Fon uses a keyboard, I use a normal grip on a Dual Shock 4 so I'm not doing anything special, and I'm 90% sure Vandaeron does the same. I will say my consistency went up a ton just by doing a playthru and duping everything I needed. I went from about 5% consistent to 50% consistent through 1 or 2 playthru/runs. I'm probably closer to 75% now.
There's no special grip or trick to it; you just have to find a rhythm (or use a keyboard Kappa).
I use an input visualizer for my stream. Check my run around Dryazhek when I do a dupe session.
I just do a normal grip on a DS4.
Edit: One thing I've taken to doing is breaking the Power Wine dupe into three sessions. Once on the ship to about 70 STR, once early in Desert to about 110, then a final one just before the Chaos General to about 150. Three sessions loses me a few seconds because I have to play with my inventory 3 times, but I make it up in consistent duping because my right wrist doesn't get tired.
I only did two single segment runs of Live A Live (most of the runners do ILs). My first run was 10 hours and then I found a ton of different strats doing ILs and did a 2nd run that came in at 6:07:xx.
So I guess that's about a 4 hour save.
I'm sanding the edges off a Dagger build now. There's a few thoughts on your proposal based on what I've found so far.
1.) I'm about 90% certain if you heal above half with regen, you cannot proc Guts again in the same room. Several resources and my anecdotal experience says the Guts reset occurs when you use a healing item to get over 50%, or exit the room, not if you regen above 50%. With that said, I had a HILARIOUS instance of stacking like 6 instances of Guts by healing through a Blast attack the other day :)
2.) In an Any% Normal speedrun you finish the game under level 20. I route to finish at 20, Vandaeron finishes at 18 I think. 37 is way, way more skill points available to dump into Guts and Dagger than we have doing a run, and it makes a difference.
3.) Dagger damage scales geometrically with levels (more hits AND more power per hit), and you really only start to notice the power at 5, 6, 7... which you won't reach in a speedrun. Earlier levels, Guts packs more whallop per point. I'd initially planned to go 4 Dagger, 2 Guts... then I added another Guts because it was so good, and finally swapped to 3 Dagger, 4 Guts when I realized Dagger was paying fewer bills than Guts. Even hilted to the gills with Power Wine STR points, Guts brings noticeably more power.
4.) You talk about stat investment, but in the speedrun you have access to infinite STR thanks to Power Wine duping. In an Advance or Dual mode run you'd also get an Energy Bread and dupe it for access to infinite VIT. Stats aren't meaningful. In Normal, all points go into DEX and VIT to taste. In Dual they'd all go into DEX and you'd use Wine and Bread to buff STR and VIT for "Free"
5.) With the Power Wine dupe, you're killing everything in the game in one Lv2 spin until Tower... then you can kill anything in one Lv3 spin. The trouble in the run comes pre-Boat, where Guts shines since you don't have the points for big Dagger levels.
6.) Something I'd discounted as "Not important" that is starting to hurt my Brawler runs is the fundamental difference between Claw and Dagger: Claw charge attacks move you forward, Dagger charge attacks slow you down. This is a huge problem on the Desert mid-boss, Clione, and generally moving through levels. Also claw has a longer attack range, which matters in a few places. You get faster boss kills when you can just hunker down and DPS, but I don't know if that makes up for it.
tl;dr: Dagger + Guts is viable. I got a 2:10 with it on my 2nd run. I'm not sure it can beat Claw + Guts though.
Who's banned VBA? I've heard it has issues but the Pokemon community allows VBA-M (a fork of VBA), SRL recommends VBA 1.7.2 for racing, and I can't find anything that says VBA is banned. Bizhawk uses VBA-Next's code for its GBA emulation, too.
My top 3 would probably be Bizhawk, then VBA-M, then Retroarch for doing GBA.
Maybe you're thinking of the ban on VBA for running Classic Gameboy games. VBA's Classic GB code is awful and runs the game noticeably faster, but that's classic GB only.
I routed and started running Compati Hero: Great Battle IV last week. I was hunting for a SNES platformer to submit to SNES Superstars, because all I had were two 10 minute runs of repeats. I literally stumbled onto that game while randomly choosing SNES games to mess around with, and thought it was so cute and charming and made such a good looking speedrun that I had to do it.
Agreed. I'm editing my run to reflect SDA timing. This will put me back at #1; feel free to give my run another look-over if you feel this is wrong.
This is mostly for my own notes for now but if anyone wants to pick up running this, I've sussed out four category ideas. I'll explain them briefly below and why I think they should be considered for running, or not considered, as it were.
I've put all four on the leaderboards and we'll just see if anyone cares to submit runs for them. I'll probably go Any% and All bosses, myself.
Any%: Kill Barius. Simple, straightforward. Duh :)
100%: Level 16 everyone, kill all bosses, get all power-ups. I actually don't like the idea of this as a run because... 1.) Some "Upgrades" are actually downgrades and it would significantly extend the run having to saddle one of your characters with that. For example, Jude's upgrade removes his attack's piercing. 2.) 100% requires running the entire game effectively 2-3 times. Some upgrades require severe back-tracking and you must always have a wall-breaker in your party as some upgrades are behind walls. Wing drops become mandatory and the run becomes luck based. 3.) Lots and lots of downtime.
Maxed Party: The party that goes to kill Barius must be maxed per 100% rules. The other 4 characters do not have to be. I prefer this as the "100%" category for the sole reason that you eliminate almost all the back-tracking and silly party management. You'll be powerful for the final fight, and routing becomes far more important than execution.
All Bosses: Any% with the requirement you also kill the other five bosses in the game. Far more strategy than Any% and killing bosses frequently gives you useful consumables so maybe even less drop luck. This one sounds fun. You also get a few more level-ups, but you'll need them :)
This is not a direction I want to see the NES/retro running community go.
Livestreaming requirement is just silly and does nothing to protect authenticity. I could produce a TAS right now of any game and stream it "Live" complete with a faked input visualizer to improve your so-called authenticity. So are you going to require hand-cam too?
You're basically proposing that legit records gotten during offline practice just not be considered legit. That's incredibly unfair. And for what? You're not actually protecting the sanctity of the leaderboards by doing this. Anyone who wants to go that far to cheat will just, as stated, stream a replayed TAS after a few crappy live attempts. The only thing this is doing is shutting out people who can't/don't stream entirely... which I suspect is the intent anyway.
Don't pull this exclusive shit; you're better than this.
I was talking about how best to do this on the SRDC IRC channel and an admin offered to move the runs for me, so this is done. I added a few categories people I know showed interest in doing, so go nuts. If you need any clarification on categories or new ones added, let me know.
tl;dr: I'm re-organizing the categories to make the leaderboard cleaner. If you got a message that your run was rejected or deleted, don't panic! I'll be re-uploading everyone's runs EXACTLY as they are now. Nothing will change.
Just posting this here as a note before I start doing it: I'm going to reorganize things on the leaderboard. Right now there's like 12 main categories and all of those but 1 could be ILs and look neater. Here's how I'm planning to do it...
The main category will be Any%, which is where my 6hr run is. The IL categories will be moved to IL boards called for example "Ninja (Any%)" "Ninja (Pacifist)" "Ninja (Bad End)" etc. I will make the default leaderboard the IL board, since ILs are where most of the focus is.
I'll do all the work to do this migration. If you have a run in you don't have to do anything. You MAY receive a message that your run has been rejected, but I'll be re-uploading your runs on your behalf exactly as they are now.
If anyone has any objections please reply. I'll probably do this this weekend.
Ahahah I figured it out and it's as simple as it looks in Zack's video. I'm an idiot.
If I mimic the inputs in the video exactly I skip to the last floor on the level, and it works on every level. It looks like all you do is...
- Select the level
- Flip to New Level and then back to Continue
- Cancel, then cancel back to the main menu
- Go back and select to continue the level normally
It was so simple I thought I was missing something. :)
Posting here in hopes someone in the know follows the board and will get an alert :)
How's the Jormugandr 1F -> 12F skip done? I'm playing with possibly giving the game a casual run or three and can't find any data on how to pull that off. Judging by the video it could just be leaving and coming back, getting a certain amount of EXP, or some kind of menu manipulation I can't see.
Anyone out there able to shed some light on that? I'd appreciate it.
About 2/3rd of my runs on here are games only I run :(
- Live A Live (ILs down, doing Any% when I find 6 contiguous uninterrupted hours)
- Doki Doki Yuuenchi / Trolls in Crazyland
- Space Hunter
- Dragon Egg
I've also done a few runs of "Dead" games to see if I can stand up to the WR. These had runners in the past but don't now to my knowledge
- Vice: Project Doom
- Robo Warrior / Bomber King
I decided to submit a request for a !bang command to DuckDuckGo (http://ddg.gg, https://duckduckgo.com/bang) since I use DDG as my search engine and am lazy and would like to just be able to type "!speedrun mario" in my browser to get the current Mario runs. However, the AJAX search bar won't do for this.
Is there some non-AJAX search page hidden in the site that I haven't found? To submit a !bang command, DDG needs something it can hit with the standard GET parameter format like http://www.speedrun.com/search?q=FOO.
Just curious. I'm a nerd who likes the tools they use and would like to have excuses to use them more. :)
