Just having icons of an external site that serve as a link to someones profile is not the same thing. Giving Twitch partners extra icons is like making the Youtube icon look different because the linked Youtube account happens to have a Youtube Red subscription. Both things advertise a business model on the external site that is completely unrelated to speedrun.com.

Also, if you are fine with the special treatment of Twitch partners: Why not also giving an extra icon to people that have a huge, sponsored Youtube channel? Or people who are the equivalent of a Twitch partner on any other streaming platform? If you do it for Twitch, might as well do it for other sites too, to be consistent.

I find it surprising that there aren't more people who see this as a problem. It may only be a small icon, but it still a special treatment that is in no way justified for an independent site. Twitch's partner program is quite a shady thing anyway, I find it problematic when it is advertised here.

It's not the point if I see them or not, I just think they make us look bad as a site. Why would we want to look like we're affiliated with Twitch? There is no reason to support their partner program.

I said it before and I'll say it again: These second icons need to either go away or given to everyone under the same conditions. There is literally no reason why Twitch partners should get any special treatment here, as speedrun.com is in no way affiliated with Twitch, their partner program does in no way benefit us. For that reason, the second icons make speedrun.com look unprofessional.

I didn't attend ESA this year, but I watched it and participated in the German Restream. It appears that a lot of the problems I had last year, when I attended the event, were improved, but i obviously can't comment on that without having been there.

The good stuff:

• The second stream is back! And I hope it's here to stay ;)
• I liked the game/category selection a lot. Some people might say that there was too much of GTA or Final Fantasy, but that didn't bother me, there's always going to be a block that you don't care about (like all the Mega Man stuff for me).
• The ESA atmosphere is still there, despite some slightly more GDQ-ish vibes.

The bad stuff:

• The second stream should be organized better. It was hard to find compared to the first one, which brings me to my main point...
• The second stream should not be outsourced, it should be hosted by ESA itself! There were many delays on the second stream and the chat was significantly worse, people were at times free to insult runners or hosts as "autists" or spam borderline racist "memes" without getting banned, just to name some examples. It doesn't matter that it was technically a different Twitch channel, since it did represent ESA at the time.
• At the same time, putting streams on follow-only mode is a terrible thing to do, it's the reason I didn't use the chat myself.
• And my other main criticism: Don't become European Games Done Quick, don't focus on the charity and the sponsors as much! I don't want to see those ads at an ESA, I don't want those "walls of sponsors" behind the hosts, I don't want a stream layout that visibly suffers from this! Remember who you are, a lot of people are like me and like ESA as the event that is "by speedrunners, for speedrunners"!

Overall, the good things outweighed the negative things by far for me. I got to see a ton of great runs, many of which I would have never been able to see at a GDQ. Host the second stream yourself the next time and you're almost perfect!

I'm assuming you're playing on PC. Because this is a known bug when playing the game on modern PCs, we unfortunately don't know a fix for it.

As far as I understand, this isn't really a legit way to beat the game. All it does is copy information from an existing file to a new one, but without counting the setup time for the second file. At best, this can be considered a glitched NG+.

For comparison, in Diddy Kong Racing, there is a very similar glitch that allows you to beat the game in 5 minutes, but it isn't even on the leaderboard. No one in our community considers copying information from an existing file to be a legit way to beat the game.

Rayman 1 does have an IL system that tries to deal with this issue. They have one category that does the level like a full game run would when entering it for the first time, as well as a NG+ version. I do understand that this game is obviously more complex, I just wanted to give an example.

That pagie in the first world, I actually got it without flight on my casual playthrough :D

This is my third on-site marathon, after ESA 2015 and 2016. Here's my feedback:

Location: The city of Potsdam was easy to access, being so close to Berlin. This is a big advantage over the more remote locations used by regular ESA. The venue was close enough to the train station, which is always nice. Although for people like me that stayed at the hotel, it was a bit frustrating that there wasn't any other convenient way to get past the railway tracks except for the station. This made the walking distance from the hotel longer than it needed to be.

Venue: I just LOVED this place.The two main rooms were really nice to hang out, there were always enough chairs available and it was great that you easily watch the stream from the practice room. I also liked the kitchen a lot, it was very clean and calm and you could sometimes even get to meet some people from outside the event. The whole area of the venue was a great place to be, so I sometimes just went out to get some fresh air.

Practice room: As mentioned earlier, it was great that you could watch the stream from this room too. Something that should be improved next year is the number of TVs and the capacity of the practice area. It was barely enough for this time, but with just a tiny bit more people, it would have been a problem. It was a bit unfortunate that out of the small number of CRTs, one died immediately and like 3 were PAL only, but I'll blame that to bad RNG. As a sidenote: Please, ASK before using someone elses N64 controller!

Stream as a viewer: Watching the stream was quite comfortable. I found myself preferring to look at the actual screen of the runner instead of the big LCD at the corner, but that's because I'm short-sighted and somewhat sensitive to strong light. Overall, I only really have one complaint about the stream, the fact that it was somewhat hard to hear the commentary. For a first marathon, there were surprisingly few tech issues.

Stream as a runner: I had a great experience as a runner (well, ok, getting a PB with my run definitely helped). Setting things up was simple, I was able to run the game exactly as I wanted. At first, it felt weird to hear my own voice through the headset, but I quickly got used to it. I even think that it actually made my voice sound better on stream. Also, it was great that there was an s-video cable available for my N64, since I had only brought a composite one with me.

So all in all, it was a fantastic event, I made the right decision when signed up for it! I met so many great people and had a lot of fun :)

ESA Germany 2018 hype!

We made a Discord group for Beetle Adventure Racing! You are welcome to join :)

Click here if you're interested: https://discord.gg/akwDJHT

I'm not a runner of this game, but let me explain my situation regarding this game. Maybe it applies to other potential runners as well:

I want to start running this game, but I don't have an NTSC cartridge yet, only my old PAL one. It would be obvious for me to get the Japanese version. Why? It's a much simpler answer than you might think: Japanese versions are much, much cheaper for me to get! So whenever I have the choice, I go for Japanese versions.

When I eventually get that Japanese cartridge and start doing runs, I will submit them here, under whatever category you put them. If this leaderboard doesn't accept my version, I will keep track of my times myself. I will definitely not spend considerably more money on a US cart, just to get on an arbitrarily restricted leaderboard.

For marathons, it might be a bit long. But I guess it wouldn't be a problem to run a modified version at an event, a version that only includes the forward tracks (or only R, if you want a challenge).

Oh and I have a completely unrelated question, but I don't want to make another thread just for it: I see that there are ILs for each track, with categories for forward and reverse and no rules mentioned. I'm assuming that the categories mean doing a full race, so 1lap is not covered. Or does it mean a lap in time trial? I'm asking because I have some recorded times on Twitch.

I wanted to ask if there is any interest in this category, since I have done some (unrecorded) runs of it in the past.

The category is simple: Beat all tracks (normal and R) using any car. In my runs, I actually did them in order, but that's a debatable thing. I think this category would be a good addition, a category that is all about playing the tracks with the fastest car.

What do you guys think?

The glitch used by Forever Runner isn't new, it's known for a while. Exe and Akheon both agreed that it shouldn't be allowed in runs.

Basically, you need to perform two NG+ glitches in a row to activate it. The problem is that Forever Runner started the timer after the first NG+ glitch, which means that he excluded gameplay from the run time.

But I admit that the glitch and the fact that it is banned, weren't known by a lot of people. We will have to make the rules more clear.

All Tracks was fine as a name, it made it obvious to everyone what the category is about.

I don't know how you are capturing your games, but I can tell you what I do. I'm using the popular GV USB2 capture card, combined with a powered splitter. It's pretty much the best way to capture an SD console.

If you're going to try this game and don't have the cart, I'd still recommend to at least try it on emu. I never played the game on emu, and it might be useful to know about possible inaccuracies or bugs in emulation. N64 emulation is terrible, so I don't expect it to be acceptable for this leaderboard.

If you decide to add the race ILs, I have a few of them recorded on Twitch.

I'm using the US NTSC version :)

I don't have 2097, but I would love to get an NTSC console and try it out at some point. Good luck with your runs!

I see that you used my run and my proposed ruleset, that's cool. I had already tried contacting the old mod of this leaderboard without success and would probably have contacted the sites staff about it at some point.

Some things I have to say:

• I don't really know what the difference between "loads" and "no loads" means, it was always there even when this leaderboard was still empty. The run I did was a simple NG+ that plays all races.
• I like the separation between the four classes, that's what I would have done too. I actually have completed offline runs on the other classes and would love to upload PBs for those categories in the future!
• Another offline run I did was "All Race Challenges", where I won every Race Challenge, as the title suggests. You could obviously do the same thing for the other types of challenges and - if you want to go really crazy - go for an "All Challenges". My suggestion here would be to only start adding those if there are actual, recorded runs.
• For ILs, it should be noted that the game not only keeps tracks of time trial 1laps (like the ones WMJ did), but also of 3laps and 1laps in races. So if you wanted to include everything, you'd have to separate the ILs into "3lap race", "1lap race" and "1lap time trial", with each of them having the class subcategories.

You can see, Wipeout 64 has a lot to offer without even going into arbitrary territory. Now that an actual leaderboad exists, I am getting new motivation for this great game, thank you so much for reviving it!

Going back to the term for "playing a game purely for fun without any type of challenge in mind":

I don't want to use words like "normal" or "standard" for this. As opposed to "casual", those do actually come off as judgmental to me. As if there was only one "acceptable" way of playing and everything else is "weird". Funny enough, that would actually be insulting to the speedrunners.

But you can call it "leisurely" or "laid back" if you want, those are basically the same to me as "casual".

I never even used "casual" to refer to "any other way of playing a game that isn't speedrunning". Why would you think that other types of self-imposed challenges are part of the definition "casual"? When I use the word "casual" when talking about gaming, I'm referring to "playing a game purely for fun without any type of challenge in mind". And no, I don't think that "casual" is the wrong term for that.