United StatesRewind should never be used under any circumstance. Always do runs from a fresh reset.
As an example, my "competitive" IL fights for this game follow that format of 2 uploads with the attempts being unlisted and linked in the descriptions.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMMZaQu-GKrN7g6xedn-veHQb_bfI1YGg
I've made this a habit, since savestates were never allowed for real WR attempts of any individual fight in the past, and I've always wanted my proof to be evident that all of my attempts were earned through legitimate means. it makes sense to uphold that standard today, since starting a fight from a savestate that starts at him is very much not the same as having to go through the reset process.
If that were the case, then the new Bald Bull 1 strats would have been hit several times by several people by now, but since the travel to him is the most significant in the game with a huge amount of luck involved, it's a very difficult record to achieve.
I should add that if you are playing on the Switch or the NES Classic, that we still require a reset of the game being played, which does not mean that you load a state that starts at the title screen. Here are the ways to do proper resets on these two consoles:
For the NES Classic, you will need to press the physical reset button (or the Home button on a Wii VC controller) to go to the menu and press either Start or A to go back into the game. This should start you on a clean reset.
For the Nintendo Switch, you will need to press ZL + ZR at any point during gameplay, then go down to the "Reset Game" option to start a new set of attempts.
Hey! There's a discord server for Splatterhouse speedruns for any game in the series if anyone wants to join! https://discord.gg/QtZHMPj
This is a weird and unique situation where the game was never officially released on the hardware that it was designed for, but was first officially released on a platform that cannot possibly be replicated via computer emulators & original SNES.
My hesitation is that if reproduction cartridges were the only accepted way to do runs of this game on an actual Super Nintendo, then it encourages the destruction of original Stunt Race FX cartridges, and similar FX based games. In terms of game preservation efforts, that is an awful thing to encourage/require in order to be competitive in speedruns of this, at least if the repro version of the game ended up to be the faster version of the game.
I like the idea of this game being runnable on an SD2SNES though, since it bypasses that concern of mine. However, I too have heard that as of right now, the SD2SNES's FX implementation is not 100% accurate yet. I have not personally tested this myself, but if you are aware of the state of that, I would be really interested in hearing where it stands currently, or if there were any plans to address it in the future by folks working on the SD2SNES.
Computer emulators have also been tough to justify adding because even when I was running the beta version on bizhawk (effectively the most accurate SNES emulator so far), I still noticed it had timing advantages compared to Oyster's runs on repro cart.
I think ultimately, a bunch of testing needs to be done in order to see where a repro cart & the sd2SNES stand time-wise compared to an SNES Classic. The only thing is that the epilepsy filter makes it really hard to get an accurate time conversion, as the game mainly uses it during situations that heavily use the fire texture, most of which are not pure autoscrolling sections. If anyone has any realistic solid ways of testing this, feel free to let me know.
There is also the probable release of the game on the Nintendo Switch's online service that would address the issue of the SNES Classic being difficult & expensive to acquire. That release would make running an official version of this game way more accessible to runners. Additionally, if that version does not have the epilepsy filter (or had it be optional), it would likely make that game the fastest official version of the game, and by extension, would make tests and comparisons SIGNIFICANTLY easier to get concrete timing data on.
Yeah, so for just letting the credits roll, you add another layer of deterrence for potential splicing in the future. It's extremely easy to just keep recording after you win, so should be very simple to follow with the huge upside of helping to keep the leaderboards clean.
That being said, any runs that were submitted before this rule was added will stay, including the one submitted by dpad a few days ago, as it's not fair to remove/reject any runs that followed the already existing rules at the time of submission.
Twin Galaxies has made many of these kind of tracks where they leave the validity of the run up to the subjectivity of a referee. It almost ¤always¤ led to fights and stupid threads about how another player must be stalling to score more points than another.
What this means in terms of what you have set up here is that you are absolutely going to start seeing debates on whether or not some runs are more "glitchless" than others once the category starts getting optimized. What happens when you get a run where someone never swaps more than once a second, but then you see another run that's faster and better in every way, but they swapped twice in one second once? Sure you could hand wave that instance, but what about if they did it twice, or 3 times? It will just keep going and going until you reach that point where it makes no sense anymore.
Plus, in essence the reduction of cooldown is not actually a glitch. It's been pretty widely known for that it's just a mechanic that Contra III runs utilize. That alone should make it not banned in glitchless categories, despite appeal to popularity.
If you can't define a limit for how often you are allowed to swap weapons, then it should not be a separate category.
P.S. Contra III has this exact same mechanic and doesn't separate categories around it. The fact that this board bans this mechanic in many of its categories is preposterous.
