Anyhow, here's the two recorded runs I did in 2019 of Zero Wing (Genesis) Any% Easy that used to be up on this board. One was a baseline, the other was a no-miss run with pretty good boss kills.
I'm curious why the Genesis runs were removed, given that the Invincibility Cheat requires pausing the game, entering a lengthy sequence of inputs, followed by navigating a test mode menu before returning to the game. All of those steps would be obvious in a run, and using it could simply be banned... rather than banning the entire Genesis port.
See this video for details regarding the test mode menu:
It's also concerning that this action seems to have been taken without any community discussion. The SRC site moderation rules make it clear that community involvement should be involved in leaderboard management. See https://www.speedrun.com/support/learn/moderation-rules for more details.
Turns out shifting an existing category to a variable is a hassle, so I kept USA and Japan as the top level categories. Any% and No Give Ups are now a subcategory, and I have added Matt's runs to those boards.
Thanks for the replies, sounds like we are in agreement.
In the next day or so I will make the following changes:
- Add a top level categories for "No Give Ups" and "Any%"
- Make USA and Japan sub-cats under each
- Add Matt's runs to the new boards
- Ensure that all existing Any% runs show up properly on the board
From a rules perspective, seems straightforward enough.
From a speed perspective, not giving up is faster than giving up... but it is much much harder to pull off.
It's a minor point, though: Give Ups Allowed vs Give Ups Permitted is a fine distinction and easily enforceable rule.
@NESAtlas: What do you think?
Howdy! In talking to a few folks from the Crush community, we were thinking about exploring more of Alien Crush via longer categories.
In that spirit, I spent some time to get a 10M and 25M run together. Those point marks match the longer categories used for Devil's Crush.
Anyone else interested? So far the strats are more or less the same - bottom bonus for victory. Not accidentally draining and getting consistently good bonus redemptions seems extra important for keeping a good pace. But perhaps the top screen has strats that are worth the ramp up for larger point targets.
How should a hard difficulty run of the 2600 version be submitted? Here is my run for reference: https://www.speedrun.com/kangaroo_arcade/run/y6656ljy
Accepting sounds fine, but not sure if we'd make a new sub-category for the mini or allow it into the current boards.
From what I've seen with the mini, the emulation seems to be pretty good. The turbo fire on the controller works at the same frequencies as original hardware, but it is not lag aware. The result is that if you are on fast turbo fire during lag frames, you may fire faster than you could on original hardware turbo.
I don't know if that difference confers an advantage in Ninja Spirit. There is lag in the game, but managing lag well saves seconds over the course of the run. But maybe faster bomb throws could take out some of the bosses faster in RTA? Hrmmm
I see @LattMackey split out the mini on the board for Psychosis. Maybe he has more info he can share here.
I slightly prefer option 2 over option 1, but I'm good with whichever. In my later runs I was timing to the first frame you can tell which congrats dialog you are getting... which is sorta in the middle of your two options time-wise.
The stage 4 end-boss might benefit from repeated death/i-frame abuse. Perhaps some of the mid-bosses elsewhere could be sped up via i-frame abuse as well. I'm not sure, though: you'd need to do enough extra damage during i-frames to make up for the loss of damage from respawn.
In any case, thanks for posting this recommendation. Let's see if anyone else chimes in.
