Came back to this childhood favorite title recently and been having fun simply playing it. (Forgotten how difficult it was!) Been spending some time in Exercise Mode to fine-tune my reactions and sharpen my [very rusty] skill level + got up to a new personal recorded best of level 51 (1818 bean score) and was pretty hyped about it. Not necessarily "impressive" but that's the beauty of self-improvement, eh?

Easy-Normal-Hard mode speedruns are great but has anyone entertained the idea of an Exercise Mode duration category? Not sure about what factor would constitute placement... ending level, total score, overall time, number of matches, etc... nonetheless I think it could open a new avenue of playstyle for Mean Beanin'.

Speedrun.com is usually used for beating the game or particular elements of a game as fast as humanly possible. I love playing Exercise Mode when I get the chance, but high score records and speedruns are entirely different things. I'm glad you have been able to enjoy replaying the game, but I don't think this is the right place for exercise mode unless we can think of something for that game mode. I wouldn't be opposed to some form of a Exercise Mode run or high score record leaderboard.

Agreed about speedrunning "usually" used in that manner. It's a difference between running a sprint vs. running a marathon but both hold a certain level of practice and skill level. What made me think of it is seeing other Speedrun boards using that style of endless/duration mode - or 'hold-out-as-long-as-you-can' gameplay - although uncommon.

Figured it's an idea to throw out there to mix things up a bit for this particular title. Something to consider. :)

Definitly would be really cool to see. I'm personally all up for it.

It's definitely a good idea! We'd love to introduce score attack modes but unfortunately it's actually against SRC policy to host such boards since it's not "directly" in the spirit of speedrunning. If you are interested in runs with a similar basis though, we do have the Puyo Puyo Champions board! PPC has a "Time Challenge" mode where you try to reach a target score as fast as possible, so it constitutes as a speedrun. Currently it's pretty quiet, and so the only thing we have set up there is the 10 million score challenge - we can definitely get the lower score thresholds set up if there's interest though! (We also have the "transition challenge" board if you have an interest in using different chaining techniques, I'd say it's very worth checking out too!)

In the Streets Of Rage community we had a similar dilemma. We fixed it by having leaderboards where you speedrun to set levels like Level 10, Level 25, Level 50, then take an intentional death and that's when your run ends.

Dr. Robotnik was my absolute favourite back in the day. In fact, I used to carry out neck exercises just by hearing about the title. It was such a great experience as a kid for me.