Hey everyone. Today we have a small update for you all regarding some changes to the rules regarding recordings of runs.

For a long, long time now it has been a requirement for PC runs to have both clear visuals of the game throughout the entire run (so not hiding any game HUD elements or FPS counters ect) as well as having audio throughout.

Despite popular belief, this did not however extend to anything outside of PC. So you could submit a PS1, 6th Gen or Handheld run without any game audio and it would be perfectly valid. Today however we're changing that. After a discussion with the mod teams of the non PC communities we've made the decision to now enforce the same recording requirements that PC requires for everything non PC.

As such all games video/audio requirements will be updated to the following:

• Video recording of the entire run is required.
• The submission has to be as preferably a YouTube video or a Twitch Highlight but any platform that doesn’t automatically delete it after a while will be accepted.
• Video Standards: HUD/GUI elements (health bars, counters, spell selection, saving icons, fps displays) may never be hidden or covered up by any element of your stream layout (including game cropping, overlays, webcams, and stream popups/alerts).
• Audio Standards: At a bare minimum, the game sound effects must be audible throughout a majority of the run. Any vod with partially muted audio (i.e. copywritten music on twitch) will be rejected.

This will NOT affect any runs that are currently on the leaderboards with no audio. Like with the banning of Dxtory in 2021 for PC frame capping all runs done after today (5th August 2024) will need to follow the above rules to be valid when it comes to recording of runs.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to reach out to me to clarify further.

Console and Emulator Boards Split

Following the discovery of some discrepancies between the GBA console & emu in gameplay the decision was taken to split the Any% board of the game into Console & Emu. This was deemed the easiest and fairest way to deal with this discovery and make runs fair for everyone.

Following this a discussion was started in the discord server on if the same split should be applied to 100% & NSC. Following discussion no adverse responses to the split were given so the decision was made not to hold a vote as the community's feelings seemed clear. As such the other two boards were also split.

As a result of this, all runs on the GBA Emu boards have had any additional penalties for playing on emulator removed.

Vote on End Time Change + Banning SC vote

As a part of the ongoing discussions, a vote on moving the end time of 5GBA to "Loading the save file after save corruption". Additionally the option was also given to ban save corruption entirely across all categories. This was due to a lack of a vote including all community members before when the trick was found.

The vote decided not to ban save corrupt or change the end time so no additional changes were made.

Further discussions will be had in the discord server in the following days regarding other potential timing changes for this game in the HP Handheld Speedrunning Discord. If you want to take part in those discussions please make sure to join the discord server.