I'll message you on discord :)

Cool! Good luck on getting good times! :)

Right now I do not run the game, because I don't feel the need to and also my hard is already quite hard to beat. However I'd love to pick the game up again, once you break my record! ;)

Yeah, the air stage is a real pain because the AI can espace easily and it's hard to trap them into your combo. Also the rotating stage isn't too pleasant because this is where RNG plays in important role.

Good luck on your runs, I hope I can watch your first pb soon. :D

It's all good! I wasn't offended by your post or anything :)

I use the P.E.O.P.S. Soft Driver 1.17 as my video plugin. (not the best choice I think, but it works good for me.) For the details of my config just see this screenshot: This plugin is easy to use and made for compatibility mostly and not for lots of eyecandy, so you might get it working with that one quickly.

If not than I guess that you have to try different plugins or settings. Emulators can work very differently on various machines, so you might need to experiment until you find a setup which works well with your system. I can't go more into detail, because I'm no expert in those fields, but I hope I was able to help and you find a good configuration for your emulator.

Saving is quite easy. You just need to select a working memory card under config > memory cards Memory card files should be somewhere in your emulators folder. Then to save the game just go to the options menu of Rumble Arena and you should find a save option there. (Also turn auto save on or off.)

Hey percy7!

I can understand your concerns because of loading times, so I'd like to get them out of the way in a friendly manner. First of all I timed the transition between two fights in my run and you were pretty right, the loading screen takes approximately 9 seconds until the next fight begins. (When "Rumble" appears on the screen)

However I did so aswell with the runs of KHeartz and Azure, and their screens were also loading for those 9 seconds. Since they used the actual PS2 console, I guess 9 seconds for the loading time should be somewhat accurate. My fps were locked to 60 (NTSC) aswell.

Sorry if I ask but are you sure you tried everything at the video config of your emulator to fix this? If you'd be able to get the 9 second loading time aswell, that would be the best I guess. Of course there might be many reasons why different loading times occur, however as I mentioned the 9 seconds of mine should be alright if runs on actual console get the same loading time.

https://image.spreadshirtmedia.com/image-server/v1/compositions/1006191890/views/1,width=300,height=300,appearanceId=2,version=1440417743/drugs-rule-everything-around-me-t-shirts-men-s-t-shirt.jpg

Hint for 100%. Nobody is going to watch the whole thing if it's like a 3 digit hour run. I guess nobody will realize that some minutes are not on twitch because your stream went down. However most of your run should be streamed so everyone could at least technically comprehend how your run went and when you got the important card drops. That's at least how I understood the rule.

Also drug using is by far not the easiest method to cheat during a run. People use cheat codes or just restream pre-recorded tool assisted runs. Using certain drugs might be good if you want to stay awake during a dangerously long run, but if you suck at the game then there is no way you can WR just by that. Also most drug users wouldn't even like to do speedruns while high, because in comparison to other things (music, dancing, talking, sex [...]) it seems rather boring. Don't want to go personal, but I guess doctorwoot isn't much into that topic so maybe he has no clue how much drugs might influence the runs. And how much they won't.

I'm not the first one to mention how stupid this discussion is, right?

I also nominate A3r1us. Same reasons as already mentioned, with him being extremely active at races but also attempts on his own.

Alright my opinion is not going to change things, but the post of Kollin encouraged me to share it with you.

First of all. I want to trust Mergy. Let's just say I trust him. Ofc if things turn out differently it will be a huge disappointment for me. But unless Mergy gets proven as a cheater I'll just believe that he is telling the truth and it has to be something with his modded ps2. I don't even now myself why I trust him, but it's just my feeling. Think whatever you want about this.

So people think he cheated by using an iso with altered droprates. It turned out that it's easy to cheat with that method. Okay. Another thing to keep in mind: Even if some people call mergy dumb. He clearly isn't. And I'm pretty sure if he wanted to cheat than he would doublecheck to make sure that the droprates make exactly 2048. Maybe something else went wrong, who knows.

I still have to admit that it's not looking good for Mergy. There is no way for him to prove that he not cheated. I bet even if he would record a whole session of grinding for 000 and actually getting it, there would be still lots of people who would point their fingers at him. Anyway let's say he wasn't cheating. It seems it has to do something with his modded ps2. (Unless someone else also gets a 000 in the near future, which might be highly unlikely.) But what exactly should lead to this glitch? Nobody knows.

People are also saying that even if it was a glitch his pb times should get off the leaderboard. I don't really see why. If this really is a glitch, then the droprates might be alright and it might be just that the drop somehow glitches out and becomes 000. In this case his pb times would be alright, because there the 000 drop never happened at all. They should get taken off however if he was cheating. If he was cheating. Besides Mergy himself, nobody knows that right now. Nobody.

People will see my post as picking Mergy's side. This is partially true, because I want Mergy to somehow get out of this in a good way, because I THINK he tells the truth. I THINK. I don't know it for a fact. I'm just saying that even after all those issues (which some people even call evidence) you basically can not call him a cheater right away. You can not call him trustworthy either. It's a dead situation right now and we should treat it as such. We have to wait until we get more information somehow.

About what to do right now. Technically I would say nothing, but things get really controversial because he is the WR holder. Even if certain people think all of his times (and even he by hisself) should be removed, I guess many people just get crazy about it because it's about a WR. So I could actually see if his WR time gets removed, because it is not set in stones yet if he cheated or not. However removing everything what Mergy did would be a dumb decision imho because nothing is proven right now. Don't call him part of the community, don't call him WR holder, everythings fine. But just do not call him a cheater, because nobody knows this yet. I really hope things get cleared soon. I don't know how, and I somehow doubt that the research is going to get something which will turn things around, but I just hope that they find SOMETHING. If it gets Mergy banned or just his times, I don't really care. I bet even if his WR time gets removed, he'll still have lots of fun of doing more attempts, maybe on a different console?

TLDR; we don't know anything. I want to trust mergy, but ofc I don't know facts, how should I? I hope that research gives us more information so we can take a decision. For now we shouldn't decide anything. (Unless people get mad because of the WR. I think nobody would even want to have a WR if it was connected with such a huge amount of drama.)

Welcome to SRC Tietscha! so which game will you try to run first?

Well I personally do not keep this. I did lots of runs before I even knew that livesplit keeps track of this (or maybe it didn't do so one year ago?) so I had lots of runs which only had the reset count. Basically I sticked to this until today, I never activate the completition rate. I also run lots of games where you need to reset in the beginning (Pokemon games, Digimon games, Yugioh FM) and I like to reset in general, so the completition rate wouldn't even stand for what it's pretending to be. But of course this might be different for other runners with other games. I'm also a fan of statistics, but in most cases I'm way too lazy to keep them on my own.

So you try to organize a 3-day-marathon without having even a fraction of runs to fill the time? I think it's hart so start from scratch if you don't have a big community built yet.

Anyway I think I have some games I could show on the marathon, also a very long one which rarely finds it way to a marathon bc of the length. (Digimon World 3 might fill around 8 hours roughly while being marathon-safe) So I think I could indeed help out. I don't want to submit yet, because I don't know if I will have time on that date. I will come back to this later, once I am better organized. Hopefully you'll find more runners until then.

Best of luck to you, I hope you can make the marathon happen and raise some money to fight cancer!

1. I am Tom aka Hdot. I run a bit of everything I'd say, games of the Digimon series are a big part of it, though.
2. I saw some speedrunners at the GDQ events and was really amazed by their skill. Then I wondered if it's not something you could pull of yourself.
3. Casual players might call it cheating, but for us it's like 'if it is in the game, it's legit'. No hardware manipulation or cheating devices and you're good to go. Speedrunning is about bringing the game to it's limits and glitches are part of those. For people who say that we are only good at games because of glitches: No. Nearly every game also has a "glitchless" category.
4. Beating the game very fast always feels like breaking the game or in other terms destroying it, dominating it etc.. It is the feeling that you have strong knowledge of the game and just found the best way to beat it as quickly as possible what makes casual players really gape. Glitches are not necessary for that, but they most of the time add a lot to that feeling of breaking the game, bc they sometimes go with some visual effects like different palettes or messed up sprites etc. so the part of breaking the game becomes indeed visible.
5. Obviously not. Both play to have a good time. The normal player usually also wants to "break the game" but by different means i.e. get good items, gain a high level or just beat the final boss. When we go for any% categories, we don't care at all about all the collectables, in this case it is actually about going with the least possible and make the best out of it.
6. Answered in 4). Also about creating a new one. Glitches are able to do lots of more things than you might think. SMW runner SethBling used a set of glitches to execute 'Code Injection' which made him able to code the well-known game 'Flappy Bird' right into Super Mario World. No hardware manipulation at all, he just used glitches to put new code into the game and execute it.
7. Aesthetical need to be defined in the first place. While doing what it takes to speed through the game in a perfect way execution wise sounds aesthetical, sitting in front of the PC for 7 hours straight does clearly not. :)
8. It's just a new way of playing. It is fun and if it's not anymore than you still can go back and throw the speedrun strats overboard. You just have to get rid of the "How can I do this the fastest way" mentality. Yes, speedrunning is still playing. We are a friendly community and while it all looks astonishing, we are also goofing around a lot. It's whole different then all the competitive and e-sports scenes. I think you could ask this questions on those communities.
9. It's not really important at all, but still you can add a few things to get a personal style to your speedrun, even if it's only small things of eye candy. Known in the community as 'Swag' or what not. Yoshi's Island speedrunners doing crazy shit during the autoscrollers, Pokemon speedrunners to name their characters 'I' and 'U' to let the game narrate it itself. Or just a plain different, maybe more risky strat you are using. You can work on your own play style but it's not one of the things you intentionally focus on.

_

Thanks for your interest, Antonin. I liked your questions and answering them. I hope you have great success with your essay and if you should finish it I'd love to read some passages :)

Nobody will ever beat your time Syd, bc emulator players are lazy af and do not learn slots. (Besides you.)

@RooneyBoy just don't mind the best times on the leaderboard unless you are willing to learn very hard strats. I'd recommend to just learn the no-reset strats and once you have a good run accept it. This game is lots of fun to run and you don't always need top times to be proud of yourself. For everybody not running this game, I guess finishing in even 2 or 3 hours is still really amazing! :)

gl on your runs then! welcome and enjoy your stay :)

Also don't forget that you can play console games too with a crappy laptop. If it's not too bad then it should handle for example an SNES emulator quite well, which has some great games for speedrunning. Just check them on the site here. I could recommend Super Mario World 11 exit. It's easy to learn and even if you do bad, you will improve quickly. Also lots of players have run this, so it's kind of fun to start in the leaderboard from the bottom and slowly move upwards. :)

Remember you don't need to get god times to be a speedrunner. Just make sure you improve even if it's slowly, it doesn't matter. You will get WRs if you find some games which are absolutely yours, but until then just do some runs and have fun.

Some platform based fighting games are easy to run. (Examples: Digimon Rumble Arena, One Piece Grand Battle, Brawlhalla, the Smash Bros. series...) You can get decent times as soon as you figured out how to beat all opponents without dying. However the games are still quite competitive because you need very good execution and RNG if you want to get WR. Also these kind of games are below 30 minutes at most, so giving it a try doesn't really hurt.

I guess racing games are also a good recommendation, because the main goal of these games is already to go fast. So it's only a matter of practice in these games.

I also think that most women comedians aren't funny. There are lots of non-comedian girls I know, who are funny enough so that I already shed tears of joy. You can not say that women in general are not funny. Also humor and attraction don't stand in any kind of relationship.

Hint: You don't need to retire from speedrunning once you get a gf (or dates, or whatever). Just do runs whenever you have the time and feel like it. Whether it's every week, month or every year. You're still one of us, don't worry. :)

Alright, the Steam Summer Sale started and the server is already quite unstable. I thought this might be interesting to discuss in any gaming realted forums, though. This is why I started the thread.

What games are you going to purchase and which ones do you recommend? Which are the best deals you should totally grab?

Discuss. :)