Hello everyone!

Thank you so much to everyone who volunteered, ran a game, donated, or watched our event over the last two weekends. Thanks to all of you, we were able to raise $3000 for Save the Children with our first charity event!

We hope that you had an enjoyable two weekends, but we are also always looking for what you liked as well as how we can improve to be better. We're using this thread here so that you can post your feedback on NASA 2020. Let us know what you liked, what you didn't like, and how we could do even better going forward.

If you want to submit feedback anonymously, we also have a Google Form you can use instead: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z84lPp5XxWHtDQroQYWC95Py2HGp-lYqTSd3Vb4Nx_E/

Barring another year of lockdowns, we're hoping to see all of you next year for NASA 2021 in Cleveland!

Hi, I was wondering if I could be added as a moderator for Sunset Overdrive? https://www.speedrun.com/sunset_overdrive

I have been doing runs in the community since the game was created, and it seems the current mods don't check the site too frequently (Most recent sign-in was 28 days ago). I've tried reaching out to one of the mods on Youtube, but have not yet received a response. (Most mods twitter accounts do not exist or are not recently used, and most twitch accounts have not streamed in 8+ months)

I've finally provided my updated notes here: https://www.speedrun.com/sunset_overdrive/guide/r8u28 , so feel free to let me know if you find anything new or better to update these with!

This game has had 3 new runs submitted in the last month, so I wouldn't say that the community is dead right now. If anything, considering the last submitted runs were almost 2 years prior, it seems the PC version is already drawing people in! I need to get around to submitting my updated routing to the guide, but if you want to get more eyes in on this game I think that would be great!

All of the runs that were done a while ago were all Any% Classic because everyone decided that competing on the same leaderboard was more interesting. If anyone does a run but none of the current mods do respond then I think we can get new mods setup. I plan on running this soon on PC as well. I also think these runs will be a bit faster because of being able to use an SSD, but not sure how much time it would save over an Xbox One run.

The only things I wish they added that would've made runs more interesting were skipping cutscenes and an easy way to do a NG+.

https://wccftech.com/sunset-overdrive-november-16th-pc/

I doubt the PC version will include anything like NG+ or cutscene skipping based on this article (my two biggest wishes), but this version will contain all DLC and may have faster load times.

Since this may draw in new runners, should we be looking to add a PC option for runs now?

Came across this post just now. The game is as alive as you want it to be! I haven't played it too much lately but if you have a time you can put up then go for it! Since there is a speedrun mode in game that removes all the load times anyways, I was thinking that we should eventually update the main timing method here to use IGT instead of real time. That way it would be the same for console or PC runners since load times are removed.

Well I wouldn't think it would be worth creating a new category for, and it really is the same categories of all 4 of those games, just adding a few stars that we wouldn't know how to skip. Thanks for the estimates though! That gives a good idea.

Hi everyone,

Me and a friend were potentially looking at doing a blind 246 race in the next couple months, since it seems more reasonable to complete in one sitting than a blind 602.

Looking at some threads talking about SMS here, it looks like playing the game completely blind would cause the final star count to be higher than 246.

I was just wondering how many total stars a blind run would pick up in the "246" and what a completely blind estimate might be? (For planning purposes)

We chose USD to keep consistency with all the other events we have held so far. Last year's NASA as well as our preNASA event were all done in USD, so we have decided to use that. If in the future we do keep the event in Canada, we could look at potentially moving to CAD as our payment type.

UPDATE: Look 2 posts below for information on booking a room using the group rate.

The event this year will be taking place at Holiday Inn Oakville (Centre) 590 Argus Rd, Oakville, ON L6J 3J3, Canada.

If you wish to get more information on how to get from Pearson Airport to the hotel, or more information on food options in the area, visit https://nasamarathon.com/info

The games list for NASA 2017 has finally been confrimed! You can view the final accepted games list at https://nasamarathon.com/games . The list is sorted by runner, so you should be able to find your run quickly.

With the games list being finalized, we are also now opening registration. The cost of registration is $50 USD, and will need to be paid by all attendees (including runners).

To register, complete the form for your availability (select "none" if you are not running anything). We will use this to put together the final schedule. Please visit https://nasamarathon.com/register to register!

Yes. We'll use the 21st for setup, hold the event from the 22-26, then use the 27 for bonus stream and teardown.

We currently have a hold on a date, but need to have a call with one of the hotel staff when they are back from vacation to finalize the booking. If everything goes well we will have a date confirmed by the end of this week, but it is more likely to see an announcement from us in the next 2-3 weeks.

Hey everyone,

In just under an hour we will be starting with our pre-NASA marathon! We have a separate page created on this site for this marathon where you can watch the stream, donate, and see the progress of our goals and bid wars.

Go to http://www.speedrun.com/preNASA/ and click on the "Donate" tab to donate or see the progress of the goals we have set.

Well we left it empty because the loading dock door there was open so people were constantly bringing trucks and gear through all day thursday, and figured that they would just be moving all of their stuff in the Friday morning like we were. It turns out that wasn't the case.

For the projector, they set that up for us on the thursday because we had requested one. After setting it up and realizing how big it was, the 3 of us there had to make the call of either getting rid of it and sticking with only the TV, or having the areas sectioned off. We ended up going with the second one because we figured the first wouldn't give a good enough view if too many people sat down.

Ideally, we would have been given permission to use the whole area beside us on the Thursday, and move the projector over so we could have more space behind the projector AND a bunch of seats behind the runner. It's unfortunate that we weren't able to get that though :(

As one of the staff of this event, I will be posting most of my feedback from an overall perspective of the event to add to everything else that was already here. There may be some duplicate information but I wrote this all before coming home from work so I might as well post it. Not that if you disagree with anything I said feel free to let me know and I will try to better explain myself / my thoughts.

Event setup I arrived at the event on the Thursday mid-afternoon to start setting up for the event. The plan was that by the end of the first day I would meet up with some other people helping to run the event (which ended up being Shokoshu and Deln), get all of the gear Dreamhack said they would provide, then test that gear so that when the other 3 NASA people arrived with the rest of the tech Friday morning we would be good to finish setting up. What ended up happening was that by the end of the first day we had tables, chairs, a projector, power (which got set up around 9pm) and an internet connection that we did not have any PCs to test. We got the PCs the next morning at 7am, where one of them were password protected, and found out that the internet did not work. It took until about 1pm to get the internet setup, and 4pm to get a second working computer. This was problematic since our first run was a PC run (Mirror's Edge). These problems caused the setup to have to be rushed in the final couple hours, which lead us off to a quick and unchecked start which was at least relatively smooth.

Tech I won't be going into too much detail about the specifics since other people will be doing that, but the tech had a few problems that could have been avoided with more time. In the months leading up to the event, the NASA staff were under the impression that someone else would be getting a tech guy that would be able to provide most of the gear and run the tech, while we would help where needed. Once we were notified that this would not be happening (5 WEEKS before the event), the burden fell almost fully on us to obtain and provide the gear. In the month or two leading up to Dreamhack, Dark-Aries spent a few hundred dollars ordering a bunch of gear and cables, renting mixers, and soldering connectors to help run this event. We were able to bring the gear and set it up fine, but the problem with having to order and receive all this gear so late meant that Dark-Aries was the only one who knew how the full setup worked. This caused problems during the first night because it was just myself and Lurk from NASA there (since Aries had been up for 36 hours at this point), so when things went wrong it took a lot of struggling between myself, Lurk, Shokosu, and a few runners who came to help to figure out how to solve the problem, and even then we still had to call Aries when sleeping to fix an issue. Having less notice and time to setup, caused by having the burden placed on us for tech later than expected and delayed setup times during the Thursday/Friday prevented us all from being able to run the setup effectively.

Scheduling Due to the tech issues mentioned above, one thing that many people noticed is that we fell a few hours behind schedule on the first night. At the time the NASA staff on site determined that we may need to cut runs or shorten categories since we were under the assumption that we had to be out by 6pm at the latest, so we ended up going into the DK64 category changes which has been discussed at length above. I still stand that this was the right choice since we ended up finishing the event at 9pm. Another problem with scheduling was that there were 2 schedules (one on this site and the other on Horaro). Since the NASA staff only had access to edit the one on this site, we made updates to only that schedule when changes were needed, while No Reset made changes to the Horaro. This caused the two schedules to get mixed up, and after some talks between the two sides we finally rejoined the two to be the same again. This was caused by an issue that I will mention in the next section. Overall, we ended at 9pm, which I felt was much later than I wanted to be out of there considering the 4 of us had to pack up and then do the 6 hour trip home in the middle of the night as opposed to the end of the day.

NASA / No Reset "Joint" Marathon Before I get into this section which will obviously be the most controverial, I would like to say that these comments are based on what I thought each group would be providing to the event. Looking at Shokusu's post above, it seems that there may have been some more miscommunication on what each side was expected to contribute, so this section may be up for debate.

The biggest issue I feel that our staff had with this event was the perceived splitting of work that ended up happening since this was advertised as a joint event between NASA and No Reset. I can break down the contributions as follows:

Gear provided: NASA - Mixer, Matrix, Scaler, Majority of cables and gear, webcam, mic for french restream No Reset - Laptop for french restream, a few cables and gear

Manpower: NASA - 1-2 staff present at all times to run english stream and help runners set up No Reset - A few staff and other people to run French restream about 25-50% of the time, 1 staff present about 50% of the time to help with tech and set runners up. Note that this is for people I directly associated with No Reset, not other runners who helped us along the way.

Here you can see that I feel we provided much more in these areas. The final area is communication. While at the event, in a conversation I was told by a No Reset staff member (word for word) that "we provided 80% of the runners for the event". While I feel that this is not true, because I believe that runners in the area would have applied regardless of who was responsible for the marathon, it was definitely noticed that since a lot of the runners were from Quebec, they definitely preferred talking to the No Reset staff over us to communicate thoughts and issues. Since the communication between our groups weren't great, I feel that having two seperate groups for contact sometimes caused that problem to grow. Because of this, other than from a few runners and staff who were very friendly and great to work with, it felt that the 4 of us were outsiders who were there to provide the NASA name and the tech.

Venue As was mentioned before, we had a relatively small area with a projector that took up the whole space so that there was no real connection between attendees and the runners. Since the retro zone beside us ended up never showing, having that space to provide more space for practice, tech, sleeping, and runner interaction would've benefitted a huge amount to the cramped feeling and the interaction of the event. Sound balancing was also quite difficult because during the day some of the stages and vendors (especially MSI) were so loud that it was hard to balance the audio and sound without getting feedback or pulling in all of the outside sounds. Also, MSI pulled the internet plug near the end of the marathon so we lost internet for a few of the last runs. Our location in the venue was great, but I feel that the problems above made it much harder to draw a crowd at the actual venue.

Positives Even though there was a lot of negative feedback above, it is worth mentioning the things that went well. The location of the venue was great with a lot of food places nearby. Having a free Monster vendor was great to get some much needed energy when tired. All of the runners were very nice and cooperative when it came to setting up their runs, and most of the runners were very understanding when tech issues delayed or even moved their runs.Speaking of the runners, I was very thankful to have various runners come and help when they felt it was necessary (shoutouts to deln and pixel911 who both provided help throughout the event when I was there). Also even though I did have a few negative points about No Reset in my post, I wanted to give a huge thanks to Shokusu who was hugely helpful before and during the event.

Closing Thoughts Overall I feel that I learned a lot from this marathon. Even though there was a lot to complain about, it was an experience I would do again if a few things were changed. First, we would need a lot more time to prepare the tech for the event. Knowing 5 weeks before the event while we were at SGDQ was not enough time. For setup at Dreamhack, we would definitely need a larger space and get all of the gear we were promised earlier than a few hours before we are expected to start. As for doing a joint marathon again, I would not want to do another marathon with No Reset. While working with some members of their organization was very positive and enjoyable, some of the other members were too much to handle to make it worth working with them again. That isn't saying I wouldn't work with people outside of our group again, it is just that I would not work with ALL members in this particular group of people again. Thanks for reading this way too long post, and if you disagree with anything I wrote, feel free to message me and I will discuss it as long as the discussion remains civil.

Thanks, - ThoseCrazyGuys

In case anyone here has not checked the other threads yet, please look this thread: http://www.speedrun.com/dhm/thread/4dgj8 . It contains the Google Form to sign-up, which you need to do to be able to get your pass for next weekend. Try to have it done by the end of this week so we can get the names to the Dreamhack Staff with time to spare.

The text block without the link to make it readable until he fixes the link in his main post:

The title of the thread puts it pretty simply. My source is my father, who works for a company located at the Trudeau airport. So he's in and out of the city everyday and keeps tabs on the local news there. So if you want to drive to the event, please keep in mind that there will be a lot of extra time (hard to say exactly, but expect the worst) spent in traffic. In my two second google search for train tickets, I discovered that the Montreal Central Station is across the street from Place Bonaventure. So that looks like a good alternative for those coming from out of town.