Since the leaderboards have now officially added Any% PNP+, you may be asking: "What is PNP+?" "What does Any% NMG mean?" Well this forum post will (hopefully) shed some light on what the recent changes to the CB leaderboards entail.
So, NMG stands for 'No Major Glitches' and it is a category where regular Pause & Play is allowed, but not PNP+. Pause & Play is when you pause as a moving object is near the end of its cycle, causing the game to think it has reached the end of its cycle. As a result, the object switches directions immediately after you unpause if done correctly. This is not a very major glitch, as it saves at most a few seconds in each world IGT. It loses time RTA because it takes time to pause and unpause.
Pause & Play+, discovered by our very own @Bigunit, is a glitch where you forcefully pause the game during a level transition so the timer pauses between levels when it would normally be running. One way of doing this on your mobile device it to open up your notification menu or whatever that is by sliding down from the top of your screen. Now this saves an enormous amount of time IGT because it takes 3-4 seconds for each level to transition into the next, and you are tricking the game into skipping the bulk of that added time. Needless to say, this was a controversial discovery and we needed a different category for it. Here is the example run that Bigunit did, and is the current PNP+ world record:
Hopefully this explained the difference between PNP (Pause & Play) and PNP+ (Pause & Play+). Before I end off, the reason why I made PNP+ a miscellaneous category was because:
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I don't think it will be that popular. It will lose traction after a few weeks or months of people grinding attempts.
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It's not even that fun to run, and sometimes the trick doesn't work so it's inconsistent. You're just sliding down the notification menu praying that the game won't add time between levels.
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I couldn't figure out how to make it a subcategory.
With all that said, thanks for reading this and best of luck in your future Cat Bird runs.
Just an update, any category named PNP+ has been renamed to No Restrictions instead. This way, reset glitch on emulator is allowed as well as Pause & Play+. Their timesaves are practically the same and reset glitch is supposedly just as inconsistent as a well executed PNP+. Another big change to the NMG Any% categories is if the "New Best Time" animation does not show up in your run, you are required to add 1 second to the time displayed in the time trial screen at the end. This is due to the fact that any run without that animation will usually only add 1 second to the time you entered the portal as opposed to 2. This change does not affect All Crowns. Hope you like these new changes :)
Another update: As you might have noticed, the Any% NR times went down from a bit under the normal WR to less than a minute in Marda, Grasi and Winda and slightly over a minute in Zipsa. This is due to a glitch discovery by @Skycloud, Timer Reset Glitch (TRG). This glitch allows the ingame timer to be lowered to up to ~6 to 7 seconds before the boss of the world if performed multiple times. TRG is performed by using the emulator-only reset button R (this might not work if you have hotkeys enabled) right when cat bird is disappearing in the final portal, resetting the level, making the player play the boss level again, but also lowering the timer, as discussed [TRG being emulator-only and making the run basically a glorified IL means NR will probably stay in Misc. for the foreseeable future]. (Also, PNP+ has been renamed to Forced Transition Pause (FTP) to differentiate it from normal PNP [since they are pretty different and FTP isn't really a better PNP], although you can of course still call FTP PNP+.) Have fun and keep on speedrunning cb ;) Bonus info: here's a run with an input display using TRG, so you can see when to press R to make TRG work (since it can be pretty confusing to hit the correct timeframe):
Possibly the last update regarding these categories, we officially have a Category Extensions page! Because of this, the mods have decided to move all No Restriction runs to that page, as the category was unpopular anyway, having only a few runs done at all. As a result, the records will no longer be tracked here, but instead at https://www.speedrun.com/cb_ce
Thanks for reading this, have a great day!
