theres also the issue that the build of rondo on drac X chronicles is an entirely different build than the pce-cd version. shaft takes less hits to kill on drac X chronicles rondo, for example. At any rate, running ppsspp or bizhawk to run the drac X chronicles version was banned a long time ago, because at that point, you are running an emulator inside of an emulator, lol. Dolphin was banned for the same reason.

As others have said, you can run the PCE-CD version of Rondo in bizhawk, and that is most likely your best bet if you are interested in running Rondo.

This is actually known about, and occurs in the US version as well. Anyone who's ran the game for a decent amount of time has lost a good start to a run to this. It's avoidable as long as you don't eject just as you are crossing over the tile for the dungeon entrance. The swimming in the air glitch is also known, and happens anytime you die outside of the tank in water and also respawn outside of the tank.

As the title says, while the game IS currently out as of today, submissions to this leaderboard will NOT be open until August 12th, 2 weeks after the initial release date of July 29th. This will give the Mods time to enjoy the game and figure out what categories and rules will be needed. Until then, happy Blasting!

thanks for grabbing a vid of that! Hopefully it ends up being useful somewhere in the co-op route, its such a neat little glitch

Sorry i dont have this recorded, but i was messing around playing this co-op with my daughter earlier and found two things.

1: right as she entered a pipe, i grabbed a warp star. this made us switch positions, and left her floating in midair spinning, unable to move. after a couple seconds, she randomly warped into the wall on the left edge of the screen, and every time jump was pressed, her mage shifted upwards one tile. Im not sure if or where this would be useful, but yeah.

2: She was a ghost, i was alive, she was near the very bottom of the screen, and i was near the top. she grabbed a warp star while dead and partially offscreen, which caused me to warp to where she was, instantly killing me because i was at the bottom of the screen. this resulted in me coming back as a ghost, leaving us both as ghosts. The screen continued scrolling endlessly at the speed it was moving when i died until the end of the stage, where we were softlocked since we were both ghosts and couldnt enter the door, and there were no chests/boxes to try to get a powerup to revive with from where this weird dual-ghost anomaly started until the end of the stage.

also, wanted to elaborate on the damage boosting over water being an exploit. It definitely is. UraniumAnchor can explain it better, as hes the one who found all the tech details of it, but its something like this: Ice, water and lava all use the same bit mask, but in area 6 the insta kill variable is toggled off. Thats why when you damage boost over water or lava, you have ice physics.

With that said, my opinion would be to leave it. its a nice risk vs. reward kinda thing to go for.

yeah, they do both use the same mapper. its not reflected in this thread, but its now known that the lag difference is due to differences in the way the 2 versions handle their RNG routines.

just wanted to add that i added a randomizer channel to the BM speedruns discord server, feel free to join us there if you wanna pick our brains more easily :D https://discord.gg/Kgt6Gap

tried a couple seeds so far, and great work so far! to chime in on the water walking question, at most i would make it something that can be toggled. Its good to hear you are planning on adding even more to it, and im excited to see how this ends up!

A couple suggestions:

This rando uses the US rom, which has limited continues. I feel like having infinite continues (or just infinite lives, to prevent people from game over warping), would be much better for a BM rando. The JP rom has infinite continues, if you didnt already know

Touching further on the JP/US thing, the JP version of the game is noticeably less laggy in general all over the place, due to differences in how the JP version runs its RNG routines compared to the US version. Might be worth switching to the JP rom as a base just for how much smoother it runs overall, in addition to infinite continues (which i know infinite continues is a minor thing that can be changed on the US rom).

And finally, i found a pretty nasty softlock playing thru a seed earlier. the seed had what would have been the entrance to either area 2 or 3 in the normal game take me to area 4 instead. i was in area 4 without hover, and due to the design of area 4, theres a LOT of places you can fall and not be able to get out of unless you die or reset without hover. Some of these places dont have any enemies, so your only option is to reset. might be worth forcing an exception to where Area 4 can ONLY come up after getting Hover in the progression logic.

EDIT: just realized you could get out most of those areas without hover if you have the wall upgrade. I however, did NOT have said upgrade yet, so i was completely screwed. So it might be a good idea to make it so in the progression logic it will not make you go into area 4 unless you have hover or wall

B-ran made a serious discovery as far as version difference goes. We don't know how we missed this before. On the PS4/PSP version of Rondo, Shaft takes SIGNIFICANTLY LESS hits to kill with Richter than he does on the original version. With this discovery, it proves that the PS4/PSP version is a completely different build of the game, and thus will be separated into it's own separate category, with the now current categories being PCE/VC/EMU, and PSP/PS4. Please use the appropriate platform subcategories when submitting future runs.

you can disagree all you want, but the fact remains that Wii VC is emulation, and would be classified as such if we ever separated console from emu

TLDR: Wii VC is already emulation, so all splitting console and emu boards is gonna do is make it so wii vc goes under emu and console runs will just be actual PC-Engine CD hardware runs.

1: Wii VC is Emulation 2: on both actual PC-E hardware and PC-E emulator, load times are inconsistent and vary every time, so you cannot simply just remove the load times 3: Wii VC and the "port" contained in the PSP game Drac X Chronicles are both already inherently emulation, therefore by emulating them with Dolphin or PPSSPP you are literally emulating an emulator. 2 layers of emulation... really??? theres a reason ppsspp and dolphin are banned for this game 4: if we separate console from EMU then EMU, Wii VC and PSP hardware will go into the EMU board, because again they are emulation.

Tons of new strats for Shantae have been developed recently, shaving a LOT of time off of the run. Im going to list them in a moment, but first i have to give shoutouts to hcfwesker for most of these strats, and Mathwe for the A6 skip.

Area 1:

Mother Brain quick kill: Stand below MB, throw out 3 clouds, switch to scimitars and activate them, rythmically mash your hair whip.

Area 2:

Crabullus quick kill: Same as MB, stand below Crabullus, throw out 3 clouds, switch to scimitars and activate them, rythmically mash your hair whip.

Area 5:

Quicker Descent: After grabbing the Mother Brain transformation, it is much faster to hop out of the tank and swim down with Shantae and kill the wall monster with her hair whips. Shantae swims downwards MUCH faster than the tank sinks, and the wall monster drops to just a couple seconds of hair whipping.

Zoidberg one cycle: Enter the room in elephant form, at the start of the fight, dash 3 times, which will put you behind Zoidberg. Throuw out 3 clouds, switch to and activate scimitars, and rythmically mash your hair whip. Step away from Zoidberg after 4-5 whips to minimize damage taken at the cost of a few tenths of a second.

Area 6

Major skip: Now that tank summoning via pause menu has been added to the game, Shantae can actually take the back door route to get the Wall Climb upgrade early, just like Gunvolt! summon the tank and use it to shoot out the ice wherever neccessary, and use the monkey transform to scale the walls.

Area 8:

Antibody Cell quick kill: make sure you enter the room as close to dead center horizontally as you can. At the start of the fight, throw out 3 clouds, then walk straight upwards until you get just past the mid point of the room. transform to Mother Brain, aim downwards and hold fire.

it would absolutely count as an emulator run, as the SNES Classic is literally an emulator in a box with a fancy GUI.

nah, you dont need a Famicom to play JP games, just gotta get a cart converter. They run about 20 bucks on ebay usually, or if youre lucky you can find one in an old NES cart. I got my converter in a Hogan's Alley cart.

Im using the save state functionality built into the Everdrive N8. I dont own a PowerPak. I use my Everdrive for practice and casual play, and actual carts for run attempts. You can use any Blaster Master game rom, just gotta make sure to turn on Save States in the Everdrive menu. I would make sure to grab the JP version of the rom, its name is Chou-Wakusei Senki MetaFight, as well.

Do you run, or are you thinking of running, any of the Blaster Master games? If so, join us at https://discord.gg/fbv9HN6 , where most of the BM series speedrunning discussion goes on!

As Mathwe said, just watch a couple of the top runs for any categories youre interested in. The game doesnt really have any crazy glitches or anything like that, so the route and strats used are pretty straightforward and easy to pick up by watching runs. You can also join this discord server https://discord.gg/fbv9HN6 , where a lot of the BM series speedrunning discussion happens.

Im considering making Any% tutorials for each of the characters after AGDQ, but that wont happen for at least a few weeks.

im down for using the IGT for boss rush, however, screenshots would NOT be allowed. still have to have a video of your run. screenshots are too easily faked and doctored.