I can't think of a good name for it and I also haven't tried the run yet, but I thought of a category that turns the minigames themselves into something speedrunnable, where you must either meet the in-game high score or finish the minigame normally in order to complete a segment. Finishing the minigame normally is an option because it turns out some in-game high scores may be almost impossible, like 400 points in Brick Blasters, which I apparently have never gotten in my 8 years of owning the game.
I may try this category whether it becomes a thing or not; in concept it sounds a lot better than tournament based categories because of how RNG centric they are when it comes to CPU rolls and what bugs you get.
Here's my proof of concept from an emulator, where I go for these high scores in all of the Castle minigames. The goal is to reach the same number of points that the highest pre-set score has, then quit the minigame and move onto the next one. So since Spilt Milk's highest pre-set score is 500, I got my 500 points then quit. Though, I did fail to reach some high scores, so I finished the minigame normally and that counts as well. In a full game run, you'd do this with all minigames in the game; even in just the Castle alone, I thought there was some decent potential for playing the minigames well and going faster. Although some minigames are more autoscrolley than others, I imagine there'd be so many minigames that let you go really fast, making for a pretty fun speedrunning experience in this game, something I know 200 drops is unable to offer. I especially bet my favorite minigame, Petal Plucker would be so much fun to try to go fast in. Bug Catcher may be ignored here though, since it's not in the Skirmishes mode and doesn't have pre-set scores. Also remember that I am player 2 in here, since player 1 is reserved for my GCC adapter.
