Hey, you might remember me from about a year ago, when I thought about speedrunning this game, but didnt. I remember you guys mentioning something about a speed difference between platforms (pc was faster then gamecube iirc). Do you know how big this difference is, and what causes it?

Yo, PC is faster than other platforms because of load times. The difference is pretty noticeable when you're aiming for a good time although i don't know exactly how many seconds you'll lose if running on console. It happens to be so because load times in this game are bound to the random animation that plays between game states (you know, the lightning bolt that bounces). Well it just so happens that there's a fixed number of those animations and they differ between versions because, i assume, of performance reasons. And as you might expect since most PCs load game states almost instantly the animations are much shorter there than on older, slower consoles. You could make the argument that we could simply remove load times post-run and it has been discussed a while back but we never got around to it because it's tedious af and we're a lazy bunch. Hope that clears things up :)

thanks for the reply :) that clears things up indeed, but at how much time would you roughly be looking in total (any%)? is it like 20 seconds or more like several minutes? cuz if it's, let's say, less than a minute I wouldnt care too much tbh. and maybe something like different leaderboards per console could solve the problem? although I can imagine that might be a little weird with so few runners

You can already sort by platform so i guess that sort of does the trick :)

Let's see... there are 12 levels + boss which means you go to the world map 12 times in total, which means 36 loads in the run. I'd say loads on PC are between 2 and 5 seconds so you're looking at about 2-3 minutes of loading times. I'd guess- and don't quote me on this cause i have close to no idea- that you can add 1 more minute for consoles because it has to write data to the cartridge and the animations are slightly longer (you can save time by playing without a cartridge though, wink wink).

ok, in that case the loading time difference wont keep me from running it on console :) now lets see if I can find motivation to actually start learning/running instead of being lazy. thanks for the help