I've been a fan of Cactus McCoy for a while, so I decided to speedrun it out of pure boredom. I've been grinding offline attempts for a good chunk of the day, with my PB being a 35:28 (a pretty bad time, I know, but I'm starting). In my 25ish total attempts, I've noticed quite a few things The biggest thing I've come across is the effect of taking damage. If you take damage near an enemigo, you'll clip through him. Once the run gets optimized, I can see this clipping (which I'll call Damage Clipping or just DCing) becoming the main tech used, at the very least out of the tech we've discovered. Another thing I've noticed is that Shady Springs is the main run killer. Things like the section with the boxing glove and pistol enemigo cause me more than my share of deaths fairly consistently due to the knockback, often resulting in a reset. I'll probably figure out more as I go, so this'll likely be a thread that's updating fairly often. Well, as updated as a thread for a game this niche can be.

Hi there. Indeed that clipping glitch in pretty useful. I've always called it "knockback enemigos". There's some spots you can do it consistently and some cases where you can only do it if they move in a certain way.

Some other things I've noticed: It seems to be random whether or not you can jump right next to an enemigo (or as I'll call them from now on just migos), making stages like Shady Springs/SS and Powderkeg Pass/PP an even larger pain than they already are Waiting for the machete migo by the end of PM to walk out of the way to be able to jump over it seems to be faster than simply killing it, but I haven't fully tested it out yet. You can jump to the platform with the revolver migo in Ruster Railroad/RR1, saving the time it takes to jump on top of the boxes (I am aware this is in the world record, but I accidentally discovered it before having watched the full WR) And, most importantly, roman candle migos are the bain of my existence

Standing next to an enemigo isn't random as far as I know, the position is just precise. Often punching him helps. But yeah that one section in shady springs is just stupid. It's definitely fastest to jump over that machete guy.

I've found something to help with corner jumps that makes them work 100% of the time if you do it right. If you hit the migo right before landing on the platform, they move back a tad bit, letting you stand on the corner. This makes the stages I was talking about a whole lot easier, especially considering the tech itself (which I will from this point on refer to as safety punching) is very easy to perform consistently.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to do an offline run with my glasses off. My Cactus Canyon was pretty eh (a 1:28 RTA), but then I found something that is probably gonna be crucial after some more optimizations happen. If you can get the boxing glove migo at the start to drop his gloves, not only are you able to do more damage than with the shovel, but they stay with you all level and each swing is quicker. I managed to get a gold split with this by 3 or so seconds (from a 1:36 RTA to a 1:33 RTA), but the RNG isn't the kindest for the route.

I've been forgetting to mention this, there's a little shortcut in sunset gulch you should know about. Around the middle of the level where there's 2 crushers in a row, you can drop down between them where the ground is discolored. Should save a couple seconds

And now, I've found arguably the most important strat I've seen thus far. I've dubbed it "The shuffle". With punching, whipping, and swinging weapons, you can hit at a much faster rate if you hold left and right while mashing s. However, there are a few caveats. Most notably, because of how left takes priority over right, it only works on the left side, but even then it might be keyboard dependent (I say might because I don't know jack about keyboards). In addition to this, doing it with a swinging or whipping weapon requires you to space it out to hit with the edge of the weapon, otherwise you'll just end up turning back and forth. With this, I can definitely see at the very least a 26:2X being possible with even average splits, and the time cap may even be a sub 25 with all of the insane strats in the run (Hitting both migos in the Cactus Canyon gaunlet which I've dubbed "double pipe", boxing glove Prospector Mines, and some more stuff I'm probably forgetting)

I've extended my understanding of how "the shuffle" works. As it turns out, it seems to be a byproduct of something that'll arguably be even more importantly than the shuffle itself. If you turn around after an attack connects, the animation that locks you out of attacking will be cancelled, almost like a Ninja Gaiden slash cancel of sorts. This means that you'll be able to do more damage if facing towards the right, although if you're facing the left it's slower than just doing the shuffle itself. However, that doesn't make it useless. Most notably, it lets you do faster attacks with projectile weapons

Are you basically talking about this? I've tried using it in runs but I usually lose time to mistiming it. I didn't know it works if you just hold left and right though, that seems a lot easier.

More or less, it's more of an attack, turn around, repeat situation. as such I've dubbed it an Attack Turnaround Cooldown Cancel (or ATCC (pronounced like the english word attic), and the left plus right version a Fast Attack Turnaround Cooldown Cancel or Fast ATCC. Was this only done to name it after the megaman speedrun fastatcc? You bet it was