Recently, I've really been enjoying watching speed runners play minimum captures on Mario Odyssey. Playing this game has made me realize that you can beat the whole game with very few jumps off of the ground. I think that a minimum jumps category might add a needed level of difficulty and it would be fun to experiment with new potential mechanics in a run like this.

To detail some of the mechanics that could be used to skip jumps:

1. As many people have realized, the hit box of the red pipes that don't end are smaller than the green, wall jump-able walls allowing you to refresh your jumps where it is not intended.

2. the length of a wall jump can be slightly extended by first holding the opposite direction of the wall and then jumping, allowing you to clear longer distances without jumping

3. Similar to #1, the hitbox of a red pipe on the ground is smaller than that of the green ground area so, with a pretty small window of time, you walk off the platform and jump before you hit the pipe, allowing you to get off the ground without actually jumping off the ground.

4: if you die in mid air while moving in a direction, you retain some momentum when you respawn, allowing you to gain a little extra distance and height. This includes dying by pressing y

Lastly for the rules of the category, after some thought I've figured out the 7 things that give the player vertical momentum to classify which one is a "normal jump"

1: The flappy jump is the easiest because it indicates whenever one is used with the three flap icons

2: Wall jumps are harder because depending on your momentum, if you walk off a ledge and press space, you could just do a "normal jump" in mid air or perform a wall jump on the ledge below. This poses the biggest issue but luckily wall jumps are unique in two ways: They instantly accelerate the player to maximum speed in the direction away from the wall and they always jump the same height regardless of how long the player holds the space bar. This is definitely the most sketchy so I think for the moderators sake, this should largely be an honors system as jumping after immediately falling off a ledge is one of the most used tools in this run.

3. Just as easy as #1, the Yellow Boxes refresh your flappy jumps when used and disappear as soon as they are used. They also are never placed even remotely close to the ground :)

4: a blue pipe with wind pushes the player up, it only effects the players vertical momentum and you cannot use a "flappy jump" while effected by it, its a little tricky because players can normal jump before they enter the wind but potentially an input display could be used, also the pipes, (if you don't jump) always take you to the same height so maybe its not necessary.

5: Those pesky normal jumps, as stated in #2 it will be hard to differentiate these and wall jumps but these do not change your horizontal momentum at all (as far as I can tell) and can only be performed while on or recently on a round surface so they are different, just tricky. Its worth m=noting that the duration that the player holds the jump button affects the jump height which also applies to flappy jumps.

6. elevators are obvious, no explanation needed

7: respawning, same as #6

So with those definitions, the rules might look like this:

#1 the least amount of jumps need to be used to complete a run, any runs submitted with fewer jumps then previous runs automatically top the leaderboard, regardless of time

#2 attempting to disguise a jump as a wall jump purposefully will invalidate the run (this can be detected through intentionally deceptive patterns of behavior, i.e. going for hard to recognize strats on purpose when not needed)

I don't know how troublesome a category is to create but I've been thinking of this for a while and I think it would be fun to try to pull of a run in a platformer with very few actual jumps. I'm sorry if this wasn't the most efficient way to communicate this but I figured I should get everything out as I'm not a studiously active member of the speedrun.com community. I will be posting some videos theorizing jump skips and other strategies. If you read this far, thank you for hearing me out and I hope you have a wonderful day.

• Mew

i like the idea of least Jumps. you could also do least amount of checkpoints with no deaths.