Yeah that's true, though we can still do that by sending each other the case pictures like we did, I'll probably create the guide today and stick our two cases on it for a start.

Awesome, yeah I feel as though if it had been sold in the US there would more than likely be plenty of copies available and more information on each version.

Yeah for sure, if only speedrun.com had a 'wiki' section, where you could just post information about the game without it necessarily being a guide or anything.

The skipper2 folder contains all of the games files (including the lab folder), but with the saves included. Seems that it's a common thing for all skipper and skeeto games as noted on this page at the very bottom: https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Skipper_%26_Skeeto:_The_Great_Treasure_Hunt

Ahh here we go, I found the saves! Turns out if the game isn't run as administrator, sometimes the files get redirected to a different folder. In this case my saves were in C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Skipper2

Yeah, plus there's of course a limited number of versions anyways, for all we know 1.1 and 1.2 could be the only versions with any difference that would affect the speedrun.

That's true, I could definitely see it being the type of thing you'd find at a second-hand shop or a garage sale, unfortunately due to the fact that I don't live in Europe the odds of me stumbling across one is slim to none.

Hmm, I just did that and still nothing, this is really strange, I have no idea where it's storing the saves.

Yeah the way I see it is Discord is good for researching and figuring things out, then the finalized information is then posted to the speedrun page via guides or forum threads

Yeah that's a good idea, though I suppose if we're all discussion is taking place in the forums/discord then yeah it wouldn't be too hard for one person to add them all into one page.

Yeah it's a shame that the game is so obscure, I feel like most game demos can be found online somewhere, though I guess the age of the game mixed with the fact that it was only sold in Europe means that no one might have thought to post it.

I checked the AppData folder, nothing there either, that's strange. However under RegEdit there is a registry entry for the game named 'SavedGame1' and 'SavedGame2', but neither seem to hold any clear data.

I think it kinda varies, a lot of games that I speedrun have pretty dead forums, most of the posts being questions about run verification, categories, and other stuff related to the speedrun.com page itself, whereas chats such as Discord are used for actually researching and discussing the game itself.

Nah I don't think I can :/

Yeah it's a shame, I'm interested in watching them, I always thought YouTube generated automatic subtitles.

That's a good point with the demo note, it could totally be possible that it's hidden in some bundle that doesn't show up on google (Like if it were simply named "5 game demos bundle!" without mentioning the actual game names, I've done a ton of googling for the word 'demo' with all different combinations of the game titles from each language, but still haven't managed to find anything yet.

That's interesting, I don't actually have that folder at all despite having a save near the end of the game. I thought that on my version the saves were stored inside the game install folder but I can't find it there, I'll have a look around soon.

The discord is just for general discussion about speedrunning the game, such as strategies, planning routes, and other stuff, as well as stuff like we're doing with the in-depth analysis of the game.

Ah yeah that's totally possible, hard to tell really since the game rarely gives any errors when it crashes, rather it just closes out completely.

Sweet, I'll set up a guide some time soon with everything we know about each version. It's a shame that multiple people can't edit guides (I don't think), since it would handy to be able to have a few people adding their versions to it.

I have a good feeling that he will respond, he did a video on youtube in 2016 playing through the first game with someone ( in danish, no subtitles :( ), so at least that shows that he's still interested in the original games. It may take a little while for him to respond either way since it doesn't seem like he's too active on there.

Yeah that's true, hopefully it would be distributable, similar to how the original Doom demo was encouraged to be spread around as much as possible in order to introduce many people to it, who would then buy the full game to play the rest of the episodes. I guess that's another thing we may have to ask if we do get our hands on a proper demo like that.

It's funny, I was on archive.org and decided to see if anyone had any versions saved on there so I could check the version, but the only result was one copy of Tales from Paradise Park (The first game), I figured I might as well check it out and lo and behold the game actually came with that demo for the second game. It seems there were a few demos bundled in with it such as freddi fish and pyjama sam, so it seems like that copy was part of a promotional bundle by some third-party company? I haven't seen any other copies of the original game that feature demos for the second game either way, so it could have just been a one-off.

By the way, I'm not sure if you use Discord but I've now set up a server for this game, it should be on the sidebar on the left. I figured it could be a good way for people to discuss general stuff about the games and/or findings.

Can confirm after some tinkering that this is definitely the issue, if I go into the inspect element css and manually add 'display: inline-block', to the triple dot icon (in this case element "<i class="fas fa-ellipsis-v"></i>"), I can then click the area where the dots would be and the dropdown will show.

Seems that since the fontawesome resource/css is not loading, all icons get a size of 0x0, so they are invisible and cannot be clicked, but still exist.

I'm no web developer, so this may not be useful at all, but on checking Chrome's developer options, I see this error:

Font-Awesome seems to also be tied to the triple-dot dropdowns, which a lot of the missing options are found under (such as the edit/delete run buttons). I checked in the inspect edit menu and the buttons are there, they just aren't being rendered.

Maybe that error can help figure out the cause?

Notification, messages, and pending action buttons are all invisible, and the buttons to create guides, modify game categories or edit/delete runs are completely missing (possibly others, I can't remember what buttons used to be in each place). I'm running the latest chrome, but the issue persists on Edge, a completely fresh install of Firefox, and with a separate computer, all have the same problem. Tested without any addons to ensure that no conflicts were at play.

Okay, so I did indeed find a demo, however when I try to open any doors on the first floor, it shows a message stating the fact that it's a demo and you need to buy it to continue, so I don't think it can be played :(

Nevertheless, this exe version is apparently 1.1.5.0

Think I just found the demo completely accidentally, stand by for more info!

Interesting, I don't think I've ever had the game crash while playing before, but there are a number of different ways to soft-lock the game and be unable to continue (such as leaving the room before the old mouse gives you the coin, when you come back he is gone).

Awesome, that's a perfect image! I believe that my copy of the first game (which I unfortunately have misplaced), was in a DVD case rather than a CD case, perhaps they re-released that one too? Also, if you're curious, this is what my case for the game looks like:

Yeah that's a good idea, you can embed images into Guides on here, so that would probably be a good way to go about creating a guide of the versions. I'll try and grab a photo of my case for it soon

I think Ole Ivanoff (The lead developer/creator?) is on twitter, and was last active less than a month ago, perhaps tweeting at him could be an option?

I never thought about the fact that there could be a demo, I just snooped around the wayback and I see what you mean, it's a shame that not all pages are available. I also checked out ivanoff.dk on there which mostly fully available and talked about the release of the second game, but there was no demo link. :(

Come to think of it, a demo would be perfect for this speedrun, right? Since demos are free it would likely be allowed to be distribution on here, and we wouldn't need to worry about the time limit due to us speedrunning it anyways.

Awesome! I'm running the game on a Windows 10 laptop and I've had no issues running it, so I think it should work fine, though worst case there's always VirtualBox of course.

I'll keep an eye out and see if I can find this version some point. I'm curious as to if there is an English version of the re-release, so far all of the videos I've found without the maze have been in the Danish version.

Yeah sounds like they totally removed it in 1.2, I wonder why they did that, since at the final boss you suddenly have all of the teeth to fight the skeleton with (and you collect those teeth in the maze).

I agree, it's a shame to have to segment an already tiny community, but it makes the most sense out of all of the options, I'll modify the leaderboards soon to have a section for both versions.

Haha regarding the lab folder, I actually tried that yesterday. The game spams an error for every single missing file, then crashes completely. Although, if you remove just one file the maze will still work, just one of the sections will have a black screen and an error instead of the maze, but you will still be able to interact and navigate.

Interesting! I'm really curious in getting my hands on this version so that I can mess around and see if there are any exploits that could be used compared to 1.1.

I think Half Life 2 has two categories like that, one for the old version of the game engine which has a lot more glitches that can be used to your advantage, and then one for the new engine which removes a lot of those.

However, Super Mario Odyssey has all of the game's versions contained on one single leaderboard, so there are runs from the newest versions, and the original version. So it's also a possibility that we simply leave it as it is, and just have all of the times on one leaderboard despite there being around 9-10 minutes difference between the versions.

Either way, would you mind sending me a picture of what your CD case for the game looks like? I might try and find if it's available for purchase anywhere but wanna make sure I get the correct version.

Well, here's something!

Turns out they perhaps re-released the game? I found this video:

It doesn't have the maze, and one of the comments says (as far as google translate tells me) "so sad that they removed the maze from the game when they renewed it." Other comments note that too.

I think perhaps then the only option is to make a second category on the leaderboard, one for version 1.1, and one of the re-release, version 1.2.

Yeah that would be a shame, this is the first game that I've moderated on here so I'm also pretty unfamiliar with what would be done in this scenario for other games. If this were say, a Mario game, then I'd imagine they would make a second category, though you're the first person I've seen to have no maze, so we'd have to find out if there are even other copies with no maze or if it's just the copy you own. Unfortunately due to how obscure the game is it's super hard to find these things out haha.

One other option would be to simply not count the maze as part of the run, just to be sure that everyone would be on the same level. It wouldn't take long for me to manually re-time all the runs on the leaderboard to remove the labyrinth section if it came to that.

I believe there are 3 options when installing the game, 'Minimum', 'Typical' and 'Full', I think if you select minimum or typical then the lab files are kept on the CD rather than being installed on your computer, perhaps try opening the CD as a folder and seeing if they're in there instead? Though on 'minimum' installation it still has the maze of course, it just reads the files from the disk rather than the hard drive.

Good idea contacting StepCore, hopefully he replies with any info. I'll do some research and see if I can find anything about it today.

Awesome! The only issue I can see is that so far I've only ever found versions (including videos on youtube) that include the maze, so we may have to make a second leaderboard or something called 'mazeless' alongside the regular any% unless a version like yours can be found easily accessible.

That's really interesting, all of the files in my copy are from 1997 exactly, here are all of the ones in my folder:

• /Lab (Folder contains many videos labeled Lab1_a1b1, Lab1_a1b2, etc)
• anaya.avi (The 'Anaya' logo when you boot the game)
• mm2.dat (The main game data)
• mm2.idx
• mm2gb.dat (English audio)
• mm2gb.idx
• mm2run.exe
• UnWise.exe (The uninstaller)

All were last modified 11-12-1997 at 2:11pm.

It's very possible that you have a version of the game that doesn't seem to be available anywhere online from what I can tell, your game data file is also a tiny bit bigger than mine so I wonder if there's any other features/bug fixes in yours that aren't in other versions.

Unfortunately as it is a paid game we would not be allowed to share the files so that everyone could be on the same version on here due to copyright reasons. :/ So I suppose the only option is to make another leaderboard or rule where the maze is not counted as part of the run, for those who are on maze-versions.

Yeah for sure, I'm trying to make it as accessible as possible for any new runners since this is a pretty obscure game!

I'm curious, inside your game folder do you have a 'lab' folder? That is where all of the video files for the maze are stored. Also that is very interesting, the exe for my version of the game says 1.1.1.0, I wonder what the difference between the two versions is? I doubt they would have completely removed the maze from the game between versions 1.1 and 1.2 but I feel as though the game would simply crash if it was an error, rather than skipping it entirely.

Also with the sound I noticed that too, the game completely locks up if a sound cannot play, good programming right there haha

First off, welcome! Was a pleasant surprise to see a message was posted here. :-)

That's interesting, I've never heard of any versions of the game not having the maze, I've played the game in various languages using both the original (english) CD that I had as a kid and a danish ISO from the web, I'll look into this when I get home in a couple of hours because I would be ecstatic if there was a way to skip the maze!

I agree with checking out the dialogue differences, I've also been meaning to try this myself to see which are faster or slower, if at all. I did notice that when playing the English version some time ago that some lines were cut off too early - perhaps the game simply has a set number of seconds to play each sound for? Either way would be a good thing to research.

Feel free to start learning the route, I have a document on my PC at home that has a step-by-step for the current fastest known route, I'll try adding it to the resources section. :)

Hello!

I'm considering running this game as I played it a lot as a kid (well, sunday drive mode at least), I was curious as to whether there is a Discord server for the game?

Thanks! Hope to make an attempt at this in the near future.