This is the thing I have been waiting for! I am SO SO happy we finally have an autosplitter for this game.

When this DLC came out, I was still only doing survivor mode runs - so of course I jumped into it right away.

It was so broken I couldn't even finish it. In fact, I still have not completed a run of this stage.

As Ruuj's experience shows, they've apparently fixed it to actually be completable, which is wonderful, but it's still completely broken, and not even in a fun speedrunning way. It's just aggravating and terrible.

If someone's crazy enough to run this, more power to them, but if they REALLY want to run a broken game I'd recommend like BattleToads Double Dragon or Ocarina of Time or something like that instead of Lost Contact.

As discovered during Twitchy's stream of this glitch, it appears that when this glitch is activated, the specific vent edge used to climb up to bug out the alien becomes unusable during the time the glitch is active - which means until the area is reloaded again or until the alien is scripted to reappear. My very uneducated guess is that we are somehow writing the alien's state to the vent edge, which is what causes it to stop appearing, and is why you can no longer activate the vent edge since it is 'occupied'. Or something.

Also it looks like the glitch will be really useful in the KG348 section of a no silent run run of the game (ironically, since it lets you run silently) as well as console runs, since it allows you to run around with impunity when you wouldn't have been able to without psychorunning. It may also be worthwhile in any% runs to make movement more straightforward and care free, though it probably wouldn't save much time, if any at all.

I'm personally on the side of working hard to get an auto splitter working, or at least to start removing load times from the final time. I know of no other speedrun community that has games with variable load times which count the load times in the final run. Runners have absolutely no control over the length of time spent loading. When we were all in intense competition to get the first sub 3, we got nowhere until I lowered my settings, and got what I thought was just an unusually good run for the 2:58:30, but when Lite was trying to figure out why my m5 was so much faster than his, he noticed the huge load time disparity, which let him and others almost immediately get sub 3. For me, community size is no excuse; if we want to actually compete, unless we mail a computer between one another for the sole purpose of running this game, we REALLY need to eliminate load times from the equation.