I updated the ruleset of the game the other day, migrating general rulesets over to the Main Rules and keeping the category-specific rules short and clean. Rulesets were also slightly changed and clarified with the following changes:

• The load remover is now mandatory for submissions with the sole exception for people without capture cards. If you struggle setting up the load remover for LiveSplit, join the Discord server as there are several people who can help you very quickly. There is also a setup guide on here so maybe that will be enough of a guide as well! It supports all three versions of the game (PS2, Xbox and Gamecube) as well as English, Japanese and Korean loading screens, covering just about everything we need for the leaderboards.

• Alternative methods to run the game on PS2 (without the use of a disc) such as OPL are now allowed. They previously existed in a grey area of sorts as other methods like softmods were completely okay but OPL for instance drastically reduces loading times and even lag. Since loadless timing is fairly simple to implement thanks to the aforementioned load remover and considering the advantage in the lag department being so miniscule, it is fine to greenlight it for good, provided the load remover is set up to work correctly.

• After a bit of testing, emulators are unfortunately still banned for this game. PS2 and Xbox emulation has been wonky for a while now, but Gamecube emulation via Dolphin usually seems to work alright. This does not appear to be the case with this game though since it still lags like mad even on good computers. Other games at least manage to run butter-smooth at full speed, so a particular property of TWoC seems to cause issues. Regardless, the way the game runs on Dolphin is in no way comparable with how it would run on a real Gamecube or any other platform for that matter, so turn to finding a cheap PS2 and use one of the many methods to play games on it instead.

I will periodically try and check on the emulator situation to see if emulation gets more viable in the future to make the game more accessible. If there are ever any questions, feel free to message me here on the site, on Discord or on Twitter.