Hey anyone reading this!

Never run any game before, this game brings back find memories from me and my father.

Just wondering if we have archived videos of the runs? Is there concrete tech we use? Whats the basics of starting a run? Thank you everyone!

Heya

Fiona's run on the leaderboard has a video, there's also some obsolete runs and other clips on her Twitch channel

Thank you for the response on this old dead game! The run looks great, its exactly what I was after to get started, hopefully I can get a start on it this weekend :)

If you'd wanna talk any kind of strat related stuff Jmil96, It's been on my back burner for a long time to hunt and try to lab some stuff out in the game.

Hey! I was informed people were asking about this run and the strats so I figured I'd pop in. It's been a long time since my run so I've probably forgotten a lot of the minutiae but hopefully I can at least recall the important stuff.

Using the wr vod for timestamps:

Missions 1-3 are mostly self explanatory. Mission 4 is where things get dicey - you need to make sure the shotgun shots are on point, since there's a level of random variance in where the pellets go. A clean shot is a 1-hit kill on the guards, and ammo is very limited on the speedrun route. At 3:24 I shoot a door open. This is a door that is supposed to be locked until you complete a winding route around and press a button. From my understanding the gunshot aggros the enemies on the other side of the door, and they'll open it to attack you even if it's supposed to be locked. Sadly robots cannot open doors, otherwise we could use a similar trick with the door on the left at 3:52 to skip the rest of the level since the exit teleporter is right there.

This is also where it becomes clear that clean movement is very important. Enemy collision boxes are very generous, and you can see on mission 5 I get stuck on enemies quite frequently. You'll rely on the shotgun for clearing paths in a lot of missions since it's the most consistent way to one-shot most enemies.

Missions 7 and 8 are by far the hardest stages in the run. Lots of tight movement, accurate shots, and improvisation based on how much damage you've taken. Get used to these levels. (Note also that I steal some energy halfway thorough mission 7 so I can pay for Blasts later - energy management is as important as ammo management.)

Mission 7 also has some of the run's most prominent glitches. At 12:18 as I'm strafing up the stairs, I spam the action button to trigger the switch under the staircase. Collision for these objects in this game doesn't seem to take height into account. In a similar manner you can hear me activate a switch at 12:58 that skips a room entirely.

12:30 is where you see the main glitch in the run, which I'm referring to as Back Boosting. Your character is pushed backwards slightly when firing certain weapons or using the Blast power. Combined with walking backwards you can clip through walls or make jumps that aren't supposed to be possible. In this instance we use it to clip out of the elevator early to save travel time.

14:34 is another backboost skip to make a jump that's normally too far to reach and skip a tunnel segment.

At 16:45 the transition onto the conveyors is weird and inconsistent. Backboosting with a shotgun shot seems the most reliable way to get you onto the conveyor early.

17:48 is the other major backboost of the run, clipping through to the other side of the wall and saving another big chunk of time. You'll note I actually have to walk backwards for a bit because the trigger for the final door to open is a few doors behind where the boost spits you out.

(Make sure to grab the health boost at the end of mission 9 while you're waiting for the timer to run out!)

The last big wrinkle I remember is the final boss. Krieger has four phases, each with more HP than the last. The best strategy I could find for DPS was to use the handgun on phase 1 along with stealing as much energy as possible, then using it along with the bigger weapons to Terablast the other phases. (Also don't stand directly on top of him as he's dying, or the final explosion will never happen and the orb will never spawn!)

Those are the big things I recall from the run. Hope that helps the two of you!

EDIT: Oh also, I think it's only right to mention that a lot of the nonsense backboost tech from this game was discovered by kalimag! This game came up in a speedrun contest on a discord server we both frequented, and a lot of tech got pooled into the run as it is now.

Super interesting reply thank you, I think there's so so so much more to find and the game definitely deserves the attention it's just always sorta been in that secondary seat but hopefully some new faces can help give it that attention

adding this to the discussion finally got a physical copy of the game for my collection, planning on messing around with the invincibility cheat to see any interesting interactions and the like so will update on that as I get time