I was watching the Escape ending route and was curious about the conditions for the earliest possible 5:54AM trigger to unlock the escape doors. Looks like the route goes straight for Raceway to get the dummy head and get Roxy's eyes for the upgrade, so I wanted to confirm if those two were the earliest way to trigger the 5:54AM time shift.

My best understanding is this - in normal play, the first Party Pass unlocks either Monty Golf or the Fazerblast Arena, with something (security upgrade?) unlocking Roxy Raceway after that. The game progresses time as you complete those items, ending at 5:15AM for the dummy head (the popular time skip backwards from 6AM method), then finishing Roxy's eye transfer skips to 5:54AM since the game assumes that's your second upgrade.

Especially after seeing Alex0023 post here (who I believe doesn't generally use Discord) I felt it was appropriate to clue everyone in here - in the Silent Hill 3 channel of the SH Discord Jokie and So-so have found and are continuously researching a new OOB method using the game's falling (teetering?) animation. Lots of information is being posted there if you want the latest and greatest. Substantial rerouting for ammo, and the shortest time will likely be on Normal difficulty going forward.

Hey all, crazycider reached out to me recently about some category additions. From their message:

"The purpose of this email is to hope that you can add two speedway challenges under the game: Surreal difficulty cannot use the game bug quick clearance， and A quick pass to collect all of the game's required collections. 20 ghosts, 20 ghosts’ story, and 7 character models. Because I think, the game's current speedway challenges project is much less difficult because it can be opened by a gatekeeper, requiring little or no complexity. So, I hope to add items that can reflect the individual abilities of players, that is, the difficulty does not use game bugs, especially the normal flow of water gate and the speedway challenges for the collection，Because, all the collectibles required for the game are 20 ghosts, 20 ghosts’ story and 7 character models. So, I think it would be better to have a full collection of speedway challenges programs."

Just wanted to collect some input from the community on rules, titles for the categories, and whether they'd be best categorized in Misc categories.

A user on Twitter recently brought up that one of the runs currently in 100% doesn't get the floating head ghost. We didn't codify any ruleset changes after the 1.07 update thread posted in the forum, but that's probably necessary.

Before we do anything I wanted to open the discussion up real quick, especially to runners currently vested in the category.

If there was interest, we could potentially split into current version/old version. We could leave it as is and keep the requirement firm on including the floating head ghost. The requirement to get her could also be removed since it seems to no longer be possible to spawn her reliably.

I'm not an expert on the current mechanics - if anyone has input of any kind, feel free to share before we make any concrete decision.

Figured this might be known but in case it wasn't, I did this in a casual playthrough -

Would anyone want to offer some insight on strats for this? I submitted my garbage time to help out the boards but I'm interested to see what you guys did to speed things up. It's fantastic to see such good times so quick in this, awesome work guys!

Recently hardware differences have become a hot topic with more research on Bigmanjapan's part regarding PS2 emulation and have always been a concern because of huge differences in a lot of Silent Hill games - the drastic differences between SH:0 on PS2 and PSP, the differences between SH2 on console and PC, etc.

The proposed change would be to organize the leaderboards to include separation of consoles/emu/other differences (HD collection, backwards-compatibility that uses emulators, etc.), similar to some of the Resident Evil games - http://www.speedrun.com/re2

As an example, this could include

SH1 - [Console, Emu, PSN] x [NG (Easy), NG Good+ (Easy), UFO Ending, 10 Star]

with more input from each game's community. We already have many people who run games on different hardware (I have reasonable PBs for PS1, PSN, and Emu for SH1, etc.), and I've always been of the opinion in cases like this that ignoring hardware differences negates the point of leaderboards in the first place. In addition, I think it would do more to encourage playing in different situations - console having mandatory Abstract Daddy fight, having your life ruined by Homecoming PC version, and so on.

I think we can do this pretty painlessly with a little time and it would benefit everyone in the long run. I just wanted to get the ball rolling with discussion - which versions of each game are worth having a separate list for?