Picked up a physical copy of this at the exchange store earlier today and think I might start running it, anyone have any tips??
Congrats on the pickup! This is one of the harder speedruns I've played on the genesis and because that difficulty lies in the controls and the physics it's really tough to give too many tips for how to control the ship. It's one of those things you just have to practice flying around to get the hang of. The options allow you to map your inputs to anything you'd like, so there's massive freedom there if you find a different scheme that works for you. I personally use the default layout.
That being said there are some things to keep note of. Only in stage 5 do you need to collect all the POWs for some reason. The rest have an arbitrary number you need to save. Mike has a really great writeup going over his easy difficulty run which I highly recommend skimming through, as it includes the POW requirements as well as lots of other useful information: https://speeddemosarchive.com/SubTerrania.html
There are a few intentional deaths to speed up the run, but in easy, which is the difficulty I'd recommend starting with, the lives are pretty tight throughout the run.
Depending on how fast you clear levels there are bonus point thresholds that accumulate over the run, and once you get pretty good times, you'll be able to get a 1up (250k points) right when svin hits his second phase or around there. But otherwise you have only that one life to work with which is quite scary. That being said there are 2 really easy to grab extra lives. One right next to the spawn in level 1, and the other is in level 6 right above 2 POWs before you break the big wall around all the bats.
On the topic of weapons and weapon levels, from what I've found, red weapon, the one you start with is champion. You start at level 1, and each time you pick up the same power up, you upgrade it, up to 4. (note that you can only get up to lvl 3 until lvl 7, where you can then get max lvl 4) The other weapons have different angles the spread comes out, and possibly could be employed somewhere, but I'm not too sure it would be worth ever changing. The main reason for that though is because when you change to another weapon, it doesn't upgrade your weapon level. So if you were to change to another weapon, you're forfeiting a weapon upgrade, and would need to find another to match the same red weapon level.
On a side note, the difficulties have quite a few differences, more than most games of the era. Normal doesn't change too much other than certain levels when you die, your weapon levels down, so that has some routing implications. You also take a decent amount more damage from flying through enemies and enemy projectiles and wall bumping. Hard I'd argue is an entirely different game and challenge... The physics change entirely for one, so controlling the ship becomes much, much harder. I'm not smart enough to explain all the differences, but the big differences are your ship has a higher weight, faster acceleration, higher top speed, but there are some other nuances as well. Every death levels your weapon down as well. Also, anything you escort like deflectors/spike ball you can no longer drag through the background, and if they touch a wall at all you explode instantly. The spike ball also is wayyy heavier so it drains way more fuel and you are slower with it. When you die at Svin on hard, you only respawn with half health each time. Also on each upgrade in difficulty you get way more bonus points at the ends of levels, so you end up with more lives to play around with.
Other than that, I'd just watch the runs on the leaderboard to see the various strats and flying lines people employ, and dive in!
There are also what people call "death pixels" but I do believe it's more than one pixel, rather it's just certain spots of walls are more dangerous than others, and you can get stuck in them and die rather quickly. These have to just be learned over time, and the longer you play the game, the more you'll find. The best tip to these is to never accelerate when you see this happening, to hopefully dislodge yourself, and usually turning into the wall rather than away is the key to not dying.
Sorry for the essay! This game has a lot of nuances that aren't really documented many places. Hope you take the plunge and enjoy the game if so. :)
Amazing, thank you Mr. Chubbus. No the essay is definitely appreciated, partner. I plan on running quite a few games coming up, so I appreciate any help I can get!
YEEHAW, time to start runnin!
I look forward to it! This is definitely in my top 3 favorite speedruns on Genesis.
I just watched yours and about died laughing at the boss on level 2, now this looks like a fun time, partner.
