Build Woes and Rockman

 

A Monday in the office means a MegaTen-Mega-Day with Shin Megami Tensei 5 in my lunch break followed by Persona 2: Innocent Sin in the evening on stream.  

Persona 2 I'm having fun with but today's session was fairly uneventful.  Summoned some demons, beat up a high schooler with my brain monsters, grinded some levels, you know, the usual stuff.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 however I'm starting to have some serious concerns over.  

Usually when I play these games I go for Strength builds on the main character.  Even in Shin Megami Tensei 4 where magic is OP as all hell, I went for a strength build on my first playthrough.  So when I started SMT 5 I decided to try and mix things up a bit for myself and try out a magic build, pumping almost all my level up points into magic, vitality and agility and letting strength fall to the wayside.  I've not been having a massive amount of trouble with the game so far but I've seen some things on line that have me slightly worried.  There's a group I follow that talks about the Megami Tensei games and a few members of that group have been posting their builds that they used to kill the DLC boss Demifiend.  All but one of them have been strength builds with only 1 guy doing it on magic and talking about how difficult it was.  

I don't mind a challenge, I'm not about to start investing in strength or restart the game to get the build right, I'm locked in now.  However I can't help but feel slightly worried that I've made a whole bunch of the late game challenges a whole bunch harder for myself than they needed to be by trying to get cute with my stat allocations.  At the very least, if I have made it harder for myself it will be so much more satisfying once I eventually pull it off. 

Another thing I've been doing in recent days is trying to get better at speedrunning Megaman 1 for the NES.  Out of all the Megaman games games in the classic series the first one I feel is one of the hardest.  It's got less robot masters than the other games, sure, but it just feels sort of janky and I never really could get fully behind pre-dash (slide) Megaman.  Still though, I'm having a blast running this game.  I managed to learn a few zips that make some of the stages easier but my overall lack of practice is really holding back my time.  The game isn't very long, with my runs now consistantly sitting under the 30 minute mark but one mistake is EXTREMELY costly and it can feel very frustrating when it goes wrong.  Today, for example, I died one time to Elec Man and ended up losing about 30 seconds.  Despite most of my other splits being green or gold I couldn't quite make the time back and ended 17 seconds over my personal best.  In other games I've run obviously mistakes put you in the red but I always feel like there's some area where I can pull the time back or at least be close to a PB by the end, in Megaman 1 however, a single mistake may as well be a reset.  The only reason I don't reset is because I have to practice all the other stages and I'd probably be stuck in the first 3 robot masters if I tried to be that strict with it. 

Still though, I'm pretty motivated to keep practicing and bring that time down.  I'm pretty certain I'm not quite good enough to come close to a world record but if I could get, maybe a top 50-ish time on the leaderboard I'd be pretty happy I think.

Speedrun Goals For 2020

After watching AGDQ I've been sort of inspired to get back into speedrunning in a big way, so this will be a short post outlining what you can expect to see on the stream for speedrun nights and off schedule screwing around

There are 3 games that I currently speedrun that I want to improve the times on

Megaman 4
Megaman X
Silent Hill

Silent Hill especially because when I was new to running and didn't know what I was doing, my time for Good+ on Normal was very kindly added to the leaderboard by other Silent Hill speedrunners.  For a while it was technically a world record (in a misc category) but some other guys turned up and got faster times.  I'll probably be doing Bad+ on easy since it's the main category but it'd be nice to get back to a competitive time for that game.

I will also be adding two new games to my efforts.  The first being Panzer Dragoon Saga which is probably the longest run I've ever done considering an RPG but at time of writing the world record sits at around 4 hours and 44 minutes  so it's not SO bad.  With it being one of my favorite games ever I'd like to get a good time in this one.  The other game I'd like to add to my repertoire is Aladdin on the Super Nintendo.  The games short and the runs I've seen are pretty interesting and it's a really fun little platformer.  It's also short as hell, I finished it in just a couple of hours for the first time in a bar a while back.  It won't be a focus but it'll be cool to give it a go.

I might be stretching myself a bit thin running five games at once but I tend to burn out easy after a pretty short time so keeping a nice rotation going will stop me getting too bored too quickly.  Plus my copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga is sitting in the aforementioned bar so I'll probably be able to do ACTUAL runs of that game once a week since emulator isn't allowed.

Catch these runs and all the other streams at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

New Megaman 4 PB (44:53) [Twitch Link]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/295441429

I don't know how to embed video lol

2018 Speed Schedule

So 2018 is nearly with us so it's about time I informed everyone what games I'm planning to speedrun this coming year.

While it was fun last year to try and run 12 games, there were a number of problems doing it that way.  First is that I had to spend a few days de-rusting, so I wasn't actually doing any proper runs for the first few streams.  Then after that, a single month of running the game wasn't really enough time to build up enough skill to get any kind of decent time in anything.  On top of all that I was losing days to social gatherings, parental visits and other events and the like which cut the time for actually speedrunning things down even further.  So this year I'll be running 4 games for 3 months each and then if you wanna see the other speed games you can donate for the mini speed marathon incentive

So with that said, here's the list

January-March- Silent Hill
April-June- Megaman 4
July-September- Super Mario World 11 Exits + Casually learning a new game maybe
October-December- Super Castlevania 4

Chip 'N Dale in 11:40

Super Castlevania 4 Isn't That Easy

Castlevania has changed a lot since its days on NES and SNES but whenever you talk about classic Castlevania with people the common opinion is that Super Castlevania 4 is the easiest in the series.

There are a lot of features in Super Castlevania 4 that basically all the other ones didn't have, including other SNES Castlevania games like Dracula X.  These included an 8 way whip, the ability to crouch walk and a sub weapon mapped to it's own key rather than being up+whip.  This made managing the games many challenges a lot easier to deal with compared to earlier games however what gets my back up is that people talk about Super Castlevania 4 as if its an easy game.

Despite all the advantages you get in this game compared to others there's still plenty of bullshit that will make you want to tear your hair out.  For example any stage that scrolls up will have the bottom of the screen instantly kill you if you fall down rather than just scrolling back down to where you came from.  This is especially annoying in some stages with tight platforming or a cheeky enemy that will smack you into a bit because you let your guard down for a second.  However that's not the worst of it because once you get to stage 8 in this game things start to get really bullshit.  One hit kill spikes fucking EVERYWHERE are the big offender and I do mean absolutely everywhere.  Then there's the clock tower which has the aforementioned death drops but only this time with TONS of enemies that could potentially knock you into them.  Then you get to stage A and there's fucking stairs that fall from underneath you that will sometimes not allow you get a proper footing on them and if you make it through that there's random floating platforms that will carry you up into more spikes if you are unlucky and aren't given another one to jump to.

This becomes all twice as hard if you're trying to speed run because not only do you have to worry about these traps but also things like health management so you can damage boost off basically everything to save time and making sure that you always have a triple shot cross.

If you really think Super Castlevania 4 is an easy game go and replay it right now, I think you'll be in for a little bit of a shock.  Still though its a great game so it doesn't matter if you breeze through it or die an absolute shit ton, you'll have fun with it.  If you've not played it before then what the fuck are you doing?  Go play it right now

Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls Speed Run in 22:54

This game is free and you should race me

New Repeating Donation Incentive: Speed Marathons

So of course I'm always looking for new donation incentives to put on the blog to help aid the charity and here's an idea I'm surprised I've not come up with sooner.

So at time of writing I can sort of semi-competently speedrun about 10 or 11 games so the obvious outcome of this donation incentive is that I'd play them all back to back.  Only I'll do you one a little better which would be that I'd do 3 runs of each game before switching to the next title.  That will add a decent amount of length to the event and make it worth the donation money I feel.

However usually when I run an event once the event is done it gets deleted from the incentive list.  The only repeating incentive that has been featured on the blog before this was Euro Truck Simulator 24 hours and the only reason that repeated is because I failed to make the 24 hour mark on the first attempt.

This is the first donation incentive on the blog that won't disappear after it's been met and instead it'll just reset back to 0.  That means if you wanted to see 10 (or more in the future) games get run back to back, you could keep donating for it and making me do these marathons as often as possible.  There will also be a sort of stretch goal during each marathon to make me play one extra game that I don't usually run one time and that will be decided at the start of each marathon, I'll pull it from a hat or something.

Let's do some speedruns for charity!

Megaman 4 Speed run 46:18

MrHyruleGamer And Summoning Salt

I think this is the first time I've ever done a post about actual individuals from YouTube and it's not something I want to talk about very often but since discovering the two of them fairly recently I've been thinking about some stuff that I want to write about.

Both of these people make content on YouTube related to speed running.  I discovered MrHyruleGamer during my work break with his speed running cringe compilation videos.  In these videos he takes clips of certain speed runners doing stuff that's a little embarrassing and edits them together so that we can all have a good laugh at them.  More recently though he seems to be putting together his thoughts on the speed running community at large which has opened a whole tin of worms but we'll talk about that in just a sec. 

Summoning Salt is a channel that seems to have a whole bunch of Punch Out videos on it but recently he's been putting a series of videos together called "World Record Progression".  In this videos he gives a sort of potted history of a certain games speed run.  They are informative and highly interesting and some of the stories that he tells about the way certain runners were interacting and getting their times down is really mind blowing.

I'll post a link to both of these channels at the end of the post and I think they are both worth taking a look at.

Anyway, I as I mentioned before, MrHyruleGamer put a video together called "The Problems With Speedrunning"  Take a look

Now while I think his attitude is completely fucked it's not like the guy doesn't have any valid points.  The general gist of his video is that speed running has a sort of image problem and the fact that there is so much cringe may turn new people away.  That said, I don't feel like speed running is in any danger of falling off because as long as games exist there will always be people who want to to them quickly but that side hobby within gaming just might not have any mainstream appeal.  My problem with his videos is that while he says all this, he's uploading compilations of all the cringe for people to look at so his whole shtick about wanting these people to do better while simultaneously acting as an archive of embarrassing moments seems a bit off to me.

Summoning Salts videos though are a lot more positive and they provide people with genuinely interesting information that I'm interested in hearing.  He names and shows examples of all these runs and runners so that if you are interested to do some further watching for yourself you can look these people up and get to know them a little better through their content which is a nice touch.  He's focusing on the triumphs of the community and since a lot of his stories include thing such as members trading information and partaking in healthy competition it paints things in a much more positive light.

There's a gaming bar I go to quite often and sometimes I'll get into a conversation with a random about speedrunning and when I tell them these stories of people cutting down times and some of the stuff that these people have done with classic games they seem genuinely surprised or interested in the hobby.  However I can bet you anything you like that if I showed them a compilation of runners acting like idiots on stream they'd probably never want to go near speedrunning ever again.

MrHyruleGamer, while raising some valid points is going about it in the wrong way I feel.  If speedrunners feel like they have an image problem it would be best to just try and forget all the cringe and focus on setting examples to each other on how to be better streamers or entertainers.   Summoning Salt seems to be a chill dude that not only runs games himself but is putting a pretty significant effort to create content that would attract people, which is what I think MrHyrule ultimately wants.

Anyway I feel weird talking about YouTube personalities at such lengths so I'll put the links to their channels and you can form your own opinions.  They both produce pretty entertaining content at the very least so I don't think  you'll be too bored.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpW9UVYM6M3GflB7Jkz1nJQ

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w

2017 Speed Schedule

The new year is nearly upon us which means it's nearly time for another AGDQ so my excitement levels are pretty high!  

As you may know, I also do a few speed runs and while I'm not what you'd call "good" I do find it highly enjoyable so this post is just to let you know what games I'm planning to run through 2017.  

This doesn't mean I'll be running only 1 game per month but it is the one I'll be focusing on with the plan of doing 1-3 runs or a couple of hours of practice a day, but I won't be neglecting other games too.  

January: Silent Hill (Bad+) 

February: Hotline Miami 

March: Megaman 4 

April: Silent Hill 2 

May: Ys1

June: Super Mario World (11 Exits) 

July: Super Castlevania 4 

August: <New Game> 

September: Megaman 2 

October: They Bleed Pixels 

November: <New Game> 

December: Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers

Like I said, I'll be trying to keep up with all my runs and I'll be of course willing to take a request for a run if it came with a small donation.  On top of that there will be the usual Final Fantasy and Resident Evil stuff too so expect the stream to be pretty active in 2017!