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Post-MM1 speedrunning?
Sep. 27th, 2019 07:20 pmWell, I may have finished with my current speedrunning of MM1. I can definitely improve, though, so I'm not sure if I want to keep going until I feel I plateau or if I should move on to another game. I accomplished my long-term goal of getting into the top 50%, and then even more by getting sub25 and getting into the top 20 on the leaderboards.
I know I can get a better time, but it would probably just move me up to 17th at best (currently at 19th). I can always return to MM1 in the future, though, like if/when I get knocked out of the Top 20.
For what to play next... I want to definitely continue doing Mega Man stuff, but I also want to compete with some Twitch friends in Duke Nukem (as in, the first one -- the platformer that everyone forgot). And then I'd like to try running my friend's game Into the Gloom. No one has ever run it, so it would be a free WR hahaha.
The things I'm considering most next (all things I'd like to do eventually):
Mega Man 2 (Zipless) - It's the next step up from Mega Man 1, and also one I have a lot of fun with. A friend of mine speedruns it so it'd be nice to get his input. I'd probably go with Zipless since I did Glitchless in Mega Man 1, and I kinda prefer playing the games without abusing game-breaking glitches that skip half the content. I appreciate speedruns that accomplish the absolute times using that stuff, but it's personally less fun for me to restart 1000 times until I nail some pixel-perfect glitches and miss out on half the game. Fun to watch, but not fun for me to play.
Mega Man 1 (Zipless) - Zipless is kind of the next category step up from Glitchless -- there are tons of glitches in Mega Man 1 that are banned from Glitchless runs. You can pause the game to negate knockback from enemies, pause the game to prematurely end enemies' iframes (allowing you to defeat a boss in a single shot, for example), screens wrap oddly so you can grab a ladder of the bottom of the screen by jumping from the top of the screen (you can also die easily this way by approaching the top of the screen too closely). Stuff like that. Zips are a totally different monster, where you clip through a wall or glitch off the edge of a ladder to skip large portions of the game at once. All of these glitches still involve playing through basically all of the game's content, though, just abusing the pause feature and stuff to speed things up a little. That's not something that would make the game boring to me so I'm willing to try that out. Then I'd have two separate Mega Man 1 records too :P
Mega Man 5 - There aren't glitchless/zipless categories in this game because a lot of the glitchy stuff in the series had been fixed by the time this was released, so there's not major stuff like that to abuse in the game. This game requires a lot of precision in using the Super Arrow, though, which I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle. I watched the video halfway up the leaderboard to see how feasible it would be to get in the top 50%, and it seems possible if I can nail all the tricks and not die. Which is within my powers, I'd think, hahaha. This is also my favorite Mega Man game, so I'd like to get a record in it eventually.
Duke Nukem - Like I mentioned before, playing this one because a couple buddies run it. It's a really short game (under 10 minutes) to run, but I'd need to really learn the game first (haven't played this since I was a kid and never got close to beating it back then anyway). Like Mega Man, it's just jumping and shooting and memorizing the best path through the game and then executing it well. I mean, that's what most speedrunning is, but what I mean is that there's not really any glitches to abuse here. It's raw power speedrunning. Perhaps there are unknown glitches, but for now, the WR doesn't abuse any (and is held by one of my friends!) so this would be pretty fun and casual to run. I'd just like to get in the top half and beat one of the two of them, probably wouldn't go for WR unless I got really into it :P
Into the Gloom - The main reasons I want to run this are 1. free WR and 2. my friend made it. I've played through the game a few times and enjoy it, but IDK how fun it would really be to speedrun. It's a horror game, too, so I'd have to play without sound so I didn't get too scared hahaha. I think even speedrunning I'd still get scared. Since it'd be the first run and I don't know of any glitches, it would be a glitchless run as well. The big 'downside' here is that the game is fairly straightforward, and there's no enemies to fight or anything, so it basically would just be memorizing where the items are and grabbing them all in the right order and stuff. So there's not really much to speedrunning it. The hardest part where a difference would be made would be in solving the puzzles -- and one of them is randomly generated I think, so it would just be rerolling until you solved it quickly. It wouldn't be a very competitive game, I don't think. So I'm kind of considering this one the least for now. Plus I'd have to re-learn and then memorize the entire game. With Mega Man games, I've played them so much that I already have the games memorized, it's just learning some optimal routes which is easy. With Duke, the game is not only very short, but I've watched my friends run it enough that I'm familiar enough with the optimal route. With Into the Gloom, I haven't played recently enough to really remember where all to go in the game, so I'd be relearning the entire game (and getting scared LOL) and then routing it myself, which is... a bit intimidating. It's not even really that hard I'm just scared of playing the game again normally because I'm a scaredy.
And of course I could continue with Mega Man 1 Glitchless a little longer to improve my time now. I think I'd rather hold off and come back to it later, though. MM1 Zipless is so similar to what I'm doing now that it's probably also something I'll come back to later. Right now Duke is probably what I'm going to try to do, but I'm feeling a bit lazy about learning the game inside out, and I'm still on a Mega Man "kick" and feel like playing those, so IDK. But I already told my friends I might try running Duke and I think they're looking forward to it now haha.
I know I can get a better time, but it would probably just move me up to 17th at best (currently at 19th). I can always return to MM1 in the future, though, like if/when I get knocked out of the Top 20.
For what to play next... I want to definitely continue doing Mega Man stuff, but I also want to compete with some Twitch friends in Duke Nukem (as in, the first one -- the platformer that everyone forgot). And then I'd like to try running my friend's game Into the Gloom. No one has ever run it, so it would be a free WR hahaha.
The things I'm considering most next (all things I'd like to do eventually):
Mega Man 2 (Zipless) - It's the next step up from Mega Man 1, and also one I have a lot of fun with. A friend of mine speedruns it so it'd be nice to get his input. I'd probably go with Zipless since I did Glitchless in Mega Man 1, and I kinda prefer playing the games without abusing game-breaking glitches that skip half the content. I appreciate speedruns that accomplish the absolute times using that stuff, but it's personally less fun for me to restart 1000 times until I nail some pixel-perfect glitches and miss out on half the game. Fun to watch, but not fun for me to play.
Mega Man 1 (Zipless) - Zipless is kind of the next category step up from Glitchless -- there are tons of glitches in Mega Man 1 that are banned from Glitchless runs. You can pause the game to negate knockback from enemies, pause the game to prematurely end enemies' iframes (allowing you to defeat a boss in a single shot, for example), screens wrap oddly so you can grab a ladder of the bottom of the screen by jumping from the top of the screen (you can also die easily this way by approaching the top of the screen too closely). Stuff like that. Zips are a totally different monster, where you clip through a wall or glitch off the edge of a ladder to skip large portions of the game at once. All of these glitches still involve playing through basically all of the game's content, though, just abusing the pause feature and stuff to speed things up a little. That's not something that would make the game boring to me so I'm willing to try that out. Then I'd have two separate Mega Man 1 records too :P
Mega Man 5 - There aren't glitchless/zipless categories in this game because a lot of the glitchy stuff in the series had been fixed by the time this was released, so there's not major stuff like that to abuse in the game. This game requires a lot of precision in using the Super Arrow, though, which I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle. I watched the video halfway up the leaderboard to see how feasible it would be to get in the top 50%, and it seems possible if I can nail all the tricks and not die. Which is within my powers, I'd think, hahaha. This is also my favorite Mega Man game, so I'd like to get a record in it eventually.
Duke Nukem - Like I mentioned before, playing this one because a couple buddies run it. It's a really short game (under 10 minutes) to run, but I'd need to really learn the game first (haven't played this since I was a kid and never got close to beating it back then anyway). Like Mega Man, it's just jumping and shooting and memorizing the best path through the game and then executing it well. I mean, that's what most speedrunning is, but what I mean is that there's not really any glitches to abuse here. It's raw power speedrunning. Perhaps there are unknown glitches, but for now, the WR doesn't abuse any (and is held by one of my friends!) so this would be pretty fun and casual to run. I'd just like to get in the top half and beat one of the two of them, probably wouldn't go for WR unless I got really into it :P
Into the Gloom - The main reasons I want to run this are 1. free WR and 2. my friend made it. I've played through the game a few times and enjoy it, but IDK how fun it would really be to speedrun. It's a horror game, too, so I'd have to play without sound so I didn't get too scared hahaha. I think even speedrunning I'd still get scared. Since it'd be the first run and I don't know of any glitches, it would be a glitchless run as well. The big 'downside' here is that the game is fairly straightforward, and there's no enemies to fight or anything, so it basically would just be memorizing where the items are and grabbing them all in the right order and stuff. So there's not really much to speedrunning it. The hardest part where a difference would be made would be in solving the puzzles -- and one of them is randomly generated I think, so it would just be rerolling until you solved it quickly. It wouldn't be a very competitive game, I don't think. So I'm kind of considering this one the least for now. Plus I'd have to re-learn and then memorize the entire game. With Mega Man games, I've played them so much that I already have the games memorized, it's just learning some optimal routes which is easy. With Duke, the game is not only very short, but I've watched my friends run it enough that I'm familiar enough with the optimal route. With Into the Gloom, I haven't played recently enough to really remember where all to go in the game, so I'd be relearning the entire game (and getting scared LOL) and then routing it myself, which is... a bit intimidating. It's not even really that hard I'm just scared of playing the game again normally because I'm a scaredy.
And of course I could continue with Mega Man 1 Glitchless a little longer to improve my time now. I think I'd rather hold off and come back to it later, though. MM1 Zipless is so similar to what I'm doing now that it's probably also something I'll come back to later. Right now Duke is probably what I'm going to try to do, but I'm feeling a bit lazy about learning the game inside out, and I'm still on a Mega Man "kick" and feel like playing those, so IDK. But I already told my friends I might try running Duke and I think they're looking forward to it now haha.
