The Binding of Isaac: Instant Start Mod

I personally haven't played very much Isaac lately, but the racing community has chugged along making new mods and coming up with new ideas for races. I saw the details for an upcoming race (tonight at 6pm EST) that really got my brain churning. There's a mod out there that lets you give your character items at the start of the game, so you could start with a godhead or a brimstone or whatever. The race is to beat blue baby in the chest with all 13 of the characters in the game as fast as you can, with the added twist that each of the 13 characters has to use a different one of the starting items.

Whoa! It's one thing to figure out what the best item would be for each individual character but then adding in that extra restriction really kicks things up a notch. There are 3 characters, for example, that all really want to start with Judas' shadow. Most of the others probably want a knife or an epic fetus if I'm using my prior racing knowledge... But in previous races I couldn't start with a godhead if I wanted to, or a brimstone. Would those be better than a knife? Especially for me, who is distinctly mediocre with a knife? Oh, and then it turns out the mod has 31 starts, and some of them aren't single items, so it's really tricky to compare. For reference, the 31 starts are:

1. 20/20
2. Chocolate milk
3. Cricket's body
4. Cricket's head
5. Dead eye
6. Death's touch
7. Dr fetus
8. Epic fetus
9. Ipecac
10. Judas' shadow
11. Lil brimstone
12. Magic mushroom
13. Mom's knife
14. Monstro's lung
15. Polyphemus
16. Proptosis
17. Sacrificial dagger
18. Tech .5
19. Tech X
20. Brimstone
21. Incubus
22. Maw of the void
23. Crown of light
24. Godhead
25. Sacred heart
26. Quad shot + triple shot
27. Technology + coal
28. Ludovico technique + parasite
29. Fire mind + 13 lucky foot 
30. Kamikaze + host hat
31. Mega blast + habit + battery + AAA battery

Some of those seem like silly things people wanted to fool around with. Having a fire mind that always explodes seems like a disaster when it comes to going fast, for example, and I can't imagine ludovico is ever very fast either. Mega blast feels like it would be very fast, but I just can't handle it. I tried it out on Maggie yesterday with no success at all, but I also didn't double charge it with the battery. But if I'm going to struggle through a few floors with Maggie... That's slow too!

Anyway, my initial idea was to run:

??? - Judas Shadow (10)
Maggie - (31)
Samson - Maw (22)
Cain - sacred heart (25)
Isaac - quads (26)
Judas - Magic Mushroom (12)
Eve - tech x (19)
Azazel - coal (27)
Lazarus - ipecac (9)
Eden - Epic Fetus (8)
Lost - Godhead (24)
Lilith - Knife (13)
Keeper - Brim (20)

I ended up making some changes on the fly. I gave Maggie the only other item with a speed up in it, the magic mushroom, and gave Judas 20/20 instead. Then I had real trouble using the knife on Lilith. I thought she'd get to use a knife even though she had the blindfold but that wasn't the case at all. On the suggestion of a viewer (who is also the guy running the race, it turns out) I ran epic fetus on her instead. She does get to use that item with the blindfold, which is sweet. I gave Eden the knife instead, and that was fine.

I died with multiple characters. Some of that was just bring rusty for sure, but some of it is how terrible The Lost and The Keeper are. I gave Judas' shadow to Blue Baby because his base stats are garbage and I hate how he can't get red hearts, but Keeper is even worse. Not being able to take any good devil deal is just such a deal breaker. So I think I need to give the shadow to Keeper. That means I'd need to find a new item for Blue Baby, and it should be a good one because he's pretty bad.

I think what I should do is give sacred heart to Blue Baby, shift 20/20 over to Cain, and tag in the crown of light for Judas. Apparently it adds a couple of soul hearts on top of doing double damage, which is good for Judas.

Azazel is also not really enjoying coal. I was hoping the tech 1 would override his short brim, but that was not to be. I think I'll give him the brimstone freed up in the previous swap. Does anyone else want tech+coal? Tech X is really good, but it hurts my hand to use, so maybe I should try giving it to Eve. Or actually, maybe the Lost should take it since he starts with spectral? Does spectral stack with technology in a good way? A quick test says yes, the laser goes the whole screen even over rocks. That frees up a godhead to use on Eve. So now I think my lineup is going to be...

??? - sacred heart (25)
Maggy - Magic Mushroom (12)
Samson - Maw (22)
Cain - 20/20 (1)
Isaac - quads (26)
Judas - crown of light (23)
Eve - Godhead (24)
Azazel - Brim (20)
Lazarus - ipecac (9)
Eden - Knife (13)
Lost - coal (27)
Lilith - Epic Fetus (8)
Keeper - Judas Shadow (10)

I'm certainly open to opinion and suggestions!

Awesome Games Done Quick 2016

It's that time of year again! The nice speedrunning people are putting on their annual January event to raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It's brought my own streaming down to a minimum as I'd rather watch the awesomeness live than play my own games.

I wrote about the blindfolded Punch Out runs from two years ago, and how intense they were to watch. I just watched a run that made me feel a very similar way. There's a roguelike game called Crypt of the Necrodancer where a song plays and you need to take actions on the beats of the song, and only on those beats. Fail and you take a point of damage. I watched Ike play it a while ago and it's really hard!

There's a challenge character where you only have 1 health, so if you take damage for any reason you're dead. Also you can't get a better weapon than the base dagger.

There's a challenge character where you die if you ever pick up money. Every monster you kill drops money, so you can't ever walk into a square where you've killed an enemy.

There's a challenge character where everything moves at double speed. (Interestingly, the character is genderqueer, which I think may be the first time I've seen that particular characteristic used as anything other than 'comic' relief.)

Then there's a challenge character which combines all of the aspects of the previous three challenges. Move at double speed, with a terrible weapon, and die if you ever pick up gold or take damage or miss a beat... The developer didn't know if anyone could ever beat the mode. Apparently to date only 10 people have ever beat it. One of them was at AGDQ, and he actually managed to do it. It is so absolutely ludicrous and had me completely riveted.

Go check the marathon out. There's bound to be more awesome stuff! (Like, apparently, a blindfolded Punch-Out race!)

SGDQ 2015

It turns out it's that time of year again. Summer Games Done Quick started up this afternoon and will be running for the next week. It's a speedrunning marathon which raises money for the Doctors Without Borders charity, which as I understand is one of the best charities in terms of actually making charitable use of donations.

These marathons are really, really cool to watch. Check it out! (Especially Monday night during the Tetris block...)

Zelda Race Results

Last weekend I was up during the day on Saturday so I joined in on the second of the 'Get Yourself Speedrunning' races. It was for the SNES Zelda game, A Link to the Past. I managed to get in a few practice runs and actually knew where all the keys were located and where to go for the entire run. I didn't get lost and I only game overed once, and it wasn't even much of a time loss since I'd just entered a dungeon and dying in that game takes you to the start of your current dungeon. Since it healed me back to 4 hearts it might even have been faster than not dying!

The race winner finished in 22 minutes and 1 second. I finished in 28 minutes and 33 seconds. This means I only took 30% longer than the best person which is way better than my Mario 3 result where I took more than 4 times as long as the best person. In the Mario 3 race I did come 91st out of 140 people. In Zelda I only came 121st! Which sounds worse, except attendance for Zelda blew the attendance record set by Mario 3 out of the water. 301 people showed up! 290 of them even finished the race!

The rating system the SRL website uses is clearly flawed though, as this race showed. The guy currently in 7th place overall on the A Link to the Past leaderboard has only done one race. This one, where he came 34th. 33 people beat him, but only 6 people are ranked higher than him on the leaderboard. Presumably the system treats initial races as more important, or only cares about how many people you beat, or how many higher ranked people you beat, or something of the sort. I feel bad for the people who may care about the Zelda leaderboard since this huge race clearly messed things up.

121st place was actually good enough to get me some ranking points. Not enough to skyrocket me to the top of the charts but I have an actual number for a game now which is pretty cool. And it was fun!

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Tomorrow will feature the second race in the series of three being put on by the speedrun racing site SpeedRunsLive. The whole thing is flying under the banner of 'get yourself speedrunning' and I was really hoping these races would exist to help bootstrap people into speedrunning, but it turns out that isn't really the case. Anyone can create a race in SRL for pretty much any game as long as they have an opponent lined up so the only things that actually seem special about these races are that they have a scheduled start time and there's a stream running with commentary on the top players.

What I was hoping would happen would be that there'd be a lot of information easily available to let people know what sorts of things they should be doing in these games. A 'cheat sheet' if you will of the core tricks to the game and a sample route to follow. The Mario 3 one eventually had a route put up in a pastebin document. It was a good start, but there was no mention that such a thing existed on the website or in the main IRC channel. Or if there was I sure didn't see it. I only found out it existed when I joined the race specific channel an hour before it started and the link was in the topic. I didn't set aside any time to practice but part of that was not knowing what I should even be practicing. If I'd had that document in advance I'd have been more encouraged to at least do a trial run.

I have done some research and practice for the Zelda race. It's much shorter than the Mario 3 race (it only covers the very start of the game up until you get the Master Sword which is right after the 3 pendant dungeons) which is nice. But I wasn't sure what I could or should be doing. The rules for the race are rather cryptic to the uninitiated: 


Rules: S&Q allowed. Glitches banned: EG, YBA, OoB.

Ok... What is S&Q? What is EG? YBA? OoB? What run should I watch to model my game after? Are they abiding by those rules?

S&Q it turns out is the 'Save & Quit' option in the game. This lets you essentially teleport to any of the starting locations in the game which is rather convenient once you've finished a dungeon. Instead of walking to the next dungeon you warp back to your house and take the shorter route. It's not clear to me why people would run without using this option but apparently people do.

OoB stands for Out of Bounds. EG stands for Exploration Glitch. YBA stands for Yuzuhara's Bottle Adventure. All three are ways to skip past large chunks of the game. OoB is clipping through walls to take shortcuts. EG is an extreme form of OoB where you end up getting onto another layer entirely. This lets you walk anywhere on the map. Different dungeons and stuff are all actually just on one big map in memory (or two?) so with this glitch you can pretty much walk to anywhere you want as long as the destination has a way to end the glitch (a cliff of some sort to jump down I think). YBA is a crazy glitch where you use a potion in a bottle on a screen transition to rewrite stuff in memory to do all kinds of crazy things. Like getting the flute well before you should have it, which lets you warp to places you shouldn't be able to reach.

So basically they're banning all the things that let you skip parts of the game. Sort of like how in Mario 3 they banned the warp whistle but still let you use p-wings and clouds to skip/cheat your way through individual levels. With a whistle you skip entire worlds in one action and that's not good for a nostalgia run. In Zelda they ban all the weird glitches but they let you warp back to your starting point. That only cuts out some boring running around on the world map.

I couldn't find any routes for this category anywhere so what I did was watched a bunch of different videos people had posted for categories that sounded like they could be this one. They had enough similarities that I got a pretty good idea of what I'd need to do. Because you aren't using any crazy glitches you need to do the dungeons in order. You need the running boots from dungeon one to knock down the book to enter dungeon two. You need the gloves from dungeon two to pick up a rock on the way to dungeon three. Then the only thing left to do is run into the forest and pick up the sword. I saw one guy who went and got an optional ice rod to help kill the bosses but most people skipped that. It seemed like the only optional thing most people did was pick up the heart from a chest in the sanctuary you take Zelda to at the start of the game.

There are still all sorts of tricks to cut frames out by walking on some diagonals and people plan out specific arrow usages so they know how many pots they need to pick up. I'm a bad aim so I need to pick up all the arrows I can find!

I did a test run this morning and got done in a little over an hour. Real people finish in 23 minutes (or maybe less now... who knows how good the people I watched actually are) so this was already a better ratio than my Mario 3 run. And I got lost lots, and got knocked out of the third boss fight several times. I expect to do much better in the actual race.

And maybe they're intentionally making it hard to find this stuff. That's what speedrunning is... Find different tricks and glitches from a wide variety of sources and watch the people who claim to be good to see what they do. Try to copy it. When you're good enough to do what they do then you can tinker with ways to make it faster by doing different things. Which you either find yourself through insane amounts of trial and error or you find by watching other people in the hopes they stumble across something new.

I'm definitely going to get up in time for the Zelda race tomorrow. But after how much effort it took this week to find what I needed to do in a game I understand I feel like trying for the Sonic one next week is probably crazy. Maybe I could show up and expect to come last? I don't want to show up and end up forfeiting though, so that may well come down to if I think I'll be awake for 6+ hours after it starts.

I may even practice more in the morning... I didn't get any ranking points for coming 91st in Mario 3, but I feel like I could probably do well enough in Zelda to get some ranking points. Assuming as many random new players show up as last time, anyway! I don't think ranking points really do anything but they're a number that I could make get bigger, so I must make it bigger!

Mario Race Result

Saturday had the first of SpeedRunsLive's series of open races trying to give people an easy way into the speedrunning scene. I only ever got around to practicing world one, but I'd played the game 18 years ago or so... How hard could it be, really?

Well, I gameovered several times in worlds 2 and 3, so things sure weren't looking good. Oddly enough as soon as I got to world 4 it suddenly got easy. I recognized most of the levels! I suspect what happened is I'd always get a warp whistle in world 1 when I played the game as a kid. Use it right away, jump to world 4! But this race was warpless, and I really didn't have a good handle on worlds 2 and 3. I muddled through though!

Anyway, I got through worlds 4 through 7 without too much trouble and had built up quite the stash of items to use powering through world 8. Unfortunately Bowser's castle was tricky, Bowser himself used a brand new mechanic, and my thumb was starting to get sore from holding down the run button for 3 hours! It took me 45 minutes to beat the last level but eventually I did! (For comparison the 6 fastest people were done the entire game in under an hour...) All told my race was sub-4 hours! Woo!

The race ended up getting a whopping 140 people. 39 of those gave up without beating the game, and I managed to finish in front of 10 people. 91st place of 140 isn't too bad all things considered, but it is a little unfortunate that I wasn't even slower. The website had links to everyone's stream who was still going. When there were 10 people left I guess people didn't care so much as I only ended up with 3 viewers plus my sister in the same room when I beat the game. The last few people were getting 30+ viewers pretty much solely thanks to being slow but persevering!

It almost makes me want to really suck in one of the next two races. But the competitor in me thinks that's incredibly stupid. Doing a race when I'm naturally slow and bad is a fine thing to do. Intentionally doing worse than I could? That's just not in my genes. Of course I've never played a Sonic game so my best at Sonic 2 could well be the worst of anyone who shows up...

Or maybe not... The guy who finished in 101st place in Mario 3 took a little over 19 hours. That's a crazy amount of dedication to not giving up! I popped in to watch him from time to time and he sure was playing the game and trying to win. He just wasn't doing a very good job of it. But he did finish higher than the 39 forfeits, so that's something!

Next up... Zelda: A Link to the Past, up to the master sword. This is a game I've actually played a fair bit so I hopefully won't be needing to figure out puzzles from scratch like I did in Mario 3. Emulators are fully allowed too (well, ones on the list of approved emulators anyway) so anyone capable of streaming really can join in.

Super Mario Bros 3

The 'get yourself speedrunning' thing is starting up this weekend with Super Mario Bros 3. You can play either the original NES version or the remake on the SNES in the Super Mario All-stars cartridge. I have the latter for my SNES, so that seemed like the obvious way to go.

Earlier this week I decided I wanted to practice a little. I have no illusions about being able to win, but I would like to have a chance to beat some of the other rookies. I also wanted to test my streaming setup to make sure I could play properly in the capture card window since I don't have a splitter. So I unpacked my SNES and hooked everything up.

The power adapter I have (not an official Nintendo version but some cheap replacement I bought after someone stole my NES and all my wires out of the MathSoc Exec office) doesn't have a very long wire, and I didn't see an easy way to plug it in while still being able to play at my desk. My mother had an extension cord lying around so I figured I'd just use that. So I plugged it in, turned on the power, and the red power light blinked on and then off.

Weird... I gave it a second try but it didn't even blink on this time. I did hear a weird popping sound, however... And then the room smelled like burning and it started to get smoky. I didn't think things through properly and grabbed the wire to unplug it. That certainly worked, but both the extension core and the adapted box were pretty hot. I got a weird burn thing under the nail on my right thumb from it. It did stop the smoke from continuing to fill the room, which was good.

Anyway, I no longer have the ability to power up my SNES. If it even works at all after this debacle. My hope is the adapater was set up to protect the system and that's why it blew. And I still don't know why the extension cord broke it. Maybe it can't handle the power needs of a power brick? I don't know. I'll need to find another power thingy, but I won't be able to do so by Saturday.

The SRL website does talk a little about when you're allowed to use an emulator. The one I use for my SNES Saturday posts is on their allowed list, and they say people using emulators have to stream or they'll get banned. Well, I can do that! So I'm going to try to use an emulator... And that meant I could practice!

I figured the right idea would be to pull up the speedrun from AGDQ since they ran the warpless category there. So I'd get a proper route and see what tricks the guy was using and could try to copy them. Try being the operative word there... I can't use the p-meter extension trick very well (probably a problem with my 'thumbo' control strategy) and I certainly can't memorize the timing for all the jumps and such even if I could do it. But I went stage by stage on the first world to try things out.

I have a new appreciation for how crazy these speedruns are to pull off consistently. It's not like you can just know how to run and jump and then wing it! You really need to know the exact layout of everything in every zone to know what you can jump off of. In stage 1-6 the guy skipped the entire slow moving platform aspect by doing an 'impossible' p-meter charge, jumping off into space, bouncing off of a flying Koopa, and then juking back to hit a small platform you can't possibly see until it's too late. Confuse the timing from any two levels and you die and blow your run.

I pushed through trying to copy the run and ended up being able to clear all of world 1 without dying. (Well, I did 18 runs and got deathless runs only twice... And actually gameovered on most of them!) My time was a little under 4:30. The AGDQ guy did it in around 3:40. I sure don't think I can get any better though! Not without actually figuring out the p-meter trick. And I can't imagine I'll remember any of this stuff by tomorrow, let alone after doing this for 7 more worlds.

I'm also not sure if I should be actively trying to avoid extra lives from matching 3 of a kind at the end of levels like good people do. I feel like getting 4 extra lives is probably more important for me than shaving off 6 seconds every 3 levels. I also wonder if I should be doing the mushroom houses and spade levels to get extra lives and consumables or if those are just wastes of time. Obviously they're wastes of time for competent players. I guess one issue is I consistently failed to get anything out of the spade level in world 1. So I'd probably just be spending time for nothing at all, and that has to be wrong!

Get Yourself Speedrunning

The people at Speed Runs Live decided they want to actually capitalize on all the viewership from AGDQ by scheduling three 'easy' races for the 3 weekends after AGDQ. This isn't actually anything terribly special since as far as I know anyone can go and create a race for any game at any time as long as they have at least one opponent lined up. What is special is that they're sporadically advertising it on the AGDQ stream and it has a big banner on the front page.

I'm not sure if they're going to bring in a ton of new people or not, but I'm going to give at least the first one a go. I've actually been idling on the SRL IRC server since last year's AGDQ but never felt like I knew enough to join any of the races. (Both in terms of strategies for any games and in terms of knowing who to talk to.) But now there's a race that's expecting completely new people in both regards. So while I'm certain to get completely destroyed by anyone who actually plays these games I have a chance to not come last if there are enough other new players.

As an added bonus, racing for at least one hour is a requirement for getting your stream featured on the SRL page. Another potential source of viewers! (Only for speedrun related stuff of course, but I'm sure I'll get back to my FFII routing after AGDQ ends.)

Anyway, the three races are Super Mario Bros 3, then A Link to the Past, then Sonic 2. It's not clear if emulating games is cool or not, but luckily I have a copy of the first one so I can maybe find out then.

I was hoping to find good notes for what the actual SMB3 run is like but haven't had any luck so far. I did find one thing on gamefaqs explaining how they manage to keep their super speed thing even after it seems like they should have lost it by the physics rules that I remember from the game.

And I get to try out my SNES S-video cable. Woo!

Binding of Isaac Starting Items

There seems to be two different ways that people speedrun The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. The first is to run a race where you need to beat the boss in the chest with Isaac. The second is where you beat the game sequentially with a set of the characters. All the ones from the original game, or all the ones from this game, or all the ones from this game excluding the crazy challenge character. I've watched a fair number of both kinds of runs and one thing they have in common is the player will check out the treasure in the first item room and reset if it isn't very good.

I've just been playing with all the items and I find I can win most of the time, but sometimes it is definitely very slow going. It certainly makes sense to invest some time at the start of the run into getting a high damage item. But what are the high damage items? I decided to take a look at the list of items in the item room pool and see which ones look like they'd be good to start with. Next time I play I'm going to try resetting until I get one of them and try to get a feel for how long it takes. I also need to make sure I've unlocked all the really good ones! If not then I should make getting them a high priority.

The way I see it, 35 of the 220 possible item room items are really good. There are also 4 items in the curse room that are super good (ceremonial robes, the mark, the pact, and pentagram) and it seems like it's worth starting with any item room item if you get one of those. Anyway, the 35 items that I want to try starting with are: 20/20, blood of the martyr, capricorn, chemical peel, chocolate milk, cricket's head, dark bum, death's touch, dr fetus, epic fetus, ipecac, iron bar, judas' shadow, lil' brimstone, magic mushroom, the mind, mom's knife, money = power, monstro's lung, mutant spider, number one, odd mushroom (large), phd, pisces, polyphemus, proptosis, pyromaniac, rotten baby, smb super fan, stigmata, tech.5, halo, inner eye, ludovic technique, and sad onion.

I actually have all but 3 of those items already. I need to beat the boss rush with Judas (should be doable), I need to kill Satan with The Lost (I don't even have The Lost unlocked and it would be super hard regardless), and I need to kill Mom's foot with the activated ability of The Bible. I should be able to do that last one by just keeping my eye out for The Bible to show up in a store. While playing Judas!

Awesome Games Done Quick 2015

Yesterday marked the start of this year's AGDQ. For those who may not know what that means it's a week long video game marathon where people who are supreme experts at specific games beat them as fast as possible. Typically this will involve abusing bugs to move faster, or to move through walls, or to skip entire sections of games.

I've spent a fair amount of time in the past year watching speedrunning streams. Most of the time people who are streaming are trying to beat their personal best times. So if they get off to a slow start they'll just reset the game and try again. This marathon is more about being entertaining than setting new records so that aspect of speedrunning is missing. And frankly that's a good thing in general. It means the organizers are only picking games to be played by people who can consistently be pretty fast. This makes it more accessible to a casual viewer I think. They also bring in extra people to talk about what's going on in the games. So even if the guy playing the game needs to focus on a hard trick there's someone else there to explain it to the layman viewer. This is good for me since I don't know most of these games! I don't think I'd like watching a regular Sonic record attempt stream, but I was happy to watch a few different Sonic games at AGDQ with the focus on entertainment and commentary.

The purpose for the event is to raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Last year they raised a little over a million dollars during AGDQ and I suspect they'll handily beat that total this year. Viewership is certainly up! They had more people watching the stream a few hours after it went live than they did at any point last year.

They have tons of prizes and stuff they raffle off to people who donate during specific sections of the event. The grand prize this year is actually a pinball machine donated by Pinball Joe, whoever that is! There's also a Humble Bundle set up explicitly for this event with the money going to the same charity. A bunch of games, a shirt and other stuff, and a 3 month subscription of xSplit which is one of the two big streaming software suites that I know of. If you want to use xSplit this seems like it really should be the way to get it. I use OBS which is open source, free, and seems to work just fine but I've hears xSplit works just fine too.

You can watch the action on their Twitch channel.

Final Fantasy II: More Progress

Yesterday I finally felt up to using a controller and set about continuing on in my FFII learning run. I leveled my unarmed skill to max and proceeded to actually beat the game without leveling my health very high at all. I did wipe a couple times though. Anyway, here's my current new thoughts...

Most enemies simply couldn't hurt me, but once enemies could hit me they did a ton of damage. Like, in the 200-600 damage range when I had 735 max health. Getting ambushed by 2 of those guys meant I could be dead before taking an action, and that happened once. The final dungeon had some guys who cast level 16 drain or poison spells which were hitting for enough to also kill me in 2 hits if they rolled high. My solution this time was actually to use the 4th character who joins the party with 1053 max health. I was able to get his evasion chance up to 99% and stuck him in the front row to reduce the odds of the enemies killing off Firion in one round. Firion was attacking with a blood sword and healing to full every action so they needed to burst him down in one round, and that got a lot less likely when the enemies could hit Leon instead. Anyway, the way I see it there are 3 solutions to this problem. I can level my max health higher (around 1500 should be safe), or I can level my evasion chances up a little more to make it so the enemies can't hit me at all, though I could still be in trouble against the casters. Or I can make more use of the 4th character. The second to last dungeon was where I started getting killed, but I could easily have stuck Rickard in the front row and used his ~570 health to absorb some of the punishment.

I could run from lots of enemies all the way through the end of the game. For the most part the things I couldn't run from were undead, slimes, wererats, or giants. Undead came in groups of up to 8, and were all immune to toad. So I need to take a lot of time punching them down slowly or I need to level a damage spell. Level 10 fire was actually able to kill all of them but the two highest level ones, and even there they'd come with a bunch of dorks so I still wanted to open with fire. Slimes are also immune to toad and they also have stupid high armour. I couldn't punch them for damage, though I did forget to take my shield off to see if I could hurt them with full on punching. Fire also took care of them. The rats and giants were handled by toad. I think there was only one enemy that wasn't handled by fire or toad, and I could just punch that one.

I timed out how long it took to level punching from 1 to 16. It took 36 minutes, and then 34 minutes, and both times I made big mistakes. I'm pretty sure 30 minutes to max a weapon skill is where I'm going to end up. Spells take longer because there's an extra menu command to move down, and it's 4 buttons instead of 3 per skill, and because of the weirdness where I didn't seem to be able to level all in one fight. Probably more like 40-45 minutes for a spell. So I guess the question is if fire saves 40 minutes of punching in random encounters over the rest of the game. Well, I don't need to send it all the way level 16. 10 did most of what I wanted this time. There's also the question on if I need to level fists and swords. Maybe if I level fire and swords instead I can burn down the bosses before I get a blood sword. Even if it takes two rounds to kill every boss, if it saves 30 minutes that has to be good. Especially since I had to punch a few of them multiple times anyway.

I found a lot of steps in the walkthrough I was using that could be skipped. Lots of 'go talk to this person' when I could just go straight to the dungeon. I have a little more of that to test at the start of the game too.

I definitely need to get the second blood sword, but I think it will be for Leon, not so Firion can dual wield them. I also want two life spells, so they can each bring the other back to life in combat. I don't need osmose at all. I'd rather buy extra elixirs if I need more mana. (In my real play I ran into huge mana problems, but that's because I wasn't running from every fight!)

I'm not sure if I need to grind up the ribbon/aegis shield from the toad spell or not. I did get hit with some instant death attacks in random encounters that ambushed me. They all missed because of the ribbon. Would they have missed from my spell resistance? Not sure. But it's nice when I'm using 2 people to have cheesed up one copy so I can just open the chest in the final dungeon to suit up the second guy. I may even want to just get a second ribbon from the toad puzzle so Leon can use it the whole time I have him... I guess the big thing is I want a way to kill many enemies that aren't weak to fire anyway, and toad hooks me up with both the ribbons and the AE kill spell.

I think for my next run I'm going to try dropping punching again, maxing out fire instead, and just grinding health with Mindu. I'm going to also look up some rank numbers for enemies near the start of the game to see if I can find a better place to grind than right in front of the first town.

Final Fantasy II: Raising Max Health

My left hand/arm has gotten worse the last few days so I haven't actually been able to put any more actual work in on routing a Final Fantasy II speedrun. But I have been doing a lot of thinking about it. I'm trying to figure out how I really want to go about raising my maximum health. I still don't know how high I want it to go, but the way I see it there are 4 possible ways to go about it.

The first is the organic method. If I need more maximum health I could just fight things a little weaker than that and level up my health as they hit me. Easy! And entirely unreasonable. I'm not convinced the difficulty gradients in the game are such that this would even be plausible on a normal run. Even if it could work it would be slow! I want to run from all the fights if I can, and kill all the enemies in one round if I can't. And since I'll have max evasion the enemies won't get a turn.

The second is to beat myself up. It's certainly possible that every fight I can't run from I could first hit myself for half my health before taking a round to kill the enemies. The tricky part is keeping a way to hurt myself for enough to get a health up without risking death, even after I significantly increase my maximum health. My damage is never going to get any better (or worse) so unless I'm in a position where punching myself is in that right window I'll need a different source of damage too. Like leveling up a fire spell or something, but that will add even more time.

Next up is to stay in the early game with Windu longer. He has the swap spell, and the life spell, so he has a safe way to knock me low (kill me then use life) and then as long as I manipulate our health totals to be different I can swap on every fight to get a health up every other fight. This has the advantage of also giving chances at mana ups. It has the disadvantage that Windu doesn't stick around for terrible long and all the fights he is around for can be run from. So while I could level up health in the first couple dungeons I'm not sure it would be terribly fast. I can certainly just stick around the starting town too and grind health, like I grind weapon skills and evasion and the like. The problem is that while I can guarantee I get max weapon skill in 16 fights I'm going to need way, way more fights than that to grind health really high.

The fourth option is to grind some cash, run to Mysidia, and buy my own swap spell. Then I can do the above option over the course of the entire game, swapping on every fight I can't run from. Swap actually levels the health/mana of two characters at the same time if they started with comparable health/mana levels. Which I guess opens up the option of using two characters, not just one character, for at least part of the game. I was really liking the idea of only having to input one command each fight but if I need to grind health over a long period of time then it should be faster to input two commands each round instead of grinding around the starting town. And if I'm using toad to kill enemies, actually, then having my fastest person use swap and my slower person killing everything with toad I'll still end a fight in one round and get a chance at a health/mana up. Also, getting to Mysidia early is non-trivial and probably requires grinding health in some other way first.

So it's going to come down to how much health I need, and how many fights I won't be able to run from later on. If I can get by with just a couple hundred then I should just use Mindu. Otherwise I probably want to punch myself a little at the very start and then head to Mysidia and run a 2 person party. Maria can have toad and maybe a damage spell too?

Final Fantasy II: Trial Start

I went and spent 5 hours tonight streaming the start of a Final Fantasy II run. It didn't exactly go according to plan but I learned some things. I also talked a bit about Final Fantasy games with a 13 year old who randomly decided to watch me because he played FFII on the GBA. Anyway, here's what I learned...

- Even with 16 sword skill you actually need a good sword to do any damage. The enemy's armour applies to each hit so the fact I'm swinging with a 8 attack sword means any enemy with something like 20 armour is immune to my damage. For the record, the Captain I need to grind for a toad book has 50 armour.

- I leveled a fire spell to 10 in order to kill the Captain, but it really didn't do a whole lot of damage. Something like 280 to a single target. I also tried using it against some powerful undead I ran into near Mysidia and it was hitting them all for about 120 each. The ghost had 540 health so it was taking 5 casts to kill them off. That is not fast. Even if I leveled fire all the way to 16 it would be doing less than 200 on average to all enemies. So 3 casts to take out the ghosts. And there are other undead with even more health than ghosts. The damage from my fire is pretty much capped, too, unless I put even more time and effort into grinding my int stat.

- Toad actually took out some enemies despite casting it with a sword and shield on. This confused me. It hit some and missed others of the same type so it isn't that they're vulnerable to the element. I was able to land it despite having 120% accuracy penalty from my sword and shield. It just doesn't make sense. My chance to hit while naked should only be around 50%! (Though toad 16 does try to hit 16 times which means it really will hit everything when I have 50% chance to hit.) My best guess is that the accuracy penalty was removed in this version of the game. Possibly drastically reduced? And that the enemies I didn't hit with toad rolled high on their magic resist checks and I rolled abysmally low on my toad checks? That doesn't feel very good, but it feels better than hitting with a spell that has a -70% chance to hit. Or maybe there's some underflow error going on?

- Toad 16 and the snowcraft did combine to get me an aegis shield and a ribbon pretty early on. No enemies that I would legitimately encounter on the way to this point in the game cast dangerous debuffs so the ribbon here doesn't come too late.

- I had serious money trouble. Especially when I got Mindu and started grinding up magic points. But I was able to kill some enemies near Mysidia for a lot of cash, and that's not very far from the starting town. So if I have a way to kill them I might try grinding down there instead.

- I wanted to get toad on my first trip to the castle but I really only see one way to make that happen, and that's to level unarmed skill. You get 8 damage for each level in unarmed, so if I grind that up to level 16 I'd get to swing 16 times for something close to 200 per swing. 50 armour doesn't do anything relevant against that! It adds another thing to grind, which sucks, but since fire really isn't cutting it for killing undead I can just skip grinding that? Alternatively the Fynn castle isn't very far from the starting town so I can just go get toad after I do some plot and level up organically along the way?

- I got my evade chance up to 99% pretty easily, but I only had 1 chance to evade. This wasn't good since the Captain swings 6 times per attack. I can deal with that by taking the time to grind up my evade chance though. (Equip 2 shields and just mash X to spam attack against a large group of enemies willing to attack you.) This is probably worth my while to do regardless.

- It was weird, but I couldn't get a full level in a spell in one combat. I could take sword skill up a full 100 experience and gain a level in one fight but the spells were all capping out in the high 90s. eventually I resorted to doing half a level in each fight to level up my toad spell.

- Counting to 100 is easy if I focus on it. Counting to 100 while reading chat and responding is tricky.

- It felt like I was still getting ambushed more often than I thought I should. It's possible I want 99% evade on all my characters, even the dead ones. This wouldn't actually take very long. Level 10 shield skill and two of the second shield would do it. Assuming I had the money to buy them!

I'm now torn on if I should continue from my saved game to see what other issues I run into or if I should start a new plan from the beginning since this start really isn't great. I guess I could just grind unarmed skill in my current game to emulate what I'll probably want to do? That way I can see problems that crop up later while having unarmed skill to actually kill enemies with armour.

I'm also torn on if I want one character to grind unarmed for early game and swords for late game or if I want two different characters to grind each one. Only having one character taking actions felt really good... So I think I want to stick with that for now.

Final Fantasy II: Party Setup

My arms have been hurting the last few days so I haven't really been able to do any playing of Final Fantasy II. I have had plenty of time to think about it though! I've been trying to figure out how I want to setup my characters so that I know what I need to grind and what I want to buy from each town when I get to them.

To start, the odds of getting a sneak attack or getting sneak attacked is based on the evade percentage of specifically Firion. This means my top priority is making sure he's maxed out. Maria starts with 15 intelligence versus 10 for the other two characters which means she should be the black mage if I want to have one. 5% extra chance to land a toad cast is pretty big! Everyone starts with the same spirit so they're all equivalent for being a white mage. Firion is going to have to have a shield on so he's going to have a massive spell accuracy penalty so he's really not going to be setup to kill undead with the life spell. Having Maria do both is a reasonable choice, but having Guy do the white magic is probably a better bet.

Then I need to decide how I'm going to win fights fast. On my last casual run I killed things by making use of the berserk spell along with basic attacks. It's way better than any other spell for doing damage, though it has the downside that it's forced to be single target. I said next time I played I'd want to use even more berserk along with maybe haste to just rip through enemies. But that was playing without power leveling with the cancel trick which is certainly in the cards for a speedrun. I guess all the bosses are going to be single target fights anyway, so a good plan could be to run from most fights, use level 16 toad to one shot things I can't run from, maybe life on undead. Then burn down a boss with berserk. That involves leveling a fair number of things though, and squeezing out more speed is probably going to come down to minimizing the time spent cancel grinding.

There's also a weapon called the blood sword. It looks terrible on the surface since it has no attack, no accuracy, no evade, and a massive spell accuracy penalty. But it has the upside that every hit drains 1/16th of the enemy's life. No matter how much life they have, and even if my strength adds no damage at all, they're guaranteed dead in 16 hits as long as they aren't undead. You can max out your sword skill at level 16, which I believe gives 16 swings in a round but might give 17. Those aren't all going to hit, but it really feels like half of them should and therefore any non-undead monster in the game should be dead in two attacks. Oh, and there are two of these swords in the game. And in the PSX version I'm pretty sure you swing with both hands. So one person with 16 sword skill and 2 blood swords will swing 32 (or 34) times per round. Which should be a round one kill... So all I actually need is someone with 16 sword skill and either enough agility to go first or enough health to survive one round from the boss and bosses will be no problem at all.

Which means it's going to come down to random encounters. Which ones can I not run from? What do I need to deal with them? Those are things I'm only really going to find out by trying things out in the game itself.

But one thing the blood sword does point out is I don't necessarily need more than one character. Power leveling health and mana on multiple people will take extra time. It's entirely possible that one character with max sword/shield skill can just straight up beat the early bosses with regular swords and then switch to a blood sword when you get them to trivialize the rest of the bosses. There is certainly the issue of dealing with the fights you can't run from since shields have such ludicrous spell accuracy penalties (-70% for all shields). One possibility is to use elemental damage spells where the enemy is weak to that element. Those spells are guaranteed to hit regardless of your accuracy and hit for double damage. Every undead monster in the game except one has a weakness to fire, for example. So I could quite reasonably wear a shield and still kill them with a high level fire spell. And if I can't run from non-undead there's always the option of killing them off one at a time with a regular sword. That's slow, but depending on how often it comes up it might be faster than powering up three times as many characters. I also save on inputs in combat if I get to kill off most of my party and only need to control one person.

I wonder... The site I've been reading says it's Firion's stats that matter for ambushes, but it doesn't mention if he has to be alive or not. It's possible I want to level just his shield skill to the point where he has 99% evade with two of the starter shields and then murder him. And then probably use Guy since he starts with the highest strength and stamina and therefore will be better in the early game with a sword and will need less time to twink out his health to the same level. His agility sucks, which is unfortunate since agility is the best stat, but if he still uses one shield and has 16 shield skill he'll have a near max evade anyway. (The sword will give 17%, a base shield will give 68%, his base agility of 5 will give 5% for a total of 90%. So he needs 9 extra agility ups or to to use the second shield in the game to max out.)

Actually, I can only use the cancel trick with Guy once I get a 4th character. And since I think I want to get the toad spell before I get a 4th member he's probably out. Which would mean Maria if I end up casting spells that need int for accuracy, or just running with Firion regardless. He'll be running with 99% evade in his standard setup anyway so I guess I don't really gain an edge by not using him.

It's all theory for now, but I think a single character setup might be viable. And if it is viable it's probably going to be the fastest unless it involves jumping through too many hoops just by virtue of saving so much time not grinding the other characters. So I think I'm going to head down that road and see where it leads.

A single character is going to need to level:

Sword - 16
Shield - 16?
Health - 2000?
Mana - 300?
Toad - 16
Cure - ???
Osmose - ???
Life - ???
Fire - ??? (And maybe other elemental spells too? Thunder/blizzard/scourge.)
Warp - 1
Esuna - 3??? (Probably not needed if a ribbon is obtained early via toad 16.)
Swap - 1???
Teleport - 1

As far as gear goes, they don't need much. A starter shield, the best sword I can get at any stage in the game, 2 blood swords, and a ribbon. As I get better shields and exceed the evade cap it becomes possible to use gear with evade penalties too, so maybe I want a power sash and thief gloves or black garb and power armlet. (Either combo will give 10 extra strength and 10 extra agility which has to be good.) I also need to get enough gold to buy the spells I want and I have no idea right now how easy that will be. It's possible killing captains for a toad scroll will give me all the money I need for the entire run!

It's also possible that this whole toad minigame plan isn't needed. The early ribbon might be critical, but with only one character I won't need the 2 extra ones and could therefore eventually use the 1 you find in a chest. Same with the aegis shield. If toad isn't useful for killing fights I can't run from then grinding it all the way to 16 has a lot less value, but to start I want to run that strategy and see what happens.

Final Fantasy II: Fight or Flight?

I've been trying to decide if the right idea is to set myself up to run from every fight or if I want to set myself up to smash every fight. Both are doable within the confines of the system I think, but they do require different gear setups and things to power level.

Fighting every fight has the advantage of getting lots of money/loot drops. In a normal game it would also give more experience, but that's not the case here. It does give more chances to gain agility.

Running from every fight has the advantage of not needing nearly as much mana to beat a dungeon. It lets you build just for boss fights instead of needing to be able to kill a variety of trash mobs. (Ribbons may not actually be needed if you never actually fight anything that casts a brutal spell on you.) Running from fights is typically also faster than fighting them, at least in a game with a high success rate on running.

I loaded up my save file from my marathon playthrough and did some brief testing on running away. I tested by running with some with 99% evade, someone with 0% evade, and then I lowered the 99% guy down (to something like 15%) and tried again. Every time I tried to run at 99% evade it worked. Every other time it failed. This makes me think it isn't agility that matters for running away. It's just evade percentage. And if I want to I can get that up to 99% pretty trivially by dual wielding shields and power leveling the shield skill.

The real question is going to be if many fights are set up with a "can't run" flag. The database I've been using to pull data for the game doesn't list that anywhere that I can find, so it's going to be a trial and error kind of thing. I think I read somewhere that you can't run from undead, which could be problematic.

In terms of the fight plan I'd probably need to find a way to reliably kill all the monsters in one action. Autoattacking them all to death with berserk buffs will certainly work, but it isn't especially fast. There are instant death spells in the game, in particular the toad spell. Toad has the best accuracy of all the instant death spells and it's also needed for getting ribbons super early in the game. Convenient! Some enemies are going to be resistant to toad though, so I guess those fights are the autoattack fights. Or maybe I want to level up an attack spell like fire? Undead are also immune to toad I think, but those you can kill off with a life spell if you have enough accuracy.

I think the flight plan is superior to the fight plan, if it will work on most fights. I guess the way to find out is do a run with a 99% evasion character from the start and see! And probably level up a life spell to deal with undead fights if it turns out you can't run from those.

Final Fantasy II: Match Game

One of the things Square added to Final Fantasy II in the Origins edition is a little minigame where you have to match 8 pairs of cards by flipping them 2 at a time. You can get some money and consumables out of it pretty early on if you can perfect the board. Perfecting the board is extremely unlikely (it's a little worse than 1 in 2 million) so it feels like this can't be faster than just grinding mobs or whatever. There's a catch though. Apparently the game will only generate 32 boards and will loop around them. So if you're willing to write down the first few boards you'll be guaranteed to get some perfects on board 33 and on...

When I read about this I thought they meant there were only 32 possible boards so I went in and wrote them all down. The idea being I could then go in, flip a couple cards, and know where I was in the sequence. Unfortunately this turns out to not be the case. After writing them all down I did confirm that they cycled back for board 33. But then when I left the minigame and then went back in the board that came up had a pattern that didn't match any of the 32 I'd written down. Playing the game 33+ times just to get some gold has to be wrong.

There's a twist to the game... If you happen to have leveled the toad spell up to max level (for reference I have never maxed out a spell or skill in this game) the game changes and the rewards get significantly better. We're talking end game quality gear here... Aegis shield, ribbon, genji helm, genji armour, genji glove, and possibly some one shot consumables too. So if that gear makes the game significantly faster it could be worth the time and effort of writing down some patterns and plowing through the minigame a few times. You'd have to grind up a toad spell, which would also add on a fair amount of time. On the plus side toad is the best instant death spell in the game so maxing it out might actually be optimal even if you weren't going to abuse this minigame.

So the question is... How good are these items? Is it feasible that spending time getting them early will save more time over the course of the entire game?

Ribbon - Probably the best helmet in the game. It has no evasion penalty, so you can wear it without screwing up your agility gains. It has no magic penalty, so you can cast spells at full power. It has the highest magic defense of a helmet. It provides resistance to every element, which means you're immune to all negative status conditions from spells. That part is the one that could be huge... Not having to worry about dying to confuse or stone might save a lot of time. You get one ribbon out of a chest and can fight enemies that drop ribbons so eventually you'll get them that way, but all of these sources are only found in the final dungeon.

Genji Helm - The highest defense helmet in the game, but it comes with massive evasion and magic penalties. If you're happy going last, being unable to run, and getting hit by every attack then you want to wear this helmet. I don't want to do those things, except maybe on my 4th character who isn't going to get agility power leveled.

Aegis Shield - The best shield in the game. It has the highest evasion and provides resistance to 4 of the 8 elements. The evasion boost isn't very big, and since I'm planning on scumming a high shield level it probably wouldn't matter. You get one normally and can farm more off of the optional superboss of the game. All in the final dungeon.

Genji Armour - Same as the helm. Highest defense, but massive evasion and magic penalties. Do not want.

Genji Glove - Same as the other two.

Ok, so the genji gear is all terrible for the way I play, and the aegis shield is probably redundant. But getting my hands on 3 ribbons early on in the game is awesome. And maybe worth the time spent... I need to figure out what that would be. I also need to actually get the toad spell in the early game, which is not a trivial task...

There's a scroll in a treasure chest in Castle Fynn, but that place doesn't open up until near the end of the game. A long time after you get the snowmobile which opens up the minigame, so that's probably out. It's also a drop from a monster that appears on the world map at the same time as Castle Fynn opens, so that's no help. It also drops from a second monster that appears on the world map at the same time as the first one. But they also exist as a trap encounter in the first town. You can walk up to them and talk to them to start a fight. They're brutally powerful for the start of the game, but by the time I can get the snowmobile I'll have twinked out more than enough to kill one of these guys I would think. The toad scroll is only a 5% drop so I'll need to kill lots of them, but the bottom line is it is actually feasible to have toad really early in the game.

Which means I should investigate how long it takes to beat the minigame with 1 miss three times over.

Final Fantasy Month

One of the people I'm following on Twitch started up a long race with another guy where they're going to play 21 Final Fantasy games one after another and see who can beat them all first. They're pausing their times when they're sleeping so you can compare the different games between the two of them. Cereth, who I watch with some regularity, actively speedruns 5 of the games on the list. Crumps only speedruns 2 of them. So he should be at a big disadvantage... But apparently Cereth hasn't ever played some of the games and is likely to lose a fair amount of time on those. Especially since one of them is Tactics and a lot of people I know have to completely scrap their first run of that game because it encourages you to save the game right before a brutally hard fight. This means there's no way to go power up... So if you can't win with what you have, and if you don't have a backup save... You're screwed!

They're playing Final Fantasy II now, which neither of them have played much in the past, though at least Crumps is casting berserk to be awesome. One of the things mentioned on the stream is how the game actually has no RTA record time... No one speed runs this thing. Not even once just to get their name in lights... And the split software I use has a lot of game names preprogrammed into it. A _lot_ of game names. Including every single Final Fantasy game, except FFII. Poor FFII.

When I played this game in my marathon, way back in 2011, I didn't know what to do to make the game interesting so I decided to try to beat it as fast as I could. I got done in a little under 16 hours, but I spent a lot of time actually learning how the game works. And given that my raising agility post is one of the few that actually gets hits from outside people I know I think I actually have a pretty high level of knowledge about this game. I also didn't abuse the cancel trick in my last playthrough and that's certainly kosher in a speedrun.

What I'm saying is, I think I could really shave the time down to the level where it would be 'easy' to play the game in one sitting. And seeing all these people tuning in to watch these guys play the game makes me think there may be interest from other people in seeing it done.

I set up my PS2 today, and hooked it up to my USB capture card, and tried setting up a stream from it. I think it's pretty obvious from the quality that I'm using just composite cables instead of s-video since I don't have that wire for my PS2. If I actually get anywhere with doing this I'll have to track a better wire down. But what I do have seemed to be fairly clear regardless, so the technical setup is in place. The next step would be planning out a path through the game (including what chests are worth picking up) and then figuring out how twinked out I have to be to plow through that path. And then grind it up!

It feels a little bad to be deviating from my marathon to go do something else, but whatever! Tactics Advance is not the best so I'm in a bit of a rut anyway.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

I've been watching a lot of streams over the past month what with my hands hurting sporadically. One of the games that cropped up recently among people I follow on Twitch and on people who stream through SpeedRunsLive is The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. It's an action RPG roguelike game with a bunch of challenge modes built into it. It looked pretty fun, and it looked like the sort of thing I could be reasonably good at, and since it's so new it's also something that people are racing a lot. Getting a stream listed on the SRL stream list requires having done some races on their site, so picking up a shorter game with an active userbase seemed like a decent thing to do. So when it went on sale this past weekend I picked it up to give it a spin.

The game has a 'bit' of a sacrilegious theme going on. You play the role of Isaac, a small child whose mother hears the voice of God command her to sacrifice Isaac. Rather than allow yourself to be murdered you escape through a trap door into the basement which is a randomly generated dungeon crawl. Your method of attacking is to cry at the enemies, which shoots little projectile tears at them. The game controls like Robotron with a double joystick setup. One joystick for moving, one for aiming your attack.

The key to the game is the wide array of items you can pick up which modify the way the game plays out. The items can combine in weird and crazy ways and a good part of the fun, so far at least, has been in seeing the changes to the character as you stack on more and more weird modifications. One of the ways to get new items, including most of the powerful ones, is to meet with Satan and exchange maximum health for power. He can teach you how to fly, or turn your tears into molten lava, or maybe just sell you a headless baby corpse which will follow you round leaking blood in a trail behind you. He's a good guy who just wants to give you the tools you need to survive!

The enemies are pretty silly, too. Flies, and spiders, and sentient piles of poop. Lots of the items center around poop, actually. There's definitely some juvenile humour going on, but if you take the theme away you're still left with a fairly short dungeon crawler that controls fantastically and has a lot of interesting decisions when it comes to what items you want to buy.

I'm having a lot of fun with it, and I'm throwing it up on stream when I can. It's worth checking out if the theme doesn't bother you too much. I have to unlock a lot of stuff before I can think about racing the game (typical races go to a level of the dungeon I can't play) but that's definitely still a relatively short term goal.

Mystic Quest Update

Today I got an email that a FFVIII speedrunner I follow had started streaming Mystic Quest with the title saying something along the lines of testing out item manipulation followed by a personal best attempt. I was intrigued at the item manipulation testing so I tuned in. He had his split times up, and his personal best was a good 14 minutes better than the world record when I last checked. Something's happened to speed things up! And that something was related to what I was going to test if I ever got around to getting over my fear of talking to the cable company and getting my upload speed fixed: buying 0 of an item.

It would seem buying 0 of an item is the same as buying 256 of an item. But it also does some weird overflow things with the rest of your inventory, especially if all 4 of your consumable item slots are already filled with other things. (There are only 4 consumables in the game so 4 slots should be enough to hold them all, but the weird overflow thing messes with that.) Buying more items after things have started breaking warps your entire inventory by adding or removing key items. The whole game is gated by locked doors, warp zones, and key item related triggers. So being able to change your inventory around on the fly allows you to skip over chunks of the game! The guy who was testing this morning went and recruited the level 31 buddy when the main character was only level 9. This buddy was able to one shot the final boss of the ice dungeon! Unfortunately a lot of the triggers can only happen once so by recruiting that character early in the game they weren't around to trigger the actual plot later on when they were supposed to. He ended up getting the game into a broken state such that he couldn't move around on the map anymore. Then he went to do a real run, but he ended up messing that up and also softlocked the game after playing for an hour.

I was intrigued to see what the world record might be now so I did some searching and it looks like it was actually broken this week. It sounds like the community only found out about the buy 0 seed bug a few days ago but have already made a route that can safely skip the entire fire area. I was annoyed watching the world record run because the guy who did it swears a lot and gets _really_ whiny and bitter when random stuff happens. I feel like if you can't handle sometimes having your party get killed then maybe you shouldn't be playing Mystic Quest.

It does make me a little sad that I knew about (at least part of) this bug but I could never bring myself to ask the people running the game about it. I wish I could talk to people.

Summer Games Done Quick

Summer Games Done Quick is a 7 day straight speedrunning marathon being held to raise money for the Doctors Without Borders charity. It starts up at some point on this coming Sunday. (The website says 2pm but there's no indication what time zone that might be. The event is physically being held in Colorado so maybe it's that time zone?) I'm going to be watching it all next week!

I've been watching a lot of speedrunning streams ever since I watched AGDQ in the winter. I've mostly found that I can't watch regular speedruns of games I don't really understand. A normal stream with a speedrun is trying to set a record time and involves a lot of resetting and not a lot of entertaining. Which is fine... Record times tend to be the goal and with games I do understand I enjoy this format. But the marathons tend to have a different focus. They don't involve resetting, they tend to involve 'safer' strategies which slow things down a little, and they also tend to involve extra people on the stream able to explain what is going on. This actually makes it so I prefer to watch marathons for games I don't know very well. There's more to learn and I'm not just getting fed information I already know. And while they may go a little 'safer' they're still going stupidly fast!

I think SGDQ is a lower key event than AGDQ so I'm not sure if there's going to be as many super cool moments like there were in AGDQ this year what with the blindfolded Punch-Out runs and the Super Metroid race and such but I'm expecting it to be pretty enjoyable. Maybe you want to check it out too?