Pastebin Monday

Mostly just doing this to organize my current speedgame thoughts, but also just to give people an idea what my plans are even if I'm not streaming stuff:

Currently, I've been running a lot of Shantae and the Seven Sirens. I'll be 9sec off 2nd place once I upload my latest PB from a few days ago and the gap between 1st and 2nd place is MASSIVE. We're talking 6min IGT difference which is insane. Unfortunately this game/category is nearly 2 hours long and has probably like 5min of RNG variance to give a somewhat solid estimate and it's just completely fucking annoying.
Didn't get the Drill Crawler card? Have fun losing around a minute to movement speed loss and wasting time farming more for the card as you go the longer you don't get it.
Coral Siren? Absurdly tight 2 cycle and the boss can still eat like 20sec doing extra attacks and if you miss the 2 cycle you're just fucked.
Angler Fish Siren? Complete and utter piece of dogshit. Basically completely random attacks with only one allowing you to hit her and she has 6 possible spawn points that all need to be IMMEDIATELY reacted to to get another mega tight 2 cycle and if you get either of the top 2 platforms at all, have fun almost guaranteed 3 cycle unless you're a god and eek it out (which is possible with double top platforms).
Final boss? Even more of a mess than Angler tbh. There are random weak points that involve random rock platform spawns to get around and hit the weak points. Once you finally get to the last weak point, she can just randomly whip out a long laser attack that wastes like 30sec each time she does it (and yes she can decide to do it twice in the short time it takes to kill the last weak point) right at the end of a 2 hour run.
This game is just quite frankly getting on my nerves to an absurd degree even with so much time to save (my current PB played well everywhere and mostly just lost time to that ~5min of variance I mentioned earlier, got fucked by everything that can fuck you). I don't care about beating the really good WR, but god damn I want solid 2nd place but idk if I have the patience to make it happen at this point. The myriad of technical problems this game has is also a huge deterrent atm, from randomly clipping OoB and hardlocking (as I did today), to CPU hogging during loads on PC (which I would prefer to play on due to the next issue), to weird saturation issue that happened to me on Switch and seems to be stuck that way for eternity. The game is just a fucking mess.

Rant over, what does this mean moving forward? Firstly, I want to run the OoB category for Seven Sirens but I haven't even begun to look at the route so I have no clue how awful it is even if it is like ~30min shorter so maybe I'll save that for later. I'm more than happy to have No OoB where I have it just to throw at marathons even if it's long as fuck for what it is and will likely never get into anything. I do however have a lot of ideas for possible new projects and/or returning to old stuff:

Returning
- Paper Mario All Cards
- Eternal Sonata Any% (360)
- Bomberman Generation Any%
- Code Vein Any% (if I can eventually get over tech hurdles basically locking me out of an fps dependent trick, probably need new CPU)

New
- Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX
- Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

Paper Mario and Eternal Sonata are more or less still off the table cuz I really just need/want something shorter cuz making time for something even 2 hours long has sucked. Code Vein is gonna require me spending a lot of money on a new CPU which uh probably no. Bomberman Generation is easily my closest consideration to return to, but I'd probably have to feel the game out again before I decided. The 2 new options are both pretty damn short, so they're definitely on my radar so idk, still just gonna feel stuff out.

I mostly just wanted to rant about how shit Seven Sirens is with this pastebin, but thanks for reading if you did even if I'm not gonna be streaming any of this stuff cuz I'm quite frankly just tired of streaming, especially while speedrunning, it just distracts me beyond belief and I am already hard on myself enough without the fear/paranoia of however many viewers judging my every move even though I know they're good people and they aren't thinking any less of me if I fuck up.