2024 update

What the hell, is the last one of these really from 2021? I knew I had been neglecting these as I haven't been as excited about speedrunning as I used to be and I'm not sure if anyone even reads these, but I thought it wasn't that bad.

So turns out the Pandemic slump I mentioned in the previous post never entirely went away and since then my speedrunning has been largely just playing Nova on and off as speedrunning comfort food. The current record is from late 2021, I should be able to improve it if I got my shit together to stay focused and get some serious attempts going, but despite having done marathon runs here and there I got very little streaming done and it's mostly just remained my usual offline practice with save states even at better times.

In ESA 2022 I got into Mega Man 1 again for a change, was excited about it coming home, then spent a couple of weeks in covid as the marathon did effectively nothing to prevent becoming a super spreader event. While sick I had no energy for anything high effort, then never got back to the game after getting better. 2023 I don't think I ever got up to anything notable.

This year I spent a decent chunk of it grinding Mega Man 1-6 any% as I submitted it to FinnRuns' 10-year anniversary event on a whim at the last minute and Javeliin was a dummy and put it in. I love the idea of that category and but man it sucks to actually play. It's so much to take in at once it's impossible to stay properly derusted in every game at once so everything's embarrassingly sloppy, and it's so long it's not only rough to play but also logistically annoying to arrange uninterrupted time for. I think I managed one streamed full run attempt before the event itself, in which the run was pretty bad but more or less within the low-ish expectations I had set for it. I had an absolutely terrible case of nerves for the first games and shudder thinking about 1 especially, but the time overall went only a little over my somewhat conservative estimate. I think I managed the commentary well enough at least.

Stressing about that one didn't help preparing for the Nova run at ESA two weeks later tense, as leading up to FinnRuns I had focused entirely on Mega Man. On top of that I somehow thought it was a great idea to do a significant reroute and add some dumb new skips here and there, and had to focus on drilling those instead of just hammering out overall consistency. Normally the run is impossible to commentate because there's too much I want to say and everything goes by too fast. That's how every commentary practice run went again and I was feeling comfortable managing that, yet somehow in the live run I kept finding myself about to wrap up whatever I was saying at the time and panicking inside with no clue what tricks or topics I was supposed to bring up next at that point. I think I managed to hold it in and end up with a solid run, though I still haven't got around to watching that one back either.

In a repeat of 2022 I returned home motivated to keep going with Nova, get some streaming done and get that record improvement, but instead found myself with an unusually rough case of your boring regular flu, and similarly faded out of the habit of regular practice and never got back to it. The following months I focused on some non-speedrun games and right now have some non-gaming things coming up too, but I'm hopeful about getting some Nova going again in October.

So that's where I'm at. And now to see if I'll actually get back on track or continue as I mostly have for the last few years.