Mario Pinball Land Any% FAQ

Q - What are you trying to accomplish?
A - I am trying to defeat Bowser as quickly as possible.  To do this, I must collect 15 stars and obtain 4 keys from defeating each of the other bosses in the game, and then reach Bowser's Castle.

Q - What is your PB and what is WR?
A - My PB and the current WR is 22:33 by me.  There are no official leaderboards for this game but only one other person has completed a speedrun of it, and I don't use speedrun.com anymore.

Q - What is your goal time?
A - For now, 20:XX.  Eventually, I'll get a relatively clean run that will look impressive enough to be happy with.

Q - Where is the timesave?
A - There was a new TAS of this game completed last year that includes save+quit to skip a total of 8 short cutscenes in the run, saving small amounts of time, adding up to approximately 30 seconds, though I haven't timed it yet.  The rest of the timesave just comes from not being bad.  For example, my previous PB took 3 tries to defeat the cheep cheep boss in the ice world.  The more things I can get quickly on the first try, the more time I will save.

Q - What makes getting a good run so difficult?
A - The run is optimized more for consistency than speed, yet is still very inconsistent.  If you've never played the game, you won't understand just how clunky the control and mechanics are.  This route could hypothetically go as low as 12 minutes, but the control is very difficult and consistent setups for most stars are very difficult, if not impossible.  Also, most of the bosses can troll pretty hard, making them much more difficult than they should be.

Q - What are the numbers in parentheses in your split names?
A - The number of stars I had at this point in my PB run.  I want 4 stars coming out of grassland, 8 after desert, 11 after ice world, and 13 after carnival.

Q - Why did you reset?
A - If I reset in the first world, it's because I was too slow collecting stars, or because I missed a star.  If I reset anywhere else, it's usually because I'm losing too much time in rooms, or I screwed up a boss fight so badly where a good run will be very difficult to get if I were to continue.