End of Year Speed Pastebin

i thought it would be nice to make one of these, to chart my speedgaming over the past year and also to plot out my course for my speedplans in 2017.

in january/february i picked up Lemma as my first "serious" speedgame (i'd learned some Mirror's Edge strats a few years before, but not for any serious speedrunning) and it was an amazing decision. Lemma has treated me very well, and i'm very proud of what i've achieved with that game. i will probably come back to it one day to spruce up my 100% time, as well as possibly grind for a sub-23 minute time in Any% (although the latter is less likely, since i'm fairly satisfied with my time in that for now).

in the latter half of this year i've tried playing lots of new games to find a good speedgame for me, with little success. i loved the idea of running Anodyne Any% Glitchless, but problems with swapping out save files ruled that out. Even the Ocean is a wonderful game, but the idea of routing it into something optimized doesn't appeal to me. i thought that Rabi-Ribi might be a good speedgame for me, but it looks incredibly technical and to top it off, you have to beat the (quite long) postgame to unlock the speedrun mode, which i really cannot be arsed with, quite frankly. the most success i've had is with Mirror's Edge Catalyst NG+, which i did one run of, but that's not something i feel like grinding any further, at least at the moment. i very briefly considered grinding out PONCHO and optimizing that, but being unable to swap in a completed save file for practice purposes (the game stores saves as registry keys) makes the idea of that seem pretty rough.

i have a few options for 2017. i've bought some games that (with my very limited knowledge of them) might be good games to speedrun, the main two at the moment being Owlboy and The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human. i could always return to Lemma, which will probably happen at some point, to be honest. i have a friend who's interested in speedrunning (shoutouts to @StarFahx on Twitter) who introduces me to new potential speedgames, so there are always a few options there. ultimately i'd like to have something that i can grind like i did with Lemma, not something that i do a few runs of and then give up on, but it's hard for me to find a game like that. i can't really run every game i pick up and think would be nice to run; it has to "click", and those games are difficult to track down.

all this being said, 2016 has been a good year speedwise for me. i've played cool games and become friends with cool people. here's to a great 2017! :D