The Big 20 #13 Retrospective

The Big 20 #13 is over. 101 entrants joined, and I wound up 31st with an official SRL time of 4:00:15. So close to sub-4.

100 People? That's A Lot!
Yes it is. There were a few reasons for this, I think.
1. There were rumors that this was going to be the last one. Given that the last Big 20 was supposed to be #5, and this one was #13, I didn't entirely believe this. But it was a possibility, especially since from my understanding, the last couple Big 20s prior to this hadn't been super well-attended.
2. The games were left to community vote. Let the fans vote, and you'll end up with a lot of fan-favorite games. That'll drive participation up.
3. Despite the games, there was a lot of variety in the goals as compared to previous Big 20s. A lot of the action games were "zipless", for instance, and some of the others (Zelda, Metroid) offered a lot of freedom in your route depending on your risk tolerance. Even Tetris, with its free level choice, fell into this.
4. The goal variety was enough that there were no "easy" goals. Sure, there were your "obviously" difficult games like Ninja Gaiden, Batman, Castlevania and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! But even some of the "easier" games were potential minefields, like Marble Madness and Ducktales, both of which have no continues, and the Chip and Dale games which only have limited continues and not a lot of invincibility frames when you get hit. Even the Zelda 2 goal, which ends before the game really gets difficult, was a potential land mine if you played too aggressively.

Cool! So Why Did I Join?
Primarily, it was #2, with a bit of #1. This was a list of games where I "knew" 18 out of the 20, so I was coming in with a pretty high floor. "Knew" in this base being defined as "Had beaten at some point, either as a kid or for the first Big 20, coincidentally the only other one I'd entered". The two I didn't know were the expected ones, Chip and Dale 2 and Little Samson, and even Little Samson I had at least seen speedruns of. While I won't claim I was a top-tier contender in any of the other games, nor did I consider myself a threat to win the Big 20 as a whole, I knew that I would at least be able to beat the "obviously" difficult games eventually with no practice. Having that to work from definitely boosted my confidence.

Practice! We're Talking About Practice!
Because of the Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! "Beat Mike Tyson" goal, my initial plan for this Big 20 was to swap back and forth between console and emulator depending on whether or not I owned the game, simply because I absolutely did not want to deal with Tyson on Emulator. Then, once someone brought up the legality of using the Disney Afternoon Collection for Ducktales and the Chip and Dale games, I briefly considered what the most absurd number of setup switches possible would be for the memes, between original games, rereleases on later Collections or systems, emulators, etc.
Then I had another idea. I found out about the Big 20 right around my birthday. Why didn't I treat myself, buy a Flashcart, and join the 21st century of speedrunning?

Flash! AAAAAAAAAAAAA! Savior of the Universe!
But first, what is a flashcart? It's a Nintendo cartridge (They're also made for other systems) with a memory card slot. You load a bunch of ROMs onto a memory card, put the card in the flashcart, the flashcart into your NES, and you can then play the ROMs on your NES! The flashcart also offers save state functionality. Their "official" purpose is for you to be able to play "backups" of games you made yourself, and to help as an NES development tool. But that's not what everyone uses them for, clearly.
For the purposes of practice, the save state functionality was the biggest deal. Now I could practice like the pros do!
"But why not just use emulators? They have save states!" True. But emulator use has its own issues, namely input lag (In layman's terms, delay between when you press a buton on the controller and when the game actually responds to the press). That's compounded by my choice of controller, a wireless XBox 360 controller. The upshot of this is that save state practice on emulator is less likely to be helpful for me on the type of stuff I'd want to use save state practice for. I'd have to learn one timing for difficult tricks on emulator, then effectively unlearn that timing and learn a different one on console. I remember this being an issue way back in the first Big 20 in early 2015.
So a flashcart it was. The specific model I picked was the EverDrive N8 Pro. Thus far, I love it, though I understand some speedrunners prefer the "Regular" N8 because you can load save states a little more quickly. That may be true, but the Pro is plenty fast enough for me.
The other issue is how I practice. I come from an era of speedrunning where the most popular form of practice for speedruns was "do speedruns". In other words, the type of practice you see from the top-tier players now, where they'll spend a ton of time on a tiny section of the game, wasn't really something I did, and I frankly don't have the mentality for it even if I had the resources for it.
Still, I gave it a shot, and I can say I love the flashcart and being able to save states on console for practice purposes. It gave me the ability to try and learn stuff of a higher difficulty than I'd otherwise be comfortable with.

The Leadup to Race Day
Besides my individual practice runs, I did five "full" Big 20 runs in the run up to September 12th. My times were:
4:23:XX (Actually way better than I expected. Long story short, I was severely sleep-deprived and probably shouldn't have tried this one at all)
4:14:XX
4:00:40
4:02:XX
4:00:35

Long story short, I set the goal for myself to get sub-4 hours on race day. I knew this wasn't going to be enough to win, and I was fine with that--there were too many world-class runners, starting from an even higher floor than I did, who frankly had more time to practice than I did. But I figured sub-4 was difficult but attainable--my sum-of-personal-bests on the 20 goals was 3:35 or so. Including the mandatory breaks between games (To give people playing on console an equal footing with people using emulators or flash carts, who could swap games much faster), that gave me about a 15-minute "buffer" to come in under 4 hours. Plus, I'd already been so close 3 times before!

Race Day
So how'd the race go? If I describe it, pretty well! I got off to a bit of a rough start, dying in Super Mario 3 to the Bowser Employee of the Month, the Lakitu in 4-4 who can sometimes just snipe you with little you can do about it. Chip and Dale 2 went pretty well though--that got me to about a minute-and-a-half edge over the 4:00:35 run. And I kept ahead of that run through the rest of the entire Big 20.
In the end, I managed to place 31st out of 101 entrants. That's pretty good, considering the caliber of talent in this race. Basically every Big 20 "All-Star" from the past took part, including Yogidamonk, who disappeared for a month (The surest sign he was taking part). This isn't even getting into all the amazing new (And "new to me") talent that's sprung up in the past few years. Toad22484 was the only one missing that I could think of.
But in any event, all that effort, and my final time was...
4:00:15.
Which was more like 4:00:05--I waited an extra ten seconds on one of my splits because I mis-adjusted one of them and turned it into a 90-second split instead. I eventually just said "I know I've waited more than 30 seconds, I'm just going to go."
So close. And it was 20 seconds better than my previous PB.
Truth be told, most of the games went really well, or at least well enough. The one disaster was, of all things, Chip and Dale 1. I got to the very last enemy before Fat Cat. Then, I don't know if I just didn't jump in time, or if I did but the input didn't take. But for whatever reason, I died, and it tilted me to the point I died about 4 more times before finally getting it together and finishing out the game.
There were a smattering of other silly deaths throughout--missing a crouch jump in 2-4 of SMB1, dying to Quick Man lasers in Mega Man 2 to name a couple--but outside of CnD1, I played pretty solidly. I did get to show off my new "!malth" command, which noted it had ben 0 days since I did something stupid in Act 5 of Ninja Gaiden and had to fight Malth with no Jump & Slash. That was amusing.
Still, even though I got a PB, and even though I finished in the top third of the entrants, I really wanted that sub-4. Oh well.
If you're curious, Yogi ended up crushing everyone with a 3:07:45. Overswarm was second with a 3:15:47, and Pikapikapikachuuuu came in third with a 3:16:55.

So What's Next?
I don't really know. My immediate next steps are to check out the rest of Chip and Dale 2 and Little Samson--we only played roughly half of the former for The Big 20, and while the latter was technically a "beat the game" goal, it was an "any %" goal that involved skipping a whole bunch of levels I now want to go back and try. Past that, I need to justify this EverDrive purchase somehow. Maybe I'll try some kind of NES Roulette thing, a la BBH's MAME Roulette. I can also dive into the world of ROM hacks if I so choose. I found a Punch-Out!! ROM hack I jokingly called "Oops All Tysons", which turned every fight into the Mike Tyson fight...except the last one, which I call "Neo Tyson" and which may be even harder than the original fight. So the short answer to this question is "Checking out stuff I didn't to see in the two games I'd never played before, then something NES related, but I'm not really sure what."

Final Thoughts
The community cooperation in this one was, by and large, awesome. This was especially true with the Mike Tyson goal. I mentioned at the start that I didn't want to deal with Mike Tyson on emulator, due to input lag. But between people forced to play on emulator and people who weren't confident in their reactions/reflexes, plus Sinister1's blindfolded tutorial, people managed to learn enough about the fight to make it much more manageable and implement a number of "buffers" to make it even easier. While I still chose to try and do it by reaction, the work of those people to reduce what it was I had to react to turned Tyson from "The final boss of this entire Big 20" to "Something still difficult, but not the thing I'm the most worried about potentially walling me for an extended period". There were a number of other tutorials posted for various games as well, that made various strategies easier if people chose to implement them. That was amazing to see, and I hope we see more of it in future Big 20s.