My plans for speedrunning over the next few months

Hello,

As many of you know, I have been on hiatus from speedrunning for quite a while now. During the end of 2011 and beginning of 2012, I was working on doing a Twilight Princess Any% run for SDA and was making slow but decent progress. As I'm sure I've made *very* clear by now, my attitude toward speedrunning is definitely an "old-fashioned" one - I see speedrunning as similar to TASing in that the goal of it, to me, is to create a final product to serve as a representation of the game pushed to its limits, rather than as a competitive endeavor for world records (I've made several other pastebins on this topic, so I won't go into detail here). Around the middle of 2012, other people started running the game seriously too (this was around the time speedrunning started to *really* take off and become really competitive) and started getting much better times than I was capable of, so I lost motivation for an SDA run and started looking elsewhere for runs to do.

Around this same time, issues in my personal life started overtaking speedrunning as my primary focus over the course of about a year (June 2012 to June 2013 - from the end of my junior year of high school to when I graduated), and the aftermath of these events resulted in me falling into a deep depression for another year (mid-2013 to mid-2014), during which I was unable to play video games at all because they started triggering severe OCD symptoms. After recovering in the summer of 2014, I attempted to get back into running Twilight Princess, but so much had changed in terms of routes and strategies that re-learning the game became overwhelming. The process of re-learning a game that I used to know like the back of my hand - along with general exhaustion from my grueling first year of college - became too much for me, and I eventually just gave up out of a lack of motivation.

I'm sure a lot of you know this, but my depression came back full force (albeit without the anxiety attacks) during the fall semester of 2014, and the root cause seemed to be that I simply wasn't happy with how my life was going - I had gone from living a relatively happy (if a bit stressful) life in high school to being completely miserable during my first 3 semesters of college, and I felt like I had lost everything I had in high school that used to make me happy. But thanks to support from many close friends and my family, I've found the strength to take my life back into my own hands and work to change it to the way I want it to be. I've changed my major in college, and I've worked out a schedule that gives me tons of time in the afternoon to relax and do what I want. And one of the things I missed most from high school that I wanted to get back was speedrunning - something I hadn't really done much of for any significant time period since graduating in June 2013.

Now that my life is starting to come back up from this downward spiral, and I have tons of time in the afternoons to relax and do what I want, I've decided it's time for me to come back to speedrunning. I'm sure many of you saw my stream from Friday, so this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. The purpose of this pastebin is to announce my coming out of retirement, and to lay down what you guys should expect in the coming months. I won't be streaming everything - I get very nervous and easily distracted when I stream, so PB attempts in serious categories will mostly be done off-stream and recorded locally - but much of it will, and I hope to do a lot of fun things on stream that you guys will enjoy.

1. Twilight Princess - I tried to get back into this game this past summer (2014), but the process of re-learning the game with all the new tricks was too overwhelming. I will most likely try to come back to this game again, but this time I'm going to be starting out running the game as if it were still early 2012, using all the old tricks that I'm already familiar with from when I used to run the game. This way, I won't have to completely re-learn the game right away, and can ease back into it with what I already know before I start learning the new stuff. My short-term goal here is just to get a 3:37 or lower using the old 2012 any% route - which was my goal before other people started beating my times - and then after that I'll start looking into the new route and new strategies from the past couple years. Most of this will not be streamed, although some practice might be.

2. Majora's Mask - I played this on stream on Friday, and I'm interested in learning the new strategies in this game. I will most likely continue playing on the N64 version; the regular VC controls are a huge pain in the ass for me, and there's been enough controversy over the "fixed controls" adapter that I'm kind of hesitant to start using it in serious runs. I will, however, be getting a GameCube controller adapter for N64 since my current N64 control stick is kind of worn-out; the GC control stick is physically much better than the N64 one and doesn't wear out anywhere near as easily, and ZFG has confirmed that it works great for the N64 zeldas, so it seems like the obvious choice. I'm thinking of trying to get a new MM run on SDA, but no promises :P

3. Ocarina of Time - This will most likely just be a casual RTA/racing game for me, so most of this game will be streamed. I haven't played this game seriously since late 2010, so I'll probably start out doing mostly No Wrong Warp runs since that's the easiest category to get into for a beginner.

4. Metroid Prime - I will most likely be doing semi-casual PAL Any% runs in this game, for three reasons. First, my Wii doesn't read gamecube discs properly, so I would be risking random crashes if I played on 0-00 NTSC. Second, the PAL single segment run in 1:16 on SDA was the run that I learned from since it seemed to be the easiest to replicate, so using the same version lets me better gauge my progress (even though just beating that run wouldn't be enough to get on SDA these days since the standards are much higher now). Finally, I just find the PAL run to be more interesting (no phazon mines shortcut, alternate methods for shortcuts because of no scan dashing) and quite a bit easier (no scan dashing, no IBBF, more time to get to certain doors because of slower loads - yes, I'm a pussy bitch :3 ). Axon has the Japanese version of this game (which is almost exactly like PAL), so we might be racing it sometime.

Other games that I may or may not be playing are Super Mario 64, Super Metroid, Paper Mario, and any others that I think of that I feel like playing. Most of my streams will be between 1pm and 6pm EST on weekdays, so stop by if you get the chance!

Finally, I just want to thank all the people who have supported me over these past few years. It's been a long and bumpy ride, but things are starting to look up now, and I don't know if I could have done it without you guys. I won't name names - there are too many people I would probably forget - but you know who you are. Thanks :)

-Steven "ingx24" Brown