sda 100% submission comments draft

First, I want to thank a few people:

- Dessyreqt is one of the most knowledgeable people in our community when it comes to Super Metroid speedrunning.   He's produced a number of different theory TASes which show what a human is ideally capable of in real time while discovering new strats in the process.  His specialty has always been 100% though, for which he created a massive spreadsheet comparing all worthwhile routes according to TASed segments that he had made for this purpose.  On top of all of that, he was the first person to beat Hotarubi's 0:50 game time run (clocking in at 1:23:34 real time), which was the single-segment NTSC record when I started playing this category.

- DbX is one of the best teachers of how to run the game, and he taught me a ton when I was learning it.  One thing that comes to mind is the power of visual cues, which helped me improve my consistency a lot when I was pushing my time down in this category.  He's also come up with a lot of strats and is one of the best runners out there considering his ability in both 100% and any%.

- Apathae, Epicly_epic, and Kronicsauce are SM runners that specialize in 100%.  They contributed many of the latest strategies specific to this category, and have been great people to have had as company when watching or doing speedruns.  At one point, epic had the record @ 1:21:14.  I recommend finding all of these fine folks on twitch!

- Gari for being a cohort when doing the green/pink brinstar cleanup after wrecked ship and retro cleanup after lower norfair was thought to be slower.  Also for suggesting speed zebs to save a pause.

- Behemoth for his segmented PAL run.  Despite the differences in the way the game runs between regions, watching his run helped me pick up on certain things that I hadn't before.

- All of the people who worked on any%.  Many tricks used in any% have been adopted into 100%.

This category was the first I got an important speedrunning record in!  When I was picking it up, most runners did a much different route, farmed to 30 super missiles for the ridley fight, and stopped at the ship before Tourian (since crystal flashing on the big metroid was being used at the time).  I started running dessy's racing route, which was similar to hotarubi's route except it got grapple much earlier, and made efforts to cut out all of the pit stops that I could.

Eventually this route was found to be pretty optimal.  Even though delaying crocomire and clipping through the ceiling to get springball might still be slightly faster, that route is very risky considering it introduces some difficult tricks to the run and missing the clip once loses more time than you stood to gain doing it.  Considering also that the clip is after the major RNG elements in the game, Phantoon and Draygon, a route using it for a marginal time gain becomes quite dubious.

Another small route change came when dessy found that traversing the crateria gauntlet (accessed from the northwest of the ship area) earlier in the run on the way to green brinstar was a more streamlined path than doing it as a last stop before tourian.

This particular run clocks in with a 0:47 game time.  The boss luck was actually quite bad, but I made up for it by having solid movement for the most part and hitting a lot of the hard strats.  Since completing this run, dessy has produced a new theory TAS using this exact route (not to mention cpadolf's excellent new 100% TAS), so I'm looking forward to getting back into it before too long.  Also, Kottpower has picked this category up recently and at the time of writing these comments, has tied my time with a 1:17:59.  This run has a lot more wiggle room than any%, so it will be interesting to see what happens with it in the future!

The rules for 100% are similar to the standard any% run...
"-Stays within the boundaries of the map and limits the use of clips to entirely in boundary use (Wrecked Ship ceiling clip, Zebetite Skip)
-Does not use the GT Code [which would artificially inflate the item collection percentage at the end of the credits]
-No Abuse of Space/Time Beam or its variants [allowing a runner to completely skip tourian, respawn items, and/or travel rooms instantly by generating out of bounds door transitions, which risks crashing the game every time you attempt it]"