Speedruns in 2017

Just some brief thoughts about the last year around speedrunning for me.

It was a fun time, but 2017 was definitely my weakest year in terms of PBs I'm proud of. There's two major reasons. The first was that I spent a fair amount of time in late 2016 getting ready to do SMG2 runs, then finished something like, 3 runs, and realized that in fact it was too long and had too much downtime (shocker to all). The second reason was all of Triple M, taking a lot of time to prepare for, organize, and perform. I ended up only really took Rockman Zero 2 seriously after Triple M because of the momentum. The rest of my projects revolved around marathon support, marathon runs or the speedrun survey.

I tried out some other projects hoping they'd be satiating and worthwhile, like Lufia 2, but they didn't pan out long term. The general experience speedrunning something completely new is good, but I can't help feel like it's a waste of time to sink into learning a game then not doing many runs. It was a hard lesson for me this year, and I think it'll be good to take a brief step back and figure out what I want to accomplish when I'm working on speedrun projects.

Part of growing up & getting older is time management, which is always a pain. Given I work in a major metropolitan city at basically a 'startup' just past its startup phase, I work quite a bit more than a nice 40hr work week. I'm not complaining, but realistically it sometimes feels like forever to get ready to do a good speedrun. Even for casual streaming stuff, when I do something like a Ace Attorney stream at 8pm, I'm like, rushing home from leaving the office at 7pm 'early', eating dinner on the commute back just to make it happen so I have enough time. And on weekends I don't necessarily want to be practicing video games (right?), and have been traveling every few weekends regularly. I really do try to prioritize effectively, but it comes with it's challenges to find what I look back upon and be happy with. And frankly even stuff like online marathon runs & 'big event' runs like Triple M don't do it for me.

The SMG2 thing really does bother me. I was very hopeful and thought it'd be fun to put my chips in to that game. But especially once SMO came out, that was the nail in the coffin. I'm definitely interested in playing SMO and being competitive in a modern game, but there's no way I could possibly justify playing SMG2 again - SMO (to me) is better in pretty much every way for speedrunning.

I won't be doing something like Triple M again, it's too much to prepare for with my schedule. It was really, really fun playing that day. But afterwards I felt pretty much like, "wow, what do I have to show for it now, could've been working on PBs instead". Getting my goal time in RMZ2 was much much more rewarding, comparatively. But for Triple M, I'll be glad to organize again, the community response to it was actually really great, so if nothing else that's a major positive.

Into 2018- very excited for AGDQ with my Goemon run with countdown, taking a brief break after GDQ, then will get into SMO much more seriously. In the mean time, the time to finally route & play a personally favorite title ARC RISE FANTASIA (a long RPG) has finally come and I'll be streaming that a bit here and there, maybe even later this week. My old mantra was to pick one platformer, one RPG, and focus on those only, and I ignored that in 2017 and got burned for it, so I'll be going back to that.

Time's a bitch. Thanks for reading