2018 Recap

This year there was a lot of wandering around. Especially in January and February, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I was just playing a bunch of random games. At some point I committed to KatAM 100% that set off a streak of main series Kirby runs, with some breaks to play Rescue Rangers 2. The biggest surprise for me this year was Chalvo 55, and I actually didn't even learn a new Kirby game (at least not one with "Kirby" in the title...)

===Kirby & The Amazing Mirror===
100% (1:10:42->1:09:31), any% (27:57-27:48)

I didn't think I'd really return to this game, but it turned out that 100% had a lot more time to save. It still does, and I'll probably be playing it again soon in 2019. Any% is a snoozefest, but I recently started doing Kracko missile and hammer mix for AGDQ. Still secretly hoping that I'll randomly PB off of one of these low-reset practice runs.

===Kirby's Adventure===
100% NMG (52:00->48:37), any% NMG (44:26->43:27)

I got back into this because this game got into SGDQ, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much more I liked 100% than any% once I finally figured out how to not tank at w5/w6. Having an everdrive made a world of a difference in raising my level of play, especially when it came to improving my any% NMG times from 2017. The near-minute improvement happened entirely within a span of a week. This game is soon to be overrun with TooMuchTornado, so I'm glad I snuck in one any% record before that happened.

===Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2===
1p2c (12:05)

Similar feeling to Squeak Squad last year, where there was someone else (garadas21) also working on pushing the game lower at the same time. It had been awhile since I had done a 1p2c thing, and a new discovery by RedSkyfang on pause buffering made the run way better. Sub-12 is doable, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to commit to grinding for that.

===Goof Troop===
Co-op (19:43->18:26)

I hadn't seen Forky since 2016 so we made a big push to improve our time for SGDQ submissions. I was most excited about doing Goof Troop at a GDQ and I'm glad the run went really well. We'll be back at the grind this upcoming AGDQ: there's a huge skip now and we felt like we had unfinished business with the game anyways.

===Chalvo 55===
Beat the Game (29:19)

Really neat obscure game that I finally gave a chance after Shentok suggested it to me over a year ago. It was fun coming up with a lot of speedstrats for this game, but nothing beats the joy of finding a big glitch. Ultimately I'm happy with my time (no unintentional deaths) since there's no joy in grinding all those (kinda) frame-perfect one-tile gaps.

===Who Framed Roger Rabbit (GB)===
Beat the Game (16:18)

Pretty slow-paced game with one big random element, but it was a nice routing experience kinda reminiscent of Noobow. I probably could've played a little better with the SNES adapter, but I'm not willing to grind the good luck anymore.

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Other games I ran in 2018: Kirby's Dream Course (sub-40 JRTA), Kirby's Super Star Stacker (really solid run), Mickey's Ultimate Challenge (fun puzzles except the book), A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build (intellectual exercise), Pokemon Puzzle Challenge (o3DS dpad sucks), Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe (autoscroller).

If I follow through with my speedplans, 2019 might be a pretty surprising year...