Why we set the Nuts & Bolts leaderboards to go off IGT

When I wrote this article Nuts and Bolts any% PB at the time was played on a Xbox 360, on disc with the game installed onto the hard drive. The disc drive I was playing on was a Toshiba disc drive. The PB In Game Time was 1:44:46, RTA: 2:00:09. That's a roughly 15 minutes 23 seconds difference.

Right now I'm playing it directly downloaded + bought from the Xbox store, no disc involved.

Believe it or not, installing it on your hard drive from disc is NOT the same thing as installing it onto your hard drive by buying it online. Here's a story before I explain the difference:

My old 360 didn't have an HDMI drive, but luckily right before NASA I bought a backup 360 (my old 360 was at risk to red ring at the time). Unfortunately, the new 360 also has a BenQ disc drive, which I learned when I was setting up HD runs the game extremely slowly. I found that from the main menu to entering showdown town it takes 10 seconds longer to load Showdown town from a BenQ disc drive INSTALLED FROM DISC to Hard Drive then it did from a Toshiba disc drive installed the same way.

I was flustered to say the least, yeah it shouldn't make a difference since we go off In Game Time anyways but it would have an impact on any future submissions to marathons by a significant amount, and it's hard enough to get the game into a GDQ as it is =(

Luckily thanks to a generous donation by PowderedMilk_ I was able to buy the game online, installed directly to my hard drive, no disc required. Did some testing and I found that from  main menu to entering showdown town it loads SIX seconds faster installed directly on hard drive w/o disc then it loads on my old 360, which had a Toshiba disc drive.

Yeah, that's pretty fucking huge.

Did a no-reset run right after to see how much of a difference it made, and once I finished I got a 2:03:45 RTA, only about 3.5 behind my PB. I looked at my In Game Timer afterwards and noticed that I had a 1:50:30 IGT, which is 5 minutes 44 seconds behind my pb!

Based off that math I deducted that having the game installed on the hard drive saves 2 minutes 8 seconds over my old setup overall, maybe even more.

Shit like this is exactly why Scykoh and I agreed upon setting the leaderboards to go off In-Game Time in the first place, I haven't even tested how much time Xbone would save if whenever I end up getting one.

In the future, expect me to not hype up RTA goals as much anymore in this game. I'm probably not gonna be saying that I'm going for “1:55” in any% as much as I'll be saying I'm going for “sub-1:40 In-Game Time”.

EDIT:

I discovered a weird glitch recently with the in-game timer. I got an RTA PB of 1:56:49, which saved a little over 3 minutes, 2 of those are because of loads of course but it was still a genuine pb regardless. After I set the time I watched through the credits then checked the in game time. My In Game Time was 1:46:59, clearly far from a PB if we went off In Game time (IGT PB is 1:44:46). I was pretty upset at this point, because not only was I unsure that I actually PB'd but I was also annoyed over how much testing or retiming of my hardware I'd have to do, either that or have to ditch IGT all together.

Before I cut the stream I went into the game itself just to test whether the cutscene that plays when you re-enter the game immediately after beating the final boss would cost in game time. I looked at the in game timer and noticed it said 1:43:47. I was so fucking shocked and lost I couldn't believe my eyes.

I did a bunch of thinking about it throughout the day and realized that it might have just been a weird glitch with the credits. Later that night I did a bunch of testing and turns out that if you watch through the credits and immediately look at the IGT afterwards the timer will count the credits sequence into igt until you do one of 2 things:

1) Go back into the game (you'd see the results by pausing the second you get a chance and looking at game statistics/totals)

2) Reset the game either during the credits or after the credits (similar to above, you'd see the results by looking at the game statistics/totals, but in the main menu instead)

Why? I don't know, it's really bizarre, but I'm glad it doesn't have much of an effect on the timer as I feared. Still funny as fuck to think about.