Some Actual 2019 Speedplans

Alright, let me preface this by saying that I love Crash NST. I love the game and how its speedruns have evolved. I love the community and how its grown to support this game that most of the Crash community didn't even want to seriously give a chance. Some very close friends of mine are people I have met running NST, and I don't regret that.

With that being said, I don't think I'll be running it that much this year, at least not in the early part of 2019.

If you remember back around August/September of 2018, I started making plans to build a new PC, because my current one is several years old now and has trouble handling any PC game at 60 FPS (this includes not only NST, but also A Hat in Time, a speedgame I've been wanting to revisit for a while now). Combined with longer than average loads and this stupid beeping noise my computer makes whenever it maxes out CPU trying to run the game, in the end NST became more frustrating to run than it was fun.

I still have plans to build this PC eventually, if anything just because it's a quality of life thing for both streaming and just day to day stuff. However, after this month, my funds are a bit lower than I would like them to be.

For those who don't know, I actually did not have enough leave to attend AGDQ; I haven't been at my current job for a full year yet, so not only did I just not accumulate enough to use for the whole week (considering the trips I went on during the summer as well), but where I work, the first year actually has a rather pitiful amount of leave you accumulate. Because of this, my boss and I agreed that I could just take Leave Without Pay (LWOP) for those days so I could attend. This was great, but naturally also meant that I was getting half the money for this pay period.

AGDQ was an amazing trip and I will never regret going to it, but it was also not cheap. Between constantly paying for parking so I can drive people back and forth between the main hotel and the overflow one (note: I do NOT regret this so don't feel bad if you were in my car and I was paying for parking: it was the only way we weren't going to be miserable going between them), buying a lot more games than I anticipated at eStarland, and going out to eat a lot, it added up quite a bit, even after my hotel cost got split five ways.

Immediately before the trip, I had also bought a new phone, because my old one was aged to the point where it was very slow and had an awful battery; I did not feel comfortable bringing this phone to AGDQ when I knew that I might be regularly away from an outlet to charge it. I decided to pay the phone in full rather than monthly payments for two years, because my phone plan is shared with my mom and sister, and doing monthly payments would have resulted in my mom paying for it and taking the money from me later. I was able to afford this which is why I did it, but accompanied with the AGDQ money I spent I had quite a large credit card bill only midway through the month.

And that doesn't factor in what happened after AGDQ. I attended Glitch 6 for Smash Ultimate (though I had planned this many months in advance), and while there I picked up some YGO cards from my friend, as well as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a game I had been searching for for a long time (I got a good deal from him but it was still $45). Then this past Tuesday, I got my car towed due to not properly displaying my parking permit (which I hadn't been doing for months but I guess that one day it mattered and ultimately it's on me).

And the final kicker is that as of last Thursday, I have had a fever. This has persisted even to as I'm writing this, and I actually went to urgent care earlier this morning. Because of my aforementioned lack of leave, I have had to take even more days of LWOP, which my boss and I have approved. But this means that once again I'll be taking a pay cut.

I want to build a new PC still, but I can't currently do it without dropping my savings to a point well below I want it to go, so for now I'm going to take the L and accept the fact that I won't be running NST or Hat for a few more months.

This actually kind of works out though because my plan for 2019 regarding moderating NST and the community was to take a bit of a background role and let Cameron, Murcaz, and several others come to the forefront as community leaders. I am proud of how I have helped the community grow to how it is now, but I’ve also kinda appreciated the break from whatever drama or idiotic complaints people always liked throwing at us.

With that being said, I want to put more focus on the OG Crash games again. I feel like all of them, especially Crash 2, are games where I had a lot of potential to go further, but never reached it, in part due to NST's release and me going all in on that game for the past two years. With the 1545 Invitational Races coming up, I feel like this is a good time to give them a go again.

I definitely want to get better times in all the categories of Crash 2 (except Any%), and I would like to be competent enough at them where if I wanted to submit No GO or even GO to an AGDQ (despite me thinking the latter doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell) I could. No plans on submitting 100% because there are far better people to submit it than me at the current time, and the past two Crash 2 runs (OG at 2017 and NST at 2019) were 100%.

I would like to give Crash 1 and 3 a serious chance again, and if I end up enjoying them I’ll stick with them.

I do still want to branch out into non-Sprash games, and I think the first of those on my list is gonna be Jak and Daxter. I have been watching OutrageousJosh a lot lately, and the more I watch it the more I really want to give it a try. Jak II might be my favorite Jak game but Jak 1 is the one that interests me most as a speedgame, and I will hopefully try it out soon. But my main priority is still gonna be Crash 2.

For non-speedgames, I’m obviously going to play Kingdom Hearts III when it releases tonight. I still plan on devoting time to Smash Ultimate, but I honestly don’t know how much I can get out of playing online, so I might just stick to my two weeklies for that and occasionally play with friends on WiFi.

I have a huge backlog of games I want to finally play casually as well, the first of which will probably be Symphony of the Night.

I would like to attend SGDQ, but it will depend on leave once again. If I go I won’t be submitting anything, because as I’ve stated before I want my first GDQ run to be at an AGDQ because of how much the Prevent Cancer Foundation’s cause means to me.

So, as a recap:

*I am on lower than normal funds due to AGDQ and sickness forcing me to get less pay than I usually do; as a result I won’t be building a new PC yet, will be inactive in NST for a while longer
*I will be returning to focus on the original Crash games, in particular Crash 2.
*I am planning on picking up non-Sprash games, the first of which being Jak 1.
*I will still focus on Smash Ultimate, but will likely do less WiFi.
*There are a lot of casual games I wanna play.

Thanks to everyone who sticks around. Even if I make just one viewer happy, that makes streaming worth it to me in the end.

~Riko