sub 3

i don't usually write long descriptions, but i felt like this needed one.

over three years ago on new years day of 2021 at 1 am, xbox and i were messing around in a vc, and i decided to play through red ball while playing various games on flashpoint. xbox had already been doing various red ball 1 ils at this point, including getting sub 20 train while it was still a pretty hard thing to pull off. after i played the game, xbox sent me the igt edition, saying i should go for il wr in level 1 since it was pretty easy. i tied the il wr of 3.097 in around five minutes. i submitted it, tweeting that i was "now officially a red baller", and joined the discord, having plans of maybe playing again in the near future.

it was shortly after this that red ball exploded. with all the people joining, videos releasing, world records being achieved, tourneys going on, and more, i just wanted to keep playing the game. after getting down to 3:47, i started having these huge mental barriers with the game. i would throw thousands of attempts away just to not pb a single time. this was mostly my fault, since my mindset with speedrunning was pretty terrible at this time. i never took breaks at all, and neither did i practice much. despite being extremely inefficient and dealing with a pretty bad computer, i managed to achieve a 3:34 and a few weeks later (after a LOT of attempts) a 3:29. after that, i was done with rb1 for a bit.

i started messing around in some of the other games in the red ball series and got close with a lot of community members. we were all just having fun playing the games. in late april, i came back to red ball again, equipped with the knowledge of how to do fast 10, death warp, and how to make the strats i already did even faster. my computer however? the same, a laggy mess. i mostly just wanted to get a lower 2x time, since 1x seemed pretty out of reach. it was then on the first day i came back that i had a 3:19 pace going into 12. it ended as a 3:22, having choked to the saw blade after the gap. while i got my goal of a lower 2x time, i thought "well shit i guess i'm going for 1x now".

dealing with my computer while still using a terrible speedrunning mindset was a mess. i still don't know how i dealt with it grinding for 1x. i was just constantly frustated playing the game every day for so long. getting both a 3:22 with no fast 10 and a 3:20 that lost 2 seconds in 5 didn't help me feel better about it at all. a few days later, i finally got a 3:18, with basically everything i wanted. i was done with rb1 for a bit yet again.

caramels 2:57 happened 2 weeks after this. we were all completely blown away. i was so amazed seeing caramel getting sub 20 on such an amazing run like that. it was also a few weeks after that when setups started entering the red ball meta. things like bird 3, max 6, and pbird were complete game changers. there was just one small issue: all the setups required getting frame perfect inputs. these were just too hard for me at the time, i could barely handle getting the two super bounces in 7 and 10. i decided to just put the game down at that point, with little to no interest of wanting to deal with more frame perfects at all.

in november, the deterministic hack for red ball was released and permitted for runs. i still didn't really have much of any plans to play the game again, but after my laptop screen broke and i had to send it in for repair for two weeks, i decided to play red ball yet again, but on my family's computer. i still didn't learn any frame perfect setups at all, and was just trying to get a good run with the same strats i used, knowing it would be easier to go for slightly faster strats i couldn't get consistently on my laptop. in the end, i got a 3:13, which felt essentially perfect with what i did at the time. i was now done, with little to no intentions of coming back.

by the time november 2022 rolled around, a lot of things changed. i got a new computer that didn't freeze every five minutes, my speedrunning mindset had become leagues better, and i was still hanging out with a lot of red ball friends. with the increased activity from people going for 3x, i thought that i should get at least one more barrier in red ball: 0x. i learned bird 3 and star 6, as well as cycle skip and hood launch in 8, thinking that if i hit one or two of these and played well the rest of the game, i can get 0x without sub 20. two weeks later, i almost did exactly that. somehow, despite missing bird 3, star 6 and cycle skip, only hitting hood launch, i played so well the rest of the game that i ended up getting a 3:08. this was pretty much exactly what i wanted, there wasn't really a point in me playing more. sub 3 would require me learning sub 20 train which would just take too much time and effort. it wasn't worth it to me.

in late march this year, while messing around in a vc pretty late at night, i started doing some random red ball races with some friends. in one of these races, bea got her first 0x by randomly getting pbird in a run, and then literally the next day got sub 3. this inspired me to take a crack at sub 20 train again, and see if it's really as bad as i thought it was. i found out i was doing the left tap part of pbird completely wrong, making the strat way worse than it needed to be. after putting in a lot of practice, my consistency with pbird started to go between 1/5 to 1/10. i thought this was good enough to do runs with. since my pb was already pretty close to sub 3 if i got sub 20 train along with it, i just put in a lot of practice into the strats i didn't hit in my 3:08, since i would just have to go a little bit faster for a chance at sub 3.

13 runs to 11 on sub 3 pace later, and not a single one of them hit pbird. one of them hit the two frame perfects, but died to the left tap afterwards. two of them had best possible times of 2:53, but neither of them got past the two frame perfects. i was getting really frustrated, and i don't usually get too frustrated with speedrunning nowadays. it was at this point that birdbanana told me to mess around with birdp, and alternative sub 20 strat. it puts the left tap i struggled with at the start of the strat, makes missing the first frame perfect very easy to visually see, and turns the second frame perfect into a two frame window if you can back up hitting a frame late. it seemed better in all scenarios. the only bad part was that there was a chance of dying to the saw blades at the end. after putting in a lot of practice, i still wasn't the most consistent at the beginning part, but since it was easy to retry in runs, i decided go for runs with it anyways, since the the rest of it after that is pretty easy.

and on just one sub 3 pace to 11 later, it happened. i've achieved this monumental barrier with a time i could never even have dreamed of a few years ago. 2:56.

i think now is where i call it quits. 4x is just too absurd to even think about maybe getting in the future, and i really don't see a point in going for it anyways. i want to thank every single person from red ball who's supported me over the years, especially the real ones. you know who you are. there would be too many people to thank here if i could list them. but i have to give my biggest thanks to xbox for making me go for wr tie in level 1 just over three years ago.