My Speedrunning Year 2024 2024 has been a great year for me in terms of speedrunning. Before talking about the goals I had for this year etc., I list all of the PBs I achieved in this year. Main Categories* Pokemon Blue NSC 11:52 Pokemon Red Any% Glitchless 1:47:59 Pokemon Crystal Manipless 3:19:05 Pokemon Yellow Any% Glicthless 1:59:44 Pokemon Yellow NSC 12:41 Super Mario 64 70 Star 55:34 Super Mario 64 1 Star 8:52 Super Mario 64 0 Star 8:31 Super Mario 64 16 Star 16:47 Super Mario 64 120 Star 2:08:51 Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories 15 Card 1:56:51 Pokemon Gold Manipless 3:18:23 Pokemon Gold Any% 12:55 Pokemon Gold Glitchless 3:17:31- *Yes Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories 15 Card is a main Category, fight me!!! Categry Extensions Pokemon Yellow RBA 36:46 WR Pokemon Blue 124 Classic 8:41:13 Pokemon Red Alt Main Fearow 2:36:29 WR Pokemon Blue Custom Starter Mewtwo 1:40:40 Pokemon Blue Custom Starter Rhydon 1:59:52 WR Pokemon Midori NSC 4:28 Pokemon Red RBA 24:34 WR Pokemon Midori NSG 8:37 WR Pokemon Blue NIU 18:40 WR Pokemon Gold Alt Main Typhlosion 3:25:46 WR- I only set myself vague or "easy" to get goals for this year: SM64 -Get a 0 star time -Get a 120 star time (+ getting sub 2:00) -sub 9 in 1 Star -In general improving all SM64 times, because I switched to playing on VC Pokemon gen 1 -Sub 1:48 Red glitchless -Sub 12:00 Blue NSC -Sub 2:00 Yellow Glitchless -Doing a 124 classic run -Improving Custom starter Rhydon -Learning new Cat. Ext and Yellow NSC -Sub 1:58 Red Classic Pokemon Gen 2 -Gold Manipless sub 3:23 -Learning Crystal Manipless for real (+ getting sub 3:23) -Learning Gold alt main cynda for real Other -Learn RE4 -Do more NG2 runs -Do more Onimusha runs -learn Pokemon Sapphire+get a good time Before reflecting upon the goals I achieved, I want to talk about the ones I didn't. 1) get a sub 2:00 in 120 star 2) get sub 1:58 in red classic 3) learn RE4 4) Do more NG2 runs 5) learn Sapphire and get a good time 1) Sub 2:00 was is harder to get than I initially thought. Even though I know if I put the time in it, I surely would've gotten it. But after clutching out a good 0 Star run and achieving my greatest 16 Star run of all time, I lost the motivation to grind for it. Silver lining, this gives me something to improve for next years sm64 league. :) 2) After the big cheating skandal in psr, the rules for runs under a certain threshold have become stricter. I 100% agree with the changes to the rules, as it makes it harder to submit illegitimate runs, however since I am playing on a low-end Laptop, there wasn't really a way for me to record/stream 60fps gameplay for extended periods of time without messing up the streaming/recording quality to a point of being unverifiable. I think I am now able to at least record it this way, but grinding this without streaming feels really bad, so I'll be putting this goal on hold for now. 3) For me, RE4 is a really hard game to speedrun as it is completely different from all the other games I run. Additionally, it doesn't really help that learning/prractising speedruns on console, which dominantly run on PC, is kind of a pain. But, I am still, slowly but surely, learning the game step by step when I have the time/motivation to do so. 4) First of all, I love this game so much. Easily in my top 10 if not top 5 games of all time. But I only have a xbox360 and the constant slowdowns and crashes (those are appearantly also in XboxOneX) really killed my motivation. This can be kind of a goal for next year, but let's see... 5) In theory, I learned this game, but I am not happy with my skill level. And I only achieved a 2:16, which I personally wouldn't count as a good time, for me at least. With that out of the way, let's talk about my favourites this year :) I try to make this as chronologically as I can. The earliest achievement of the year was the sub 1:48 in Red Glitchless. Not really to happy about it, but I think I played this one well. After Flute I thought it was unlikely to get a 146 with this, so I played it safe, skipped silph bar and got a 1:47:59. This will likely be one of the runs for next year to improve, since I think I can "easily" lower this by an other minute, given the time. On the high of this PB, Out of nowhere, I got the NSC time I always wanted, a sub 12. Not that much to say about the run itself. Lost a little bit of time because I forgot to set my options at the start, so set them before saving for Spearow manip. Timeloss of that was minimal, since I got a lot of fast animation Attacks on Rival, on which I even died on (good), and the standart no encounter route 1 (which is almost mandatory for any sub 12 time) into hitting the manips and having decent BC fights. Yellow Glitchless sub 2:00 happened i guess... Don't get me wrong, I don't hate this game, but after playing alot of red it just doesn't seem to apealing. A big part of yellow glicthless is just red with slightly better early game, similar mid game and a worse late game imo. On top of that you have much harder yolo balls for no reason, making it harder to get to the only part that is more fun than red. And after that the game just gets worse and worse (as a speedgame). After completing my yellow goal, I looked into Red/Blue RBO, yellow NSC and RBO. In both RBO categories I even got the World Record in. While learning THE Manip seems daunting at first, Yellow RBO is arguably more fun than Blue RBO. Pokemon Red RBO may be one of the hardest gen 1 runs I have done. The run starts with a starter manip, which alone makes this really hard since you have to first track your IGT, buffer the intro (both easy), clear several Texboxes in their 4 Frame windows and then confirming it's nickname frame perfectly. If this was the only hard part of the run, it wouldn't be too bad since it is at the beginning of the run and it doesn't take too long to try again. But the thing that makes this run really hard, is the Kadabra + yolo-ball manip that extends into Ditto + yolo-ball manip. This turns this run into: perfoming the hardest (mandatory for the route) manip in the game into the second hardest manip in the game. (The extended manip in Blue NSC that manips the Bug catcher fights after deathfly manip is much much harder than this, but to finish a Blue NSC run that isn't mandatory. It is not even mandatory for the WR, just makes it "easier" if you are a god gamer.) In summary I am really happy to have achieved great runs in my favourite Cat.Ext runs in Red/Blue and Yellow. To conclude the reflection Pokemon gen1 I have to mention Custom starter Rhydon. Rhydon as a Pokemon doesn't exude speed or any other good qualities for a good pokemon to speerun the game with. But after pushing it to its limits and slight optimization to the route by _poy, I finally got a sub 2:00 time. I think any sub 2 run of this might have to be deathless, which is really hard to get (alone because of misty). Okay you can techically get a sub 2 with 1/2 deaths if you are lucky, but there way too many spots (esp the early game) that have a high amount of time variance. So with a perfect early game you can die to misty 3 times and still get a sub 2. This in turn means, my 1:59 can be pushed much lower. Since my SoB is 1:55:05 I assume 1:56 is THE run, because of the modifications of custom starter alot of RNG is mitigated. So you just reset for good fights essentially, which makes it easier to reach "perfection", as there is no other test of skill other than maybe menuing. But let's see when someone else is beating this time. Moving on to gen 2. After grinding for it I achieved a 3:19 in Crystal manipless that led to a 3:19 in Gold manipless which in turn led into my 3:25 with Cyndaquil. The manipless Categories in gen 2 are really fun to grind and after some short break I'll maybe set my sights on lowering my Crystal Manipless PB and maybe grinding for World Record. I see myself lowering my maniped time in Gold as well and go for a 3:15. Not sure if I want to learn crystal glitchless yet, but I know I'll get to it eventually. I am really proud of my contributions to the Alt main typhlosions, which where mostly sparked by nerdy. These changes where: -Routing LID manip into the run. Getting the Masterball to skip the pokedoll for Gyara and buy a X ACC for Morty. This makes Morty Free (instead of relying on Rollout accuracy) and eliminates the RNG of finding and catching a Poliwag. -Finding a good Cyndaquil Manip with a great IGT success rate I fully credit nerdy for the idea of using R29 Manip for more consistency. In general, thinking about this run and ways to optimize it were a lot of fun. Much more than actually running this lmao. Depending on by how much my time will be beaten, I'll return to this for one more PB. After all these gen 2 achievements, I think my skill level in this game has improved significantly to the point of where it wouldn't be crazy to say that I am a WR contender in the manipless Categories. Never thought I would get there :). There has been a lot of Pokemon, but the sm64 runs I had weren't too bad either. After my first 0 Star run, I was satisfied enough to say that this is my last on lmao. The run itself is fine, but that DDD skip was kind of a fluke which I never replicated. Let's not talk about the 120 Star run, it is bad and I am looking forward to improving it next year. The 70 Star PBs were really cool this year. They gave me a little confidence in a time in which I really needed it. But by far the best sm64 run I have ever performed, and maybe ever will, was my 16 Star PB. I had a really sloppy early game and entering HMC I was like: "This isn't it, unless I match my golds from this point onward." Sadly I didn't match my golds until the end. I beat most of them. This HMC to end was as good as have ever done it, even if you were to splice my best sections together. It was wild. In conclusion: I can't be happier about the achievemnts, Improvements and overall enjoyment I got out of speedrunning this year. This years Red Tourney was a blast, even though I severely underperformed in 3/4 of my tourney races, it was really hype and the organizers did a good job. Looking forward to see where I take this next year. Thanks for reading this rambly mess of word salad (I'm not much of a writer). Of to one more year of speedrunning. Happy new year !!! :)