Getting “Unstuck”

First off, I want to thank everyone who reached out to me after I posted the last entry of the blog. It meant a lot to me that people wanted to make sure I was okay and that the issues I was working through weren’t going to stop me from pursuing my dreams.

To explain a bit more of what was up, a part of what was going on was working through trauma and depression from my past. I’ve been seeing a counselor since the summer of last year, and I’ve been working through a lot of problems that developed due to how I was raised and how my parents dealt with my Autism diagnosis. These things have had a negative impact on a lot of my pursuits over the years, and anyone who’s worked through childhood issues in counseling knows working through them is not easy. Throw in the fact that I was sick, which was in turn making some of my physical issues worse, and I was just not in a good place mentally.

To address the physical issues that were giving me trouble, I brought up my worsening headaches and tendinitis to my chiropractor, who I see once a week, and they gave me a lot of good advice. Part of why I was depressed is I had broken knots in my arm before, not realizing they can potentially come back; my chiropractor informed me that knots can appear again in parts of your body you use often, so the best thing to do is keep working through them and develop healthy habits to keep them at bay. So I’ve started to work on breaking the knots again, and I’m also working on developing good stretching and warmup routines for activities to help prevent knots from getting worse or potentially forming again.

As for my overstimulation and headache issues? Well, sadly that may not be something that entirely goes away. Of course, my chiropractor helped me realize certain muscles in my neck are really tight, so working to relax them can eliminate headaches to a degree; after all about 90% of headaches come from tension in the neck. Sadly, overstimulation will likely always be a problem for me due to my Autism, and there will flat out always be games that I cannot play because my body has trouble processing all the visual details.

So where does that leave me with speedruns? Well, I’ve been spending the last few weeks focusing on recovering from illness, resting at home, and taking it easy at work. I’ve thought about games I want to run, but not actively trying to run anything. But recently, a rediscovery of love for a hobby gave me what I needed.

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned this on the blog, but I was a competitive fighting game player for around 5 years. I played a bunch of games in my local scene and online, my favorite being Sega’s Virtua Fighter series. I even hosted the first official Virtua Fighter tournament at Combo Breaker, the largest fighting game even in the US behind Evolution. However, due to issues with members of the fighting game community, the expense of going to local meetups regularly, plus my own mental health problems, I ended up stepping away from fighting games, somewhat bitterly at that. I sold my fighting games and gave away my arcade stick (and even if I hadn’t at the time I quit, I likely would have had to when I filed for bankruptcy in early 2023). I played fighters every once in while with friends, and even speedrun Street Fighter III Third Strike at one point, but I just wasn’t happy with fighters.

Recently, after some chats with my pal Comet, I decided to start playing some fighting games again for fun. I played Virtua Fighter 4 Evo on my PS2, and let me tell you I don’t know if the smile on my face could have been any bigger. And then I went out and picked up an arcade stick for my PS2, and I felt like I had returned home after a long journey. And I instantly realized that this could work out well in my journey as a speedrunner.

Note: Jacky Bryant is my favorite fighting game character ever

Fighting games aren’t generally speedran for a variety of reasons, but honestly I felt like this is the next logical step for me in speedrunning. There’s a lot of fighting games that I love, each with arcade modes that dare you to beat them as fast as possible, and story modes with unique challenges to overcome. I’ve always had a love of arcade style games with console-exclusive story modes ever since I was a kid, and at one point I wondered why I hadn’t tried speedrunning any of them before, other than my brief time speedrunning Third Strike.

Barry very much approves of the arcade stick

As of writing this, I’m working on figuring out a speedrun route for Virtua Fighter 4 Evo’s Quest Mode. I don’t want to go into detail about it here (I’ll save it for a later blog post), but what attracted me to the idea was both my love of Virtua Fighter and the fact that there are no runs of the Quest Mode on Speedrun.com. So right now I’m working through the mode, figuring out what needs to be done to “complete it” as fast as possible. And I may work on running arcade mode along the way.

Screenshot of VF4 Evo’s Quest Mode

Regardless of how those runs go, I’m just happy to be able to get back into what I love doing, with games I love playing, and chatting with people that make me feel special. To everyone I’ve become friends with in my journey as a speedrunner, thank you for sticking around. Y’all are the best.

Stuck

First off, I want to apologize for how long it’s been since the last entry of the blog. Sadly, the reasons for the delay, and the tone of this entry, are due to problems that have put me in a bad spot that prevent me from effectively speedrunning. And I don’t know if I can or even want to continue at this point.

To explain why there was initially a gap in entries, it was due to being sick. A simple infection, but of course it led to me not having a lot of energy, and my tendinitis flaring up more than normal, making it hard to run. The one day I thought I was finally “better,” I attempted some The Force Unleashed runs. Sadly I was not better, and the following day my energy and tendinitis levels were even worse. If I hadn’t gotten a new PB, I would have completely regretted attempting more runs at all.

Over the next week and a half, my body seemed to fluctuate between feeling better and feeling worse, not fully recovering my illness, likely due to stresses at work getting worse lately. But then there were other things getting worse.

Something I haven’t talked about on the blog before is my issues with visual over stimulation and tension headaches. Due to my Autism, I deal with visual over stimulation issues, especially with games that have a lot of detailing and objects on screen. It’s the primary reason I play older games, there’s a lot less information my brain has to process. When I get visually overwhelmed, not only is it tiring, but it leads to tension headaches. These headaches have sometimes gotten so bad that I feel like my teeth are going to pop out. I have to be careful with my game and movie selections all the time due to this.

Another issue I deal with is tendinitis, in my right forearm and both of my thumbs. The issue here is obvious, and it’s gotten worse while playing input heavy games and playing them fast. Even just holding down and manipulating the D-Pad during Silent Hill has given me issues at times.

And then there’s my lower back. I’ve had a pinched nerve in my lower back for about 5 years now, which often gives me issues when I sit in a chair for an extended period of time, I’ll feel like someone hit my tailbone with a hammer.

So why am I not doing well? These issues have all been getting worse. I’ve lately been starting to get tension headaches when playing any games, or even just looking at a screen for an extended period of time. They haven’t been the worse, but the fact that even playing low detail games like Resident Evil 1 (which I was dabbling in lately) has gotten me worried. And the tendinitis in my thumbs has been getting worse too, once again making it hard to get through any sort of practice session, or even just route crafting. Same with sitting down too, I haven’t used a donut cushion in a while due to my pain not being as bad, but now I’ve gone back to that.

          So honestly, I don’t know where to go from here. I feel like all the physical problems I’ve dealt with to different degrees over the years are striking all at once, making speedrunning unnecessary difficult, painful, and frustrating. I’m not sure what to do right now to be honest, aside from putting speedrunning on hold for an extended period of time again. I am seeing my chiropractor tomorrow, but I’m not honesty not feeling optimistic, with all of these problems hitting all at once. I’m not sure where I’m going to be as a speedrunner over the next while. I have been trying to catch more streams (when my work schedule allows it), and I still want to hang with the amazing people. But as of now, I don’t know if serious runs are even going to be a thing for me again. I will write more entries as I figure out things, but I have no idea where I’m going to be even just a few weeks from now.

The Search For My Next Speedrun – The Force Unleashed (PS2) Part I

Firstly, a bit of blog update: I’m going to drop the “Speed Stories” moniker, mostly due to 95% of my articles fitting into that category. I figured maybe I should simply call the blog that, but “speedstories.wordpress” is already taken, so I’m keeping the name of the blog as is. With that out of the way, let’s dive in!

In my previous article, I mentioned that I had a list of games I wanted to try speedrunning, and I was going to spend two weeks with each one to see how they felt and figure out which one I wanted to work on the most. The first of these games I decided I wanted to try out was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, specifically the version developed by Krome Studios.

My History With The Game

When I was a kid, I didn’t have access to gaming magazines, so I wasn’t really aware of most big game releases, or what games were “in vogue,” unless I had friends that talked about them. So for a time, the games that were on my radar were usually licensed games, and one license that always got my head turning was Star Wars. I was a HUGE Star Wars fan as a kid, after being introduced to the original trilogy by my Dad, and then later chomping at the bit for info on the newer Star Wars movies as they were coming out. So you can imagine my excitement when I learned about Star Wars the Force Unleashed, especially since it was telling a new story taking place between Episodes III and IV following Darth Vader’s Secret Apprentice. To this day, the Force Unleashed is the one game I spent the most time obsessing over in anticipation for its release.

As I followed info on the game, mostly through YouTube, the thing that stuck out to me the most was the versions of the game developed by Krome Studios. There was a trailer put out showing that they were developing the Wii, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable versions of the game, and that each version was going to have a unique feature.

At the time, I was obsessed with the PSP, wanting one so badly, and seeing that it was going to have an exclusive game mode with missions from the Star Wars movies made me want one even more. My second cousin had a PSP, and she ended up giving it to me after she wasn’t using it much, and The Force Unleashed was the first game I bought for it. I have many fond memories of playing the game on my bedroom floor, using an iDog as a speaker for it.

Not the same iDog I had as a kid, but I’m sure you get the idea. Photo credit: digitalbear on flickr

Getting Into the Speedrun

I don’t remember exactly what caused this to happen, but nostalgia for Krome’s version of The Force Unleashed started coming back to me a few months back, and it led to me picking up a PS2 copy while on break at work. Since I couldn’t play the game on my break, I spent the rest of the time watching speedruns of it, specifically ones done by StarFalco64.

A while later, while easing my way back into livestreaming, I decided to host a stream consisting of me playing several PS2 games casually, including TFU. During the TFU segment, I found myself trying to do some of the same things Falco did, which admittedly was dumb in hindsight as the runs I watched were in the New Game Plus category, and I was playing on a fresh file. Regardless, it got me chomping at the bit to try running the game for real, and I joined TFU’s speedrunning discord.

The First Week of Runs

Admittedly, I didn’t do a lot of research before attempting my first runs of the game, as I was eager to simply get going on something new. I started out with the Any% category, where you start the game from a fresh file. I did two runs of this, in the second one I got a time of 2 hours, 11 minutes, and 53 seconds.

The run was fun, but it was long. I’d never ran a speedrun category that went for over an hour in real time, much less two, so it wore me out big time. Falco and crew told me that I should go for the New Game + category, where you continue from a completed save file, with all your upgraded force powers. NG+ is both faster and more competitive, and I could see why as soon as I jumped in.

The first run was still pretty close to two hours, but it still felt more enjoyable to me. And of course, there was plenty of time save here, as I hadn’t learned some of the big time saving tricks, including using an alternate costume to skip cutscenes. My next run did incorporate a few of those tricks, including one I actually discovered: if you remove the memory card during the run, it disables autosave, making it easier to reset a NG+ run, and allows to skip cutscenes faster.

The next three runs I did were all improvements to my PB, mostly thanks to cleaner trick execution, as well as upgrading force powers during the run, meaning they’d be stronger for the next one. My latest run as of writing this entry incorporated two difficult skips on Kashyyyk that let you skip several major battles, as well as fully upgraded Aerial Assault, the attack you use on force wielding bosses.

This run puts me simply four minutes behind second place on the New Game + leaderboard for PS2 Hardware runs.

Feelings on the Run (As of now)

Running The Force Unleashed, the most appealing aspect of it to me is that it’s mostly about combat rather than platforming. Don’t get me wrong, platforming is fun, and it’s still a part of TFU, but it’s a minimal part. And seeing how there aren’t nearly as many bottomless pits in TFU as in Spider-Man (2000), it was a relief to not worry about frequently losing height and time from a bad jump input.

It was also exciting jumping into TFU on the PS2 when I did, as a lot of cool skips have been discovered in the last week alone, such as one in Cloud City where you return to your ship after fighting the second wave of Chop’aa’s thugs to skip a forced encounter with Mandalorians. And then there was the discovery of just how useful the “Enhanced Lightsaber Damage” crystal is in boss encounters, making non-force wielding bosses, such as the Rancors, faster than ever. It was fun to add something new to each run I did.

The community has really been (force) pushing the limits of this game lately, that’s for sure!

Although I will admit, one thing I’m not that fond of is how much of the time save comes from enhancing force powers. In my latest run, I improved by a whopping seven minutes, but that was mostly due to having certain powers at max. Sure it makes the run’s time more manageable, but at times I felt like my improvements weren’t necessarily coming from playing better.

One other issue I have is that the game’s RNG can also be an obstacle, particularly with barriers that you have to break with the force. Breaking a barrier requires you to hold down a button for several seconds, and if you get shot during it you get knocked back and must start the charge over, wasting time. Sometimes you can get to a barrier without being tailed, and break it right away, other times a crowd of enemies will be behind you shooting you requiring you take them all out, which costs precious time.

Issues aside, I’ve still been having a ball with The Force Unleashed on PS2. There will come a point where upgrading force powers won’t be an option, so I’ll have to get good at other aspects of the game for significant time improvements. And seeing the 1^st and 2^nd place times are from two years ago, long before the recently discovered skips and strategies were discovered, there’s still a lot of potential for lowering the World Record overall. I don’t know how much time I’ll have for runs throughout the rest of the week, as I’ve been informed that some shakeups at my job will cause things to get a bit chaotic, but I’m sure with enough persistence I’ll be able to seriously (force) push my play to the next level in my “trial run” of The Force Unleashed.    

Speed Stories – Moving on From Spider-Man / The Next Steps

“Speed Stories” is a series that shares the latest developments of the speedrunning career of TheFlyingFelicia

Well readers, the title says it all. I know this is technically the second I’ve said I’m moving on from Spider-Man (2000) speedruns, but I know for a fact that this time, it’s definitely happening. I’ll admit I didn’t want to go into the entirety of how I was feeling in the last entry of Speed Stories, since I wanted everyone to still feel excited about the remainder of the Spider-Man (2000) tournament. And hey, even with how I’m feeling now, I’m still excited to see all my buddies rock the rest of the matches!

But I can’t deny anymore, I am burnt to a crisp on Spider-Man (2000). And that very much occurred to me during my tournament match with Niloqui on April 2^nd. I already knew I wasn’t in the best headspace, but I thought “let’s try to not take this seriously, and just have fun!” Unfortunately, even with that, I was still just plain not happy playing during the race. What made it worse was the physical issues I was having during the run, not tendinitis thankfully, but rather, my hands just plain not wanting to do the tricks. I could feel my hands rebelling against doing most of the techniques associated with the run, which led to me playing sloppily during the race.

Getting a bit into my life outside of speedrunning for a bit, in my teenage years, I became obsessed with the idea of becoming a professional musician. I got so obsessive over it that I overworked myself, to the point where in some practice sessions I had that feeling of my hands rebelling against me. But I’d keep pressing on, because I was absolutely determined to make that happen.

If you look closely here, my right arm is in a brace, partially due to how I pushed myself too hard as a musician

It took some things I’d rather not talk about here to realize what I was doing was not healthy. So years later, feeling that again with SM2K, I’m not making the same mistake twice.

So what’s next for me? Well, I’ve had a bunch of games I’ve wanted to do speedruns of for a while, but the problem is there’s a lot. In addition, there’s that fear of picking a game, spending a lot of time prepping for the runs, only to realize I don’t like the game, but feeling I had to commit because I did so much prep work. To be honest, it’s part of why I haven’t tried a new run sooner, alongside the SM2K race.

But the other day, I came up with a solution, which is now my course of action for the next few months. I made a list of the games I know I’d really love to do speedruns of, and I’ll spend two weeks with each one, one at a time, to see how I feel running the game. I know the runs won’t end up being the most optimized, but if I find myself really enjoying the runs I do in that time, then it’ll very much be a consideration for what to do next. Plus, it prevents me from giving up after just a few runs, since sometimes you have to work through a few kinks at first to really get into a speedrun.

If you follow me on twitch, you’ve seen that I’ve already started running The Force Unleashed recently, and I’ll continue to do so for the next two weeks.

After that, I’ll move onto one of the other games or categories on my list and go from there. And of course, I’ll share here in the blog how running each game goes, as well as my general thoughts on the runs.

With that in mind, stay tuned both here and on twitch.tv/theflyingfelicia for updates on things! I plan on streaming more regularly over the next few weeks, though admittedly I’m still figuring out how I want to share streams on here. And of course, keep following https://www.twitch.tv/spiderruns for the rest of the Spider-Man (2000) tournament, it’s gonna be epic!

Regardless, I thank you all for reading this entry, and I hope you’re just as excited as I am for my search for my next main speedrun!

Speed Stories – Spider-Man (2000) No Skips and tournament prep

“Speed Stories” is a series that shares the latest developments of the speedrunning career of TheFlyingFelicia

Full disclosure, I put out the article on the Forbidden Memories strategy guide last week due to deciding I needed a full week off speedrunning, rather than simply a few days. I’ve dealt with forearm tendinitis in both arms, more so my right, for over seven years, and I realized one of the only ways it’s going to be able to heal is to get away from energy drinks and soda for good. I knew I would need time for my body to adjust to a much smaller amount of caffeine in my system, so I took a week off to readjust while not worrying about my performance as a speedrunner. And seeing how there were two weeks until matches in the SM2K tournament began, I knew I would be fine.

Towards the end of that week, I began contemplating how to best prepare for the tournament matches coming up. I thought about ways to speed up my run, and while I initially thought I needed to learn more tricks, I recalled that many of my peers have gotten times much better than my Personal Best without some of the tricks we know now. I realized my movement tech was bottlenecking my runs, and that it would need serious work. With that in mind, I decided to start learning the “No Skips” category for SM2K.

As the name implies, the “No Skips” category is one where Out of Bounds skips and game breaking cutscene skips are not allowed. Since the player cannot rely on skips to save time, they need to know the best paths through all of the levels, and what form of movement is best for each path. Most of the time, you want to be web zipping or web swinging rather than walking.

When I decided I would start learning No Skips, I had eight days until my first tournament race (funny enough, a rematch with Niloqui). I knew I couldn’t spend all of that time working on the category, as my skips needed to stay sharp for the race. With that in mind, I decided on spending four days working on No Skips, and four days refreshing on (and hopefully improving on) Any%.

No Skips

As silly as this sounds, I initially found myself pretty relaxed playing No Skips. Many of the OoB skips in SM2K are difficult, and missing one will kill your chances of getting a new best time or a world record at a high level. There’s also something about playing the levels you skip or speed through in speedruns that feels refreshing. A bit of sightseeing, which you’re often not used to.

None of the levels skipped via boundary breaks are particularly hard to get through casually, in a speedrun setting the challenge is using optimal movement technique. As mentioned earlier, you want to be zipping or swinging rather than walking, as those forms of movement are the fastest. What can make it difficult is dealing with enemies: every enemy in Spider-Man (2000) has a projectile attack, and if you get hit by it, Spidey will fall, either to the ground or to his death. In addition, you have to pay attention to how far away a spot you want to zip or swing to is, and make sure Spidey is facing in the correct direction, otherwise hitting R2 to swing or zip will do nothing.

My first No Skips run I submitted to Speedrun.com was 40:16. A good start, there was definitely room for improvement in terms of when I would zip or swing.

The next day I went for more runs, and after telling myself to do a no-reset run, I improved my time by 44 seconds! The run had better movement, but unfortunately, I botched Sewer Cavern, which cost me just over 40 seconds. If I hadn’t been doing a no-reset run I would not have continued, so I’m glad I did finish the run.

On my third day of working on No Skips, I did some runs both offline and on a twitch stream. Offline, I got my time down to 39:12 thanks to getting through Sewer Cavern in one shot, but I did have a bad Mysterio fight and some sloppy movement.

On stream I wasn’t able to get a new Personal Best time, but one run did get within one second of my PB, and I at least improved my best times on a few levels.

On day four, I did some more no reset runs. Sadly none of them were time improvements, my best run of the day was 22 seconds short of a personal best. My consistency in the category was there, but I knew I would need to shake things up if I wanted a better time. However, with my four days of focusing on No Skips being up, it was time to get back into Any%.

The Return to Any%

Jumping back into Any%, I remembered just how hard many of the tricks are, levels like Bugle’s Basement didn’t feel any easier. However, I did start to be more aware of where I could zip and swing everywhere else, which saved valuable seconds in certain spots. Sadly, even with those small saves from better movement, I was at the mercy of the hardest parts of the run.

Bugle’s Basement: Guaranteed to crush your dreams or your money back!

On my second day back on Any%, I conducted a practice session that unfortunately was not going well. I decided to hunker down and do a no-reset run, believing that that mindset would help me do better. It sadly did not, I found myself back in the same mindset I was in when I decided to put down SM2K for Silent Hill: I was burnt out, angry, and unhappy. I tried to be positive, focusing on if I happened to improve my time in any of the levels, but that wasn’t enough for me. I did finish the run, but I went to bed somewhat bitter, because I just plain did not have enjoy anything about that practice session.

So of course this got me wondering: what do I do to prepare for the tournament? While I’m very much someone that likes to be as prepared for a tournament as possible, I knew it would not be worth practicing more if I was going to be miserable the whole time.  I decided that not playing, and coming back in with a relatively fresh mindset, would be my best bet.

This also had me wondering what I should be doing next in speedrunning. If I’m just plain unhappy running Spider-Man (2000) in Any%, do I work on another category, or do I try something else? . Of course, I will finish the tournament, and if I am accepted as a runner for one of the charity marathons I submitted my Any% run to I will do the run. But more than ever I think it’s time to look into other games to run.

Regardless, make sure to be watching https://www.twitch.tv/spiderruns tomorrow starting at 4pm / 1600 EST for my match with Niloqui, as well as Zojalyx vs Crypto and ChuckNicey vs Monsh! It’s gonna be one heck of a day true believers!

Slower Gaming – The Forbidden Memories Strategy Guide

“Slower Gaming” is a series about gaming stuff The Flying Felicia is involved with outside of speedrunning

One of my favorite things is strategy guides for bad or mediocre videogames. There’s something amusing about how the author has to write about the game in a positive manner in order to stay professional, while also preparing you for the dumb and / or terrible things ahead. For example, the strategy guide to Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero talks about the control scheme as if it was perfectly normal for a platformer to control like a fighting game.

With that in mind, you can probably guess my reaction to coming across an eBay listing of Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories and its strategy guide. After initially thinking “No way, there was actually a strategy guide for Forbidden Memories?!,” I thought with a smirk, “I wonder how not helpful this guide is.”

The best part of this listing is the eBay seller accepted an offer of $25. A steal for sure!!

You see, being a speedrunner, I’m very aware of just how infamous Forbidden Memories is thanks to the ludicrous amounts of good luck and favorable RNG required to beat the game at all, much less quickly. With that in mind, I felt I had to get my hands on that strategy guide both for my own amusement and to see how useful (or not useful) the information provided really was.  

For those unfamiliar with Forbidden Memories, here’s the basic rundown: it’s a game for the PlayStation that’s loosely based on the Yu-Gi-Oh official card game. It follows the same turn structure and general winning condition, but differs on when cards of different strengths can be put down, and it involves a unique fusion system that allows you to combine certain low strength cards into stronger ones.

What’s made Forbidden Memories infamous is the ludicrous amounts of good luck and positive RNG necessary to get through the game’s story mode. Even from the start your fate is in luck’s hands, since you start with a completely random deck. To earn more cards for said deck, you have to win duels; The problem is you only earn one card per victory, and the kind of card you get depends on the grade you receive after the duel. Most cards have a less than 1% chance of being earned after a duel (there are over 700 after all), meaning it can take hours of dueling just to get something decent.

To make things worse, most opponents you face later on have decks full of super powerful cards, and they often play them on early turns, not giving you the chance to draw what you need to win. Throw in the fact that in story mode you must redo all duels in a particular area if you lose a single duel, and you’ll see that FM is needlessly difficult. If you’d like more details on this, I’d highly recommend checking out “The Ultimate Roulette of Speedrunning” by ThaRixer.

Now that we have the rundown on the game and how it works, let’s get into the guide itself. What I will be doing is going through the guide section by section, commenting on what the guide does and does not say. I will also note, this is being written by someone who only has small amount of knowledge on the game and how it works, if there’s anything I missed or is incorrect, please let me know in a comment and I’ll make sure to correct it.

Game Basics

The strategy guide starts off by sharing a lot of information most people already know, such as your starting deck being random, and that Free Duel mode is the best way to get better cards. One thing that both shocked and amused me was the section on Grades following a duel. What was both shocking and amusing? The fact that that section was, no joke, only one paragraph long! It also doesn’t give a lot of information how you are graded, aside from using as few cards or taking as little damage as possible.

I’m not kidding, this is all your get on Duel Grades in this guide

Walkthrough

The walkthrough section includes card lists for each opponent you face, as well as general strategies for facing them. The problem is, each list only features 20 cards, which is half the number of cards in a deck in Forbidden Memories. Usually some of the opponent’s more troublesome cards will be listed, but it is weird and kind of funny that the deck lists are literally half-complete.

1/2alf the Power!

I will give this section credit for some of the strategies shared. For example, it’s shared that Isis tends to always go for a Neptune Guardian Star on her cards, allowing you to plan what Guardian Stars to go for in the fight against her. I will note this is written with the idea that players will frequently change their deck or build a different one for each match, which is good for casual play, but it’s not something speedrunners would do. Of course, nobody writing this guide could have had any idea people would eventually speedrun Forbidden Memories 11 years later, so I’ll give them a pass on that.

At the start of the World Tournament part of the story, the guide flat out says you won’t win, and you will likely have to go through Free Duel mode to get the cards necessary to win. There are also multiple points throughout the walkthrough where they will tell you to take the time to go through Free Duel for better cards. Good to know the guide makers did admit how BS the difficulty can be!

Of course, this advice is best for casual players, for speedrunners, who want to spend as little time grinding as possible, that advice will only help you so much. And even then, the guide doesn’t go into what kinds of cards you should attempt to get, aside from stronger monsters. There’s also nothing about which opponents are best to duel in Free Duel Mode, or even information on what kinds of cards they can drop, which would be extremely helpful for both casual and hardcore players.

In case anyone is wondering, no, the Twin-Headed Thunder Dragon strategy is not listed anywhere in this guide. It does make sense, I’m sure the community at large didn’t realize that card’s potential until way after the game’s release. Although I will share that an employee I know at a local game shop did tell me he figured that out on his own back in the day, which is pretty cool.

Card List

All 722 of the cards in Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories are listed in here. Said list shows the stats, what Guardian Stars are associated with the card, what terrain gives it an advantage, and what the card code is. The card codes in particular are probably the most useful bits of information here, as they can help players more easily obtain cards essential to their strategy. It is a shame that the cost of the cards is not shared, but I give that a pass because I feel that’s information one could easily get on their own.

Also, a member of the FM discord wanted me to point out that despite there being a full deck list in the guide, a player cannot get all 722 cards under normal circumstances due to maxed out star chips (in-game currency) and some cards never being drops from duels.

Fusion List

This part of the guide is split into two parts: instructions for how Fusion works, and a list of possible Fusions. The guide does a good job explaining how to pick cards for Fusions, and unlike Forbidden Memories’ manual it actually explains the concept of Chain Fusions, where you fuse more than two cards in the same turn. It also unintentionally explains the concept of “cycling,” aka “tossing,” where the player can get rid of a card by attempting to fuse cards that cannot go together.

Now, for the part of the guide I’m sure most were wondering about: the Fusion List. How good is it? The answer: not great. It only lists 35 cards that can be made by Fusion, and then literally tells you to figure out the rest yourself (no joke). Granted it shows multiple fusions that get the same result, but it doesn’t go into what about those cards makes the fusion. Even simple guidelines like “Plants and Females work well together” would have been nice.

A Strategy Guide telling me to try things on my own?! 0/10 Worst Guide Ever!!

Conclusion

I know I’ve been poking fun at the lack of essential information in this guide, but I do need to give it and the writers some slack. You see, the guide is handicapped by being about two games: Forbidden Memories and Dark Duel Stories for the GameBoy Color. This means the authors of the guide likely had to fit the time it takes to research two games into the time it takes to research a single game. And seeing how RPGs can be some of the toughest games to make strategy guides for, thanks to the massive amounts of information that must be collected, I can see why this particular strategy guide isn’t as informative as it could have been.

Still, it was fun to look through this guide, if only to see that it does admit just how ridiculous the game’s difficulty is, and to have a few visual references to aspects of the game. And if nothing else, old strategy guides are fun because they’re time capsules in a way: it’s fun to look at it to see what sorts of information was available for a game at release versus what’s known now. Nowadays, thanks to the hard work of fans all around the globe, Forbidden Memories players now have things like a complete fusion list and a better understanding of drop pools and drop percentages after battles.

If you decide to try out Forbidden Memories, casually or as a speedrun, you can check out the Speedrun.com page (https://www.speedrun.com/yugiohfm) for a variety of resources and guides available. It also features a link to the Forbidden Memories discord, where you can more directly ask questions, be involved in races, or simply see what’s up in the scene. Regardless of the path you choose, may uncertainty in outcome be on your side, and may you never get Exodia’d 13 Hours into a speedrun.

Speed Stories – Spider-Man (2000) any % Race, Part 2: The Rest of the Seeding Matches

“Speed Stories” is a series that shares the latest developments of the speedrunning career of TheFlyingFelicia

First off, I need to make a correction in regards to the previous entry of “Speed Stories” – I was under the impression that there would be only one seeding match per player in Crypto’s Any% Easy tournament, in reality Crypto planned out that there would be three seeding matches per player. So the last entry should have been called “My First Seeding Match.” That’s my bad.

Secondly, in said previous entry I had also said I wasn’t taking things too seriously, as I had just started learning Silent Hill’s “All Bosses” category and I wanted to focus on that. But after how well I did in my race against Niloqui, and learning we were having multiple seeding matches per player, I felt a new desire to keep working on my Any% Easy runs, and hit the ground running for my next two seeding matches.

The second of my seeding matches was on March 7^th, where I raced against the player ChuckNicey. While I felt relatively good about my first race, I was a bit nervous for this one: Chuck is a relatively new player to SM2K, but he’s grown pretty fast, I would go as far as to say we’re about on the same level despite me having played the game longer. With only a few days to practice, I knew I’d had have to focus on just a few details in my run in order to be as ready as possible.

Between taking this race a bit more seriously than the last one, as well as Chuck and I being on about the same level, I felt like I was holding on for dear life over the course of the match. In reality, this race was about as good as the last one for me: I hit every trick I attempted in this race, with the exception of Warehouse Skip.

Even with that, and a slower time (39:13 vs 35:11 on my last race), I still eeked out the win. This put me at two wins and no losses during this seeding phase.

I may have said a winning streak after the race with Chuck, but I still couldn’t relax: I was informed that in my next race I would be taking on WiliFetti, a Top 3 runner runner of SM2K.

Fetti’s PB in the “No Skip” category, one of several where his time in is in the Top 3

This time around I had just over a week to practice (the race was on March 15^th), so I focused on a mix of both no-reset runs and polishing up some of the game’s harder tricks. One said trick is “One-Cycle Doc Ock.”

In SM2K, Doc Ock’s boss fight isn’t very hard, but it is time consuming due to how it’s set up: Ock sets up a shield to protect him, and you have to hit a series of switches that lower from the ceiling to turn off said shield, and after that you have a few seconds to do as much damage as possible before the shield regenerates. Due to the short amount of time you have to hit Ock, for most players casually the fight takes two cycles of hitting switches to turn off the shield. However, a couple years ago speedrunners realized that with good timing and the right combos, you can potentially defeat Ock in only one cycle, which saves around 40 seconds in a speedrun.

One-Cycle Doc Ock performed on the PC version of the game by scene veteran Ink Blowout

Of course, in the context of a race, that can put you at a major advantage against your opponent, so I made sure to spend a lot time working on this trick.

The day of the race vs Fetti, I did everything I could to be ready: I did some last-minute IL practice, ran a no-reset run, got a RedBull, and did a lot of stretching and working with my massage gun to loosen my muscles. I had a strong feeling Fetti would win due to his high level of skill, but I was going to make sure my part of the race was as good as I could get it.

My setup earlier that day, when I was getting practice in

The race was… interesting to say the least. It started as a tug-of-war between Fetti and me in terms of who was ahead. Then came the start of the Daily Bugle levels: I was a bit behind due to my run through The Lizard’s Maze and a slow boss fight against Venom, but then I failed the skip in Symbiotes Infest Bugle several times, had to do the level the slow way. I was annoyed, but I felt that as long as I pulled off the rest of the skips, I’d be fine.

And then came the last three levels: vs Doc Ock, vs Carnage, and vs Monster Ock. I attempted to do One Cycle Ock, and unfortunately messed up my timing. So I would have to do the normal Two Cycle strategy, no big deal right? Well, thanks to getting stuck on level geometry and messing up another combo, I ended up taking THREE cycles to defeat Doc Ock, which cost me a lot of time.

This guy’s Doctorate is clearly in wasting time

 Then came vs Carnage. Carnage can be quite the wild card in this game, as you’re trying to knock him in a Sonic Buble (comic logic) and get him to stay in there in order to defeat him. I had a lot more trouble doing this than I should have, leading to possibly the worst vs Carnage I’ve ever had in a speedrun, even in my early days of running the game.

And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, in vs Monster Ock (which contrary to its name is a chase level rather than a fight) I fell out of bounds. Yeah. I’m one of only three speedrunners in the SM2K community that that has happened to. Even at the very end of the race, I was I dealt a bad hand.

Credit to Anganoff’s discord for providing this hilariously fitting image

I’ll admit, I wanted to forfeit then and there (Fetti had already finished his run a few minutes before I even got to vs Monster Ock), but I knew that (A) it would be more embarrassing to quit rather than finish the run, and (B) quitting wouldn’t be good sportsmanship. I finished the run, but passed on doing the post run interview due to feeling “tilted” from how bad the last few levels went. I knew Fetti was going to win the race due to his skill, I just didn’t expect my loss to be partially due to bad luck and poor execution.

I really have to give credit to my friend Comet for reaching out to me after the race, they’ve followed my progress through the tournament so far, and always took the time to congratulate me on getting through each match. It was thanks to him I was able to cool down emotionally, and then jump on commentary for the next race, which was Spyran vs Sotaleer.

Credit to Comet for getting a screenshot of me putting random things in front of my webcam at the end

So what’s next? I’m taking a few days off running SM2K, which is something I very much need both physically and mentally. After that, it’s back to the grind! There are a few more matches for the third round of seeding, after that there will be a two week break before we start the actual tournament. This will of course give me the time I need to go over the mistakes I made in the last few races, as well as possibly learn a few new tricks. A lot of new tech has been discovered for SM2K in just the last few months, so I have some catching up to do!

And on another note, I’m also going to start livestreaming again! I won’t be doing streams super frequently (yet), and I won’t be streaming speedrun attempts (yet). Instead, I want to take the time to get used to running tech behind my streams and playing for an audience solo again. Make sure to follow me on twitch (twitch.tv/theflyingfelicia) for notifications on when I go live, and follow Spider-Runs (twitch.tv/spiderruns) to be notified when the next series of matches in the tournament take place!

Speed Stories – Spider-Man (2000) any% Race, Part 1: My Seeding Match

“Speed Stories” is a series that shares the latest developments of the speedrunning career of TheFlyingFelicia

A few weeks ago, in the Rino Runs Discord (Rino Runs referring to people who speedrun Spider-Man games starring Rino Romano), a server member named Crypto suggested that a speedrun tournament be hosted. What Crypto was suggesting was a series of 1v1 matches in a bracket, with players eliminating each other out of the tournament. This hadn’t been done in the Rino Runs community before, other than the occasional race done for fun or for pride. This would be a whole new experience for all of us, me especially.

I’ll admit, I didn’t plan on participating at first. After all, I’d just started learning a new speed game (see previous posts), and a lot of my energy was going there. Plus, I’ve personally never had the best sense of grace under pressure in a competitive setting. Getting eliminated quickly from the many fighting game tournaments I’d attended in the past wasn’t helping me either.

Imagine that I’m the lady here, and you’ll get an idea of how many of my fighting game matches went

Thankfully, Crypto was able to convince me to give the tournament a shot, at least running it for fun. Fellow runner WiliFetti was also part of my decision to run, with how much he’s inspired me in the past, and him DM’ing me asking if I’d do the tournament.

This is Fetti’s Personal Best for those interested

As I had the mentality of “this is just for fun,” I didn’t really do a lot of prep work for the first set of matches. It wasn’t until Saturday the 2^nd, two days before my seeding match, that I started doing any runs. I’ll admit, my first couple practice runs didn’t go well, with both ending up around the 40-minute mark (my Personal Best time in any% Easy on PSX was 35 minutes and 38 seconds), so I had a strong feeling I wasn’t going to do well.  But thankfully, recently my personal counselor had been encouraging me to study and work on mindfulness, trying to keep my headspace in the current moment, rather than worrying about the past or the future. One trick I learned was to focus on your senses in the moment, so in my next run I focused on the feelings in my fingers if I started to get tilted. And what do you know, it worked! The practice runs I then did on March 3^rd and before the actual race on March 4^th went better thanks to this mindset.

My first race, my seeding match (which determines my skill level for the actual tournament bracket) was against a runner named Niloqui (https://www.twitch.tv/niloqui). Honestly, I was certain I would be beaten due to Niloqui having run the game for much longer than I have, plus the fact that his PB for any% Easy on PSX (technically emulator, but still) is 31 minutes 55 seconds. Regardless, I still took the match seriously, making sure I stayed in a positive mindset and focused on playing to the best of my ability. And the result? Well, remember how I said my Personal Best WAS 35:38? Watch the vod and see for yourself:

My setup for the race

In an extremely tight race, I pulled ahead at the end, and managed to win the race while also setting a new Personal Best time of 35:16.

The race was exhilarating, and even if I hadn’t won, I would have been proud of my performance, in particular the fact I stayed in the moment and didn’t worry about mistakes or any tricks coming up. My only major gripe about the run was that I botched several big tricks, most notably one-cycle Tunnel Crawl and Bugle’s Basement skip, probably the two most infamous tricks in the any% Easy category. In both cases, I ended up playing the levels the safe way instead of trying the tricks again and possibly failing, losing valuable time. Hopefully for my next match I’ll have those down again. But still, the fact that I messed up some major tricks and still set a PB by 22 seconds is pretty crazy.

The best part is, this tournament is really only getting started. On March 5^th, there will be three more seeding races, with some amazing players facing off, including the World Record holders for any% Easy on Hardware (Spyran, https://www.twitch.tv/Spyran) and Emulator (Sotaleer, https://www.twitch.tv/sotaleer). So make sure to tune in at https://www.twitch.tv/spiderruns tomorrow to catch the action! And then make sure you’re following to be notified of when the tournament matches begin.

Of course, my dilemma is how much I want to focus on this tournament. I want to keep improving in Silent Hill, especially since I’ve finally memorized my notes and no longer need them. At the same time, with how well I did in the race, and how fun it was to be cheered on by my buddies in the Rino Runs community, I may grind some more to improve my performance. I’m not sure what I’ll do yet, especially since the adrenaline rush from the race is still flowing through me as I type this. So make sure you’re following this blog, as well as https://www.twitch.tv/spiderruns to stay updated on how things go!  

Edit: I got a new PB by 49 seconds (In Game Time) in Silent Hill a couple hours after posting this article, how crazy is that?

Barry the iDog looks excited for whatever comes up

Quick Update – My First Match for the Spider-Run (2000) any% Easy Race

Hello readers, first off, I apologize for how short this blog entry is. Between work being unexpectedly busy and family visiting from out of town, I’ve had to put writing a full blog entry on the back burner. Secondly, I knew I had to get something out to inform people about my participation in the Spider-Man (2000) community’s any% Easy tournament, and my first match is tomorrow (at least of this posting).

The first phase of said tournament is for seeding, which means seeing what people’s skill level is for placing in the bracket.

My seeding match will be a race vs the runner Niloqui (https://www.twitch.tv/niloqui). The race will not be on either of our twitch pages, instead it will be on https://www.twitch.tv/spiderruns, tomorrow (March 4^th) at 4pm EST. I’d recommend following the Spider-Runs twitch page, for notification on when the race is live, as well as the rest of the seeding matches, which will occur on Tuesday the 5^th.

This is my Personal Best in the any% Easy category for those wondering

I’ll make sure to write a longer blog post about preparation for the race, as well as mindset briefly returning to SM2K, but for now I wanted to at least inform people on the day of my first part of the race. You can also follow Spider-Man (2000) on Speedrun.com (https://www.speedrun.com/sm2000) for more info. In the meantime, have a good rest of your weekend, and God bless.

My current speedrun setup, I’ll go into more detail about it in a future post

Speed Stories: Silent Hill – The First Week of Runs

“Speed Stories” is a series that shares the latest developments of the speedrunning career of TheFlyingFelicia

I know I’ve only been running Silent Hill for a week, but I can say with confidence that it is the hardest speedrun I’ve worked on so far. I did go in knowing Silent Hill would feature challenges that are different from the games I’ve run in the past, after all, that was part of why I wanted to run the game. Still, even with that knowledge I wasn’t ready for how much of a rollercoaster the game can be in a speedy setting: it’s a game where even small mistakes can cost you, and it mostly boils down to navigation and movement controls.

One of Silent Hill’s most defining attributes is how claustrophobic and maze-like it feels, thanks to low visibility and repetitive visuals. Every time I’ve ever played Silent Hill casually, I’ve always found myself constantly checking the map to make sure I’m going in the right direction, and that I’m entering a door that I know isn’t locked. Of course, constantly checking the map prevents you from moving efficiently, not to mention that menuing also counts towards the completion time. One needs to know the perfect path and follow it to keep their time low.

To assist with this, I watched a run of the All Bosses category done by the speed runner Punchy (https://www.twitch.tv/punchy) and took notes on the path he took, as well as what enemies he avoided and which he fought.

I ended up with around 25 pages of notes, and of course it was a challenge to balance looking at notes and flipping pages while doing the run. The goal of course is to reference the notes as little as possible, but that wasn’t happening in my first couple of runs. Even with notes, I also found myself getting turned around several times, costing me valuable time. Thankfully I’ve memorized most of those notes over the past week, and I’ve down to only a few pages I keep as a safety net of sorts.

A page out of the author’s notes

Even if one has the perfect paths memorized, they still have to deal with Silent Hill’s most infamous attribute: its controls. Simply mentioning that Silent Hill utilizes tank controls will certainly get people running away screaming, and that’s before getting into how laggy said controls are. The controls are generally manageable if Harry is walking, but obviously during a speedrun you’ll spend more time running than walking. Unfortunately, Harry doesn’t turn as quickly when he’s running, and he cannot stop running on a dime; when you let go of forward, he takes a few steps to stop. As if that weren’t bad enough, if Harry is running towards a wall or a door, he will faceplant when he gets close, which takes up precious time. And I’m sure this goes without saying, but it’s hard to get Harry to move to a specific point when he’s running, which is problematic when you’re trying to pick up or place an item.

To move efficiently in Silent Hill, you’ll have to memorize where to run, and where it’s better to walk. You’ll also need to know where to input left or right to turn at the correct time. To avoid faceplanting into a door, Harry will have to be at an angle where he’s not directly facing the door, so you’ll often have to turn slightly as you’re approaching the door. And then you have to keep all this in mind while trying to run around enemies as well, and hope you don’t get hit. This is all much easier said than done; in his Silent Hill streams Cypryss has said the controls feel like you’re suggesting to Harry what he should do, rather than telling him what to do.

My first successful run of Silent Hill in the All Bosses category was 50 minutes 30 seconds (in-game time), performed on February 18^th. The following day I brought that down to 44 minutes 6 seconds, which is the first run I submitted to the Speedrun.com leaderboards.

My biggest issue with my 44:06 run was that I misinterpreted my notes in several areas, leading to me getting lost. I took the time to rewrite my notes a bit more clearly, and also removing pages I didn’t feel were necessary, so therefore I didn’t have to flip them as frequently. As I continued run attempts, I realized the areas that were throwing me off the most were the School and the Nightmare school. These areas are pretty difficult thanks to the Grey Children enemies, which have more range to their attacks than one would think. This is made even worse when there’s two of them in a narrow hallway, and you have to fight with the game’s laggy controls to navigate around them.

“Sorry Harry, no adults allowed in the classroom!”

I eventually had to start working on running through just the School and Nightmare School by themselves to figure out how to navigate around the enemies, and even then, it’s still a struggle to get through these areas. The fact that I’m navigating through a school makes it even worse, because let’s face it, school sucks.

It took me about a week to get a new Personal Best time, partially due to navigating the School and Nightmare School, as well as dying towards the end of several runs. Finally, on February 25^th, I got a time of 40 minutes 2 seconds.

In this run, I was at the point where I didn’t have to reference my notes as frequently, allowing me to focus on running the best paths and avoiding enemies. Still, there are a couple obvious mistakes, including my movement around the pipe where you use pliers to get a key. I’ll admit I was yelling at my monitor during that one.

The most useless pliers in gaming, amirite?

So, what’s next? Improving my navigation of the School and Nightmare School will be a must, if I can get through those areas without taking hits, it’ll save me time from not getting attacked and not having to grab health items. And while I have my notes mostly memorized, there are still a few pages of notes I keep out as a safety net. My next goal is to be at the point where I don’t need my notes at all, and I can focus simply on movement. And then I’ll begin working on the tougher movement techniques, such as using the strafe buttons to get through certain areas quicker.

I’ve also been thinking it’s time to finally start streaming speedrun attempts again. I’ll admit, due to anxiety issues, as well as exploring my gender identity recently, I haven’t felt the desire to stream on Twitch. But recently my friends in the Spider-Man (2000) community asked if I wanted to partake in a speedrun tournament for that game, and my part would need to be streamed. Maybe that’ll help give me the boost I need to share my runs live with everyone. Regardless, offline or online, I’m going to keep pushing to conquer getting through gaming’s most infamous haunted town as fast as possible.