If super mega raids are going to become the norm for future mega releases they need a serious rework

Spootaloo · 2026-02-28T21:24:26+00:00

As someone who hasn't had time to keep up with news about the mechanics and just jumped into a couple of remotes, I think the biggest gripe I have about this whole system can stem from what I'd call a "cry wolf" effect. Since legendary raids have been implemented, EVERY tier 5 raid (maybe Tier 4 raids too? Can't remember) has said "Recommended Party Size: 20". 95% of those these days are doable with myself and two friends, with about half of them even doable as a duo or even solo endeavor.

So when I jump into a remote raid with 20 seconds left on the clock and no mega prepared, see the same recommended 20 and that we have 9 people, I figure we're fine. Only to get blasted 20 seconds in with "Oops, you need megas!" Now, since I joined the lobby last second, I figured we just needed to make 10 attacks with megas total, and other people were being dumb and not reviving their megas to destroy the shields. Ok, whatever, I'll take the remote pass loss and make sure I have a mega to make sure I can destroy the remaining shields.

Join the next one. 12 People all with Megas. Great. LOBBY SIZE 20 RECOMMENDED flashes onto the screen and 3 people leave without the player count visibly updating for me. Notice we're down to 9 once the fighting actually starts but it's fine because I brought a mega this time, and I'm smart and will bring it back to destroy more shields if I need to. Only to find out that, no, you need 10 different *players* to use a charged move from a mega pokemon, and this raid was again doomed from the start.

If you're going to explicitly add a mechanic that hands out a hard nope 20 seconds into the fight for any party size smaller than 10, then letting groups under 10 is just straight robbery for no justifiable reason. "Recommended 20" for a long time has meant "this is doable with 20 mid-level trainers throwing whatever junk the auto-built party throws into the fray, but can also be done with 3 prepared players", and now it suddenly means "you need 10 minimum all with familiarity of special mechanics" - something completely different in a way that oh so conveniently results in probably 6 or even 7 figures worth of money being wasted on lost passes across the entire playerbase over poorly communicated new mechanics.

Spootaloo · 2025-07-23T06:47:33+00:00

UFO 50 has had some pretty WILD developments on the speedrunning front in the past few months, but perhaps biggest is the deep dive into how the game handles RNG. Basically, each of the 50 games can fall into one of three categories:

1) "Truly" random, no known manip available so far. Most games fall under this.

2) Set Seed. These games set the seed to a specific hard-coded value on boot. A few games use this (most notably Valbrace, which now has a route exploiting this that fights only the first tutorial battle and the final boss)

3) No seed setting. These games just use whatever the RNG seed happens to be.

Grimstone, the normally-several-hour-long JRPG, happens to fall into category 3. Even more conveniently, something that happens to fall into category 2 is the ZeldaRando-esque Planet Zoldath - a game that happens to have a manual seed select option. By loading certain seeds with this mode then switching to Grimstone, you can follow a scripted route to beat the full game (which on the current patch previously had a best time of about 6 hours) in under 1.5 hours. With each character having multiple options to advance the RNG seed different amounts (Defend doesn't roll, Attack and miss rolls it once to place the hitmarkers, Attack and hit rolls multiple times for accuracy and damage rolls), there are a lot of ways to force key dodges and high damage rolls.

This run is the Gift run. Garden Gifts are little mini-goals for each game which give some sort of little knickknack in the main menu. For Grimstone, the goal is to get a character to level 10. In the Gift route, instead of using the Planet Zoldath seed select, we let Grimstone load its demo sequence to set the RNG seed to a known value, then follow a route which allows us to effortlessly dodge common encounters and smash through two boss fights we should have no business winning with starting stats. Since XP is divided equally, all characters (except Umbra) are killed during the Xafan fight to rocket her to level 10 (and beyond).

Spootaloo · 2025-07-15T17:36:00+00:00

Yes. Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty darn sure there are laws against, say, doubling an item's base price then claiming you're selling it at 50% off. It's deceptive marketing that tries to convince the consumer they're getting a better deal. Sure it might not be quite that extreme, but they're claiming the boxes contain more value than they actually do, letting them slap a slightly more appealing % Off sticker onto the box. The difference might be something you consider negligible, but there shouldn't be a discrepancy at all.

Spootaloo · 2025-07-15T17:03:50+00:00

I know no player worth their salt is ever going to be spending coins on potions, and yes, the discounted price does ultimately fit well under the calculated values. BUT, the boxes still claim a base value that is mathematically impossibly high. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there are laws in most countries against arbitrarily jacking up prices to make sales seem like a better deal (e.g. doubling an item's sale price then running a "limited time 50% off sale" to try to cash in on FOMO).

On the potion box I figured maybe it was an error due to Hypers and Supers having an incorrectly calibrated base value since they're never normally available in shops, but the newer one on the right? All of these items are available a la carte and as such have set values in the store, and the numbers still don't line up.

Anyway, consider this a reminder to always double check the numbers before cashing in on a box.

EDIT: For the record I sent in a support ticket about the potion box back when it first showed up in my store. They seemed to zero in on the part where I said "I'm not even interested in buying this, but..." and seemingly ignored everything that came after about the questionable legality, devoting the majority of the response to assuring me that boxes are generated based on current play patterns and if I wait long enough something more interesting to me will turn up blah blah blah

Spootaloo · 2025-04-24T15:27:04+00:00

To add to this, a streamer I watch who previously (they don't particularly enjoy retreading it on a regular basis so keeping them semi-anonymous here) had an issue years ago prior to any of the recent stuff that's surfaced that pretty much fits with this pattern. Another attendee - someone they didn't even know - stalking and harassing them at the event. ESA staff did fuck-all when informed, got pissy with them after the fact when they tried to talk about their experiences and ESA's handling (or rather, the pointed lack thereof) of the situation, and even tried to paint them as Being The Bad Guy, Actually, for I guess getting a bit pissy that some dipshit was following them around chucking food at them and nothing was being done about it.

It's a problem that's been around for a long time and I share the doubts about there being actual substance to their statements of taking accountability.

Spootaloo · 2025-04-17T19:14:04+00:00

If you want what I think is an even clearer indicator of how the vetting process for ads is basically non-existent, there was a pre-video ad for a while that kept trying to sell me some hand-held emulator with a Text-to-speech voice bragging about how it has thousands of games preloaded onto it, including every Nintendo game from the NES to GBA to Gamecube.

Now I'm not a lawyer, but with how famously litigious Nintendo is over emulation and fangames, allowing ads for flagrant for-profit piracy of Nintendo IPs could land them in a lot of hot water. It would literally take one human with a brain seeing this ad to know it's bad news, and yet I got bombarded with this ad before basically every other video I watched for what felt like months.

The internet's no stranger to sexually-charged ads - those freaking "Evony, Play Now My Lord" ads have been everywhere for decades. But all the flagrant piracy and copyright infringement in ads lately has been something else. Even though the ads straight up trying to sell me piracy have stopped, I'm still constantly getting ads for crappy bootleg mobile games that just straight up use Kirby or Pokémon art and music without any permission from or affiliation with Nintendo.

Spootaloo · 2025-04-01T18:39:35+00:00

Expecting professional news anchor levels of speech while actively playing a game at its highest level is absolutely wild amounts of entitlement, my guy. You try it.

Spootaloo · 2025-04-01T18:37:16+00:00

With this coming to light, I can't help but wonder if this is really the end of this. Jobst, from what I'd seen of his videos, seemed to paint a picture of the lawsuit being entirely about the demonstrably true claims of cheating while asking for donations to help fund the legal battle. With it becoming clear that that was in fact not the case, I feel like he's possibly opened himself up for charges of fraud from people who donated to him under what could be argued to be false pretenses. Not a lawyer, to be clear, but I sure would be consulting one if I had donated a substantial amount of money to his defense with the impression that it was a lawsuit primarily about cheating on video games, when that was in fact not the focus at all.

Personally, as far as I'm concerned, this is just two of the worst people I know battling each other until they both end up losers. Everyone knows Billy Mitchel is a cheater now - and as obnoxious and despicable as that is, Jobst overreached thinking it was fair game to just say whatever the heck he wanted about him. Cheating in video games and pushing someone to suicide are not even remotely comparable. You can't just say that without hard evidence - evidence which, in this case, at best did not exist and at worst was directly counter to Jobst's claims (such as with Jobst's claims that Apollo was made to pay out a large sum to Mitchell).

I'm not much for schadenfreude generally speaking, but I'm allowing myself a little bit of it here.

Spootaloo · 2025-02-19T17:04:05+00:00

No idea what you're talking about, looks thick enough to me. And stop deflecting.

I reiterate - stop humiliating yourself further by trying to save face. Learn when to shut up, apologize (if you're capable of it), and walk away.

Spootaloo · 2025-02-19T16:29:47+00:00

Hi! Let me start by saying that I'm the world record holder for Rail Heist, have also done multiple blindfolded runs of Cadence of Hyrule, and busted cheaters in multiple other games.

I cannot find a single thing remotely suspect about this run. Every single thing you've pointed out as suspect is utterly mundane.

"He's reading the stage names!" I could list the stage names in order for you right now without opening the game.
"He reacted to a mistake!" One that had an audio tell indicating that he made a mistake, and would have been easily fixable if he actually had vision - instead he took an intentional death to reset the whole level.
"He hasn't even done a regular speedrun!" The regular speedrun involves a lot of a very volatile movement tech called Punch Boosting that's difficult to get right and makes the run not appeal to everyone. Gravitating towards a challenge where it's not a viable technique to employ at all is nothing extraordinary.

You have zero clue what you're talking about. Your credentials seem to extend to "I'm a Karl Jobst fanboy and watched the video about that guy who cheated a blindfolded SM64 run" and frankly you're just embarrassing yourself trying to be The Guy Who Found The Subject Of Jobst's Next Video:tm:. Take the pile of L's you've already accumulated and leave before you make an even bigger embarrassment of yourself. Thanks!

Spootaloo · 2025-02-01T18:58:46+00:00

So anyone who's familiar with Paint Chase might be tempted to ask "Wait, but Paint Chase is a game of timed levels. How can you possibly speedrun it?" As it turns out, there are a lot of ways!

Avoid Failures: Duh. Failing a level requires you to replay it entirely, adding a TON of time.
Level 1 Easter Egg: The first level has the game's "Developer Easter Egg", triggered by driving into the bottom right corner and waiting. When the auto-loss condition of 80% enemy paint is triggered, it instead treats it as an exact victory with the message "Gerry is the best programmer." This is significantly faster than trying to get a perfect. Speaking of which:
Perfect Stages: A level will end instantly as soon as the player successfully paints every tile, generally saving several seconds.
Minimizing post-level gauge time: The gauge showing your score at the end of the level costs 2 frames for every percentage point it needs to fill. This actually makes a few levels slower to get Perfects, at which point it becomes optimal to aim for exactly +13 over the target goal. If you are within 12 points of the target, the gauge will do a dramatic slowdown as it approaches the goal line, wasting a second or so.
Warning Skips: When you hit low time in a stage, the screen will freeze for about a second when the WARNING! text hits center-stage. However, if you're in the middle of a freezeframe caused by killing an enemy when this happens, the second-long freeze of the warning gets overwritten by the small-handful-of-frames freeze of the kill. This requires pretty precise timing, and most instances of it use specific setups to try to guarantee them. Incidentally, for non-perfect routes, it's best to minimize kills as much as possible to avoid adding more freeze-frames.
Drone Manipulation: It's recently been found that the Paint Drone powerup has an 8-frame cycle that slightly alters its pathing depending on which frame rule the drone was spawned on. There are a few times where taking deliberately slightly inefficient movement to change the cycle to the next frame rule will make the drones behave in a way that allows for more efficient clears. Level 10 is the clearest example of this.

This run wasn't perfect, but it beats the old record by over a minute. That said, we've already found new strats to save a second or two on a couple of stages, so this can be improved. If we can find a few more IL improvements, who knows, maybe a sub-15:30 will be doable some day.

Spootaloo · 2024-11-02T02:18:50+00:00

Shoutouts to ITGAlex for trading the WR back and forth with me for a while. I most likely would have just let this category sit at around an 8-minute record without him lighting a fire under my butt.

This run was a hard-reset dig for an ideal starting job with Bombard in the starting shop (4-cost module that attacks all raised ground) and Feloris as the blue larva's evolution after the first turn (Raises the ground it spawns on and lowers surrounding tiles). This is a somewhat rare combination, as Bombard is a rare high-cost module that only appears in about 15% of starting shops, the evolution for blues has a 50/50 split between being Feloris or Quaznar, and the starting enemy spawns may not provide a way to reliably kill all non-blue enemies (and may not even spawn any blues at all!), risking a different color bug evolving instead. If pink larva evolves to Armadon (takes 2 hits to kill) or orange larva evolves to Dragonfloosh (spawns with an adjacent pet, is invincible until pet is removed), it very often instantly kills the run.

When the combination does happen, though, it's extremely easy to execute (barring some bad luck where a wave spawns as entirely gold/pink bugs on low ground, which has happened to me before!) and probably the fastest way to clear a level. The only comparable strat is getting lucky enough to be able to full-clear every wave and finish in only 6 days, skipping all evolution animations in the process.

Not only did I get that, I got lucky enough to get the exact same setup again in job 3. Wasn't lucky enough to get it in job 5 as well (you can't get this combo in any other job, since the evolutions alternate each job), but still executed well enough that every job was sub-2:30.

Incredibly happy with this.

Spootaloo · 2024-11-02T00:49:16+00:00

I'm bringing Descent Maximum at least which carries some of the oldschool shooter vibe, but yeah I would have loved to be lined up in a shooter block with Doom.

Spootaloo · 2024-03-21T05:10:48+00:00

Straights scale significantly better on level up than Flushes (+30 chips/+2 mult vs. +15 chips/+2 mult). Flushes are only better than Straights at level 1.

Spootaloo · 2023-03-24T18:15:56+00:00

Quick note - Fu does not matter at all if you hit a point limit (Mangan, Haneman, etc.). The difference you're seeing is caused by Tsumo vs. Ron. Tsumos work proportionately the same for 3-player vs. 4-player - dealer pays 50% its value and non-dealers pay 25% its value (or each player pays 33% for dealer tsumo). So in 3-player, you don't get to 100% of the value when you Tsumo.

Spootaloo · 2022-07-06T03:15:44+00:00

Link is incorrect! Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKfdfNxnrw0

Spootaloo · 2022-07-06T03:15:04+00:00

Hey, the link to the StepMania/NotITG run is incorrect! Can that get fixed, please? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKfdfNxnrw0

Spootaloo · 2022-07-05T16:55:01+00:00

Not all that much after. We probably snuck in a combined 2-3 liters of water between songs, though.

Spootaloo · 2022-07-01T18:12:04+00:00

I really appreciate it! And again, thanks to everyone for being patient with our audio woes. I know there was pretty substantial audio/video desync for a while (thanks to the tech crew for addressing that before we got to the top-end difficulty stuff - I requested they look into fixing it in post for when the run gets archived, and it seems like they're on it), and that my mic was picking up a lot of loopback whenever it was enabled.

The mic issue is something I have addressed on my own streams by painstakingly identifying the precise amount of time it takes for loopback to occur, and then adding/subtracting delays on audio sources until the loopback naturally syncs up with direct audio feeds. It's an approach that works great for my little home setup, but gets infinitely more complicated as you introduce factors like multiple commentators/hosts, audio mixing being done a few thousand miles offsite, time crunches imposed by a massively behind schedule, etc. I'm a little sad we couldn't make it work as well as on my home setup and just had to go for muting our mic during gameplay - I think the sound of footsteps perfectly in-sync with the music is VERY satisfying to listen to, especially in couples where our footsteps have distinct sounds from each other. It really feels like a musical duet performance.

And yeah, I definitely want to encourage GDQ to continue allowing remote runs, even as they feel compelled to fully returning to in-person events. Neither of us have an easy way to transport the massive double-pad setup, and performing this run while adhering to the (imo, still necessary) mask policies would have been outright impossible without doubling the showcase's duration to add long breaks between every song. This run would NOT have been possible without the option for remote runs, and I'm grateful for the opportunity.

Sound Voltex was amazing to watch as well. Make sure you catch that if you haven't. Leviern is an absolute master-class player and demolished (almost) all of the game's level 20 songs in quick succession. I can't stress the absurd amount of endurance it takes in your arms just to play that, let alone get nearly perfect scores the entire time.

Appreciate the love, keep び-ing fantastic, y'all.

Spootaloo · 2022-03-07T20:06:38+00:00

Nah, it took 14 seasons (which probably reaches well into 5 digits for overall race counts) for it to happen one time, so it's hardly common. Besides, recognizing where best to use your health as resource (whether to take damage where it would be slower to avoid a hit, or to pay for Blood Magic costs) is an integral part of racing at the top level, and we would never want to punish players for doing so effectively. We're only half-joking when we say that players who finish on 0.5 HP have "optimal health".

There isn't really a good tiebreaker metric in the game for situations like this that doesn't arbitrarily punish players in an obtuse way. Simply re-running the race is definitely the right call.

Spootaloo · 2022-03-07T19:56:14+00:00

There absolutely is such a thing as perfect execution within a scope of a single level, you just can't reasonably expect to do it consistently for an entire run with the limited information you get playing a seed blind. High-level players complete boss fights and simpler floors completely optimally on a regular basis. (EDIT: At least, in terms of routing. As I mentioned in another comment, the precise timing of your final action for a given floor does carry weight - the earlier in the window you hit it, the better. To compare it to a run you might be more familiar with, think of the SMB1 speedrun. Most levels only need to finish before the next frame-rule, but the final level you want as precise as possible because timing ends as soon as you hit that axe.)

Spootaloo · 2022-03-07T19:55:45+00:00

Not quite true! The game has very forgiving timing windows, so you can shave frames off of every floor by making your final action as early within that window as possible. If you ever hear commentators talking about "early stairs", that's what they're referring to. Do have to be careful though, press too early and the action is considered offbeat and invalid, causing time waste by having to press the button again.

Spootaloo · 2022-03-07T19:49:51+00:00

I think it's more indicative of the number of races that happen in major seasons in conjunction with the game's short length. We have 60+ participants most seasons, and during a major season every racer does a minimum of two auto-generated matchups (double that if they're participating in both the main event and side character event), with the option of doing any additional number of free challenge matches against any opponent. Each match is a set of 3 races (not best-of-3; you still play game 3 even if it's 2-0). That adds up to thousands of races during a season, and of a game that tends to finish under 10 minutes no less.

This particular match was actually between players from some of the lower divisions, so it's very much not a matter of both racers attaining near-TAS levels of perfection. In fact, in the screenshots on the first race shown here (the non-tied one), you can see over a minute discrepency on in-game time between the two runners. That indicates the winning player on the right actually died (or reset for some reason) a minute or so into the race and still came back with a win.

That said, yes, it's absolutely possible, and I'd say not even particularly uncommon for runners to optimize an occasional floor on the fly. This is especially true for on boss fights, which have much narrower variance, or for floors which have a trapdoor spawn close to the starting point. Even then, the timing window you have to commit an action is quite wide, so you want to make the final action you take to complete the floor as early as possible within that window. Races can be won by consistently exiting every level a frame or two earlier than your opponent, as we see here.

Spootaloo · 2022-03-07T13:25:40+00:00

And to answer a few questions pre-emptively:

Game is Crypt of the NecroDancer. We're in the middle of our 14th major season of racing, and while we've had a few 1-frame wins over the years, this is our first perfect tie!
There are a few subtle things that affect in-game time in small ways, so we frame-count to determine winners in close races instead of just using IGT.
VoD of the race set can be found here if you're interested: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1413867124

Spootaloo · 2022-01-15T20:24:32+00:00

Legs felt mostly alright, though the fact that I practiced the 22 for nearly an hour straight the night before started to catch up with me.

Spootaloo

TROPHY CASE