RuffledBricks

Has anyone other than @jetsetdanny shared videos of how they got these scores? Curious to know if there's any strats I've been missing from my full game speedruns.

Today I managed to get the Any% world record down to 20:24: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/931996825 There are several new timesaves in this, mostly found by another runner called Mick_jo, with a few from myself as well. These include: Doing Main Stairway without nipping into Ballroom West to reset the cycle Running under the Jelly in Tree Root on the first cycle Slightly faster execution of the Out On A Limb shortcut by doing a vertical jump over the Bird Smooth stair clip at the bottom of Foot Of Megatree Entirely wait-free execution of East Wall Base On The Roof ceiling warp (actually quite an old strat now, but I hadn't discovered this before my previous Any% run) Timing trick in Ballroom East to ensure you can run under the three Skulls without pausing New jump timing in Ballroom West to avoid having to return through the table to collect the last item Sadly, I had an enormous brainfart in Forgotten Abbey due to a new strat not being quite bedded in properly, so I lost a fair chunk of the saved time on that. Will try it again next week to try and shave that off. I'm intrigued to know if sub-20 mins is possible, so if anyone's spotted anything I've missed optimisation-wise, please do let me know.

I just imagined a randomised version of Attic Centipede and laughed out loud.

This is a good point. In my head I hadn't really settled on whether the randomiser would apply once per game (i.e. the positions are randomly set before the game starts and are then fixed once you start) or whether the randomiser would apply every time you enter a room. I hadn't considered that the latter would help to avoid the IDS.

Here's an idea I had for a mod, though I do not have the programming know-how to create this myself. I'd be interested to play a version of JSW that was exactly the same as the original (with the pokes, natch), except all the enemy cycles are randomised, so that each enemy starts from a random position in their cycle when you enter a room. The pros of this idea are that it would create an extra challenge in the game, as compared to the vanilla game you'd never know where the enemies were going to start from in each room and would have to adjust your timings and strats on the fly as a result. A possible downside of this idea is that this could potentially lead to more instant death loops if the randomiser places an enemy right at the entrance of a room - for example, you could die immediately in Top Landing if the Swiss army knife enemy started their cycle right at the Bathroom door. Although this could also be seen as an upside, as it would require the player to be extra vigilant about the route they take around the mansion to avoid as many instant death 'hot spots' as possible. Anyhow, what do you all think? Has it been done before? And if it hasn't, how feasible would it be to create?

Nah. So it ended up being 3 and a half minutes on this occasion, although that's largely because I didn't have the tech restart the timer for the first three failed attempts. But the fourth (successful) attempt was a bit sluggish as at that point I was just trying to get it right, so I doubt if I timed that one individually it would be a personal best. For speedrun marathons, you're focusing more just on completing the run than you are on getting a PB time, just because it's done in front of a big audience and you need to give them a satisfactory ending. I'm thinking of trying to optimise my Writetyper route on stream at some time to see if I can get it even quicker (sub-2 mins would be awesome if I can figure that out), but I probably won't get around to that for a while.

So here's the ESA VOD for anyone who didn't manage to catch it live: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/912384624 The JSW Writetyper run met the donation incentive, so it went ahead (timestamp: 22:44:40). As you'll see, nerves got the better of me a little bit - there were 5,000+ people watching so go figure! - and it took four attempts to complete the run on this occasion, but I managed it in the end. It's at least worth watching for the chat comments, which are 90% "what the hell's going on" and 10% "he looks like Mark Ruffalo".

One more Miner Willy-related marathon thing I'd like to plug if I may. This Sunday at 10:45am, I'm doing European Speedrunner Assembly's Winter Marathon 2021 in aid of the Swedish Alzheimer's Foundation. I'm only officially booked to speedrun Yazzie, BUT... They're going to be running an incentive so that if enough people donate to the cause I'll be doing my sub-3 minute Jet Set Willy WRITETYPER speedrun with commentary straight after. So I may end up having to do my silly feat of ridiculously precise keyboard mashing live, rather than in the comfort of my own streams in which I can just do numerous takes until I get it right. Twitch channel is here if anyone's interested: https://www.twitch.tv/esamarathon

If you missed this yesterday, the full recording is available on Twitch as a VOD here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/895304382 The JSW2+ run is at 1h 54m 16s. The Manic Miner race is at 3h 56m 15s. Enjoy!

Quick reminder that this is tomorrow. Also, one correction: it's actually being hosted on ESA's Twitch stream rather than UKSG's own stream. Link here: https://www.twitch.tv/esamarathon

Followed by another room called "Like Vicenarian Days".

Awesome, thanks!

Ah, sorry, didn't realise you were referring to MM rather than JSW. And yeah, just had a look and those last couple of levels are very different. I'm guessing they had issues replicating the beam in Solar Power Generator and the image of the surface in Final Barrier? Or did they just decide the original last levels weren't challenging enough?

Here's a plug that might be of interest: a couple of Miner Willy games are being featured at UK Speedrunner Gathering's Winter Marathon 2021 on Twitch next weekend. Firstly, I am going to be doing a Manic Miner race against retro game speedrunner TinyTim78. I'm going to be playing the ZX Spectrum version, and he's going to be playing the PC version at Normal speed. So I'm going to have to try and be pretty good to keep up with him! Secondly, another regular Miner Willy speedrunner DigitalDuck is going to be doing a 100% run of Jet Set Willy 2+. It's a very impressive run, so I heartily recommend everyone check it out. Outside of Miner Willy, there's also going to be speedruns of Yazzie (myself) and Wonderful Dizzy (TinyTim78), so it'll be a rare instance of the ZX Spectrum being decently represented in a speedrunning marathon. And with pretty new Spectrum games at that. Full schedule is viewable here but here's the section relevant to this forum: And here's the link to the UKSG Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/uksg_marathon Hope this post is allowed. Do let me know if not.

Why is the BBC version more difficult than the Spectrum? I looked it up on YouTube just now and didn't get much of a sense of it other than it seems to run faster.

Do it!

Gotcha, thanks. I've been deliberating whether to try routing a Writetyper run of JSW128, so was wondering whether the list of room codes was already available somewhere. But I can always compile my own.

Afraid not, these links are about JSW2. My query was regarding if anyone had a list of the Writetyper codes for JSW128. Thank you though.

Out of curiosity, did anyone ever make a list of the room codes for Writetyper in JSW128?

Discussed this on stream some months ago and I had some thoughts about the project. Firstly, Blake's soundtrack is superb. I love the combination of the orchestral composition with the 8-bit sounds laid over the top. Plus the inclusion of the original sound effects is cool too, and Eugene's "Yesyesyesyes" is funny. The dark and dingy aesthetic of the levels is very nice. One of the things you can easily forget in the original MM is that each of the levels is meant to be a cavern, as the bright colours and often strangely open-air level themes (Skylab anyone?) don't exactly scream 'underground lair'. So it's nice to have an art style that closer matches the situation now, and there's some beautiful details like the squid in the Cold Room. Plus it makes the end sequence where Willy reaches his house seem a lot more idyllic in this version. That said, one of the things I really like about the original is its surrealness - that there are penguins skating in the Cold Room or seals doing ball tricks in the Abandoned Uranium Works, for example, and you just have to accept it. Some of this playfulness seems to have been lost in the redesign, as the penguins now just hobble about and the seals' balls have been replaced with brain domes with their eyes hanging out. It seems like there's also broadly more of a shift towards the grotesque - Chomper's gums; the blood splatter in the Game Over screen; the, erm, suspicious stains on Eugene and his crew - which isn't quite as fun to me (although the redesign of Eugene as a shades-wearing urinal is inspired, as are the toilet spider legs). Maybe I'm just a bit squeamish. My only real qualm with the game in its current form is that I think Blake could push the level designs further and make more use of the third dimension. At present, most of the levels are heavily modelled on the originals, but with the elements distributed around the perimeter of the room. The best restructuring thus far is Abandoned Uranium Works, in which he's actually made the seals into a credible threat (which they weren't in the original). It'd be nice to see more reinterpretations like this. Overall though, I'd definitely be interested in seeing a finished version of this. Although I must admit I'd be more intrigued to see Jet Set Willy 3D...

Ah okay, thanks for clarifying. No, I didn't mean clusters! 😅

Not really sure what you mean by clusters. Can you elaborate? By categories, I mean for speedrunning goals. If you look on SRC, there are categories called Cartography Room and Cartography Room Item: https://www.speedrun.com/jet_set_willy_ii_the_final_frontier#Cartography_Room https://www.speedrun.com/jet_set_willy_ii_the_final_frontier#Cartography_Room_Item The former category is for runs where you try to get to the Cartography Room as quickly as possible, whereas the latter is for getting the item in the Cartography Room as quickly as possible. I did runs in both of these categories just because I wanted to have *something* on the leaderboard for JSW2, and these were the simplest options. Plus they're quite fun to route too.

Thank you very much! Yeah, I've not really tried speedrunning JSW2 yet. There's a couple of very short Cartography Room categories I've done speedruns of, but I've yet to try any where you actually complete the game. I wanted to get the first two completely out of my system first before I attempted to learn a game with such a notably different jump dynamic (and also much faster!). The other main speedrunner of Miner Willy games on the SRC leaderboard is a streamer called DigitalDuck, and thus far he's only been willing to speedrun JSW2 in the revamped 2+ e.22 form just because of how much more forgiving the death system is in that game. And I'll probably follow suit to be honest - I might attempt an Any% run of the original JSW2 at some point, but I can't fathom trying to do a 100% run.

Hi all, So as discussed in the Nightmare Edition thread, I'm a Twitch streamer and I've spent a lot of the last year speedrunning the Miner Willy games on stream. I'm currently registered as having world records for speedrunning both JSW and MM in all categories on speedrun.com (AKA SRC). My profile can be viewed here: https://www.speedrun.com/user/RuffledBricks I have videos of all my best speedruns on my YouTube channel. Here are my current PBs to date in the four categories on SRC for speedrunning JSW: Any% (complete the game in any way you can): Max Lives% (complete the game without any unnecessary life losses) - this is probably the tightest of the four speedruns here: Warpless% (complete the game without using any unintended 'warps' in the game, e.g. Rescue Esmerelda to Ballroom East): And finally, as already discussed briefly in the Nightmare Edition thread, WRITETYPER% (complete the game with use of the room select cheat code). Probably my proudest achievement, this one: As you'll see, the different rules make for very different routes when optimising each category. I didn't know about this forum at the time when I was recording all these, so I would imagine there are some players around these parts who would probably be able to beat these times or, at the very least, spot some tricks I may have missed here and there. I've vowed not to try and improve on these times any further unless I know I can shave at least 15 seconds off, because I've spent a LOT of time figuring these routes out. So if anyone knows of any ways this could be done, I'd be very interested to hear them. Also, I recorded a 7 part JSW speedrunning tutorial to try and encourage more people to have a crack at speedrunning the game: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqNObzuH834dePmD1qt7cY82QilYsF66e Since doing so, a couple more players have added runs to the SRC leaderboard, so it's helped to create more of a speedrunning community around the game. But again, I'm sure the strats that I've shared in this tutorial can be improved upon. I haven't shared my Manic Miner video in this thread because the one I have on YouTube is a bit outdated in terms of optimum strats (and suffers from a few dropped frames here and there), so I'm currently in the process of trying to record a better one. Anyways, would be interested in everyone's thoughts on Jet Set Willy speedrunning and to know if anyone else has had a crack at it. So let me know!

Cool, I'll start a post in Site Links to discuss MW speedrunning further. Thanks for confirming!