Tool-Assisted Speedrun Submission Guidelines

The run must be perfect/mistake free.

These runs are made with emulators that have rerecord capabilities and runners are expected to use them. If you make a mistake, you are allowed to go back in time and correct that. Because of this, no mistakes should be visible. Everything you attempt should be accomplished. There should be no missed shots, no backtracking unless absolutely neccessary, no damage taken or death unless it saves time, and as little waiting time as possible. It is suggested that you use waiting time to do something entertaining, rather than just standing there.
Note: Perfect does not mean optimized.

Faster runs will obsolete slower runs.

The name of the site is speedruns.net. Exceptions for fighting games and shooters, where entertainment is more important than speed. If your run completes a game faster than an existing run you are always welcome to submit your run. In case of games like Gradius your movie must have something special compared to an existing movie. I.e. much cleaner gameplay or new glitches or bugs found.

Run must be entertaining/show "skill".

It must look like something the average player can't do. Try hard to make very difficult things in the game look easy. If just speeding through the level isn't hard, try killing all enemies or doing a pacifist run. Impress the audience. It must not look like just someone playing a game. Do things that would not be possible without slowing down, savestates and so on. Shooters should try for maximum entertainment, 100% kills or both. Fighting games should try to put spectacular combos together, and do moves which are incredibly hard because of the button presses required. If you come to a section of a game or a level that autoscrolls, and can't be improved time-wise, entertain the audience.

Premises

Only submit full runs. Do not make a run of a part of a game or just from one stage. We publish only full runs.  Always start recording from a reset or directly from the beginning. Runs which start from a savestate will not be published only in very special cases. Passwords and cheats in any way are not allow for a tool-assisted speedrun. Use glitches and bugs but no cheats or passwords. So no level skip with button combination or something like that should be in your movie.

We will accept  

- Runs that look like normal speedruns/walkthrough runs. Provided that the run is mistake free, runs where no glitches are found will still be accepted. However, if a shortcut is found that makes the run faster, the run with the shortcut will obsolete the walkthrough run.

- Hacked ROMs. Provided that the hack is of good quality, freely available, and easy to find, hacked game runs will be accepted. What entails good quality is up to the dicretion of the publisher. If we can not get the rom there is no way of watching or even publishing a run.

- Runs of obscure titles. As long as the run follows the guidelines, it should be accepted, despite how well known the game is. It has not to be Mario, Zelda or Sonic to e accepted. There are lots of games that have no run yet.

- Unoptimized runs? If the run is deemed entertaining enough, it will be accepted despite being unoptimized. We will do this in hope that someone will se the unoptimized run and be inspired to tweak it and make a better run, which will then obsolete the unoptimized run. Runners should make every effort toward finding the fastest way to finish, however. But the final decision can differ from game to game. Note: Unoptimized does not mean sloppy. Making obvious mistakes though you know they could be improved can not be accepted for publication.

Thanks to arkiandruski for these Submission Guidelines

Non-Assisted Speedrun Submission Guidelines

Faster runs will obsolete slower runs.

The name of the site is speedruns.net. Exceptions for fighting games and shooters, where entertainment is more important than speed. If your run completes a game faster than an existing run you are always welcome to submit your run. In case of games like Gradius your movie must have something special compared to an existing movie. I.e. much cleaner gameplay or new glitches or bugs found.

We will accept

- We highly recommend to use a dvd-recorder and a real console sytem for such speedruns. Like said before though we do accept speedruns on emulators but at the moment we can only accept them when used Nestopia because with Nestopia you can not use savestates or slowdowns when recording a movie. Please use the contact form for finding a way to transfer the files if they are recorded on a dvd-recorder or similar.

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