Real run completed in 14.55.

I'm a bit late writing this, but you know how laziness is. I worked on the Shin Ankoku run pretty much all day on Saturday and finished with a time of 14.55. It's obviously not my best work, but it's still worth submitting (especially considering the previous goal of sub-15).

I never really did plan things out completely when it came to running this game, which I think came back to haunt me with this run. The general idea is so freaking sensitive that if you deviate in just a few minor spots, you'll begin to eat hefty losses later on.

For example, Jeigan gained a level up in Chapter 17 just by attacking the Thief. This was obviously NOT supposed to happen, but there wasn't much I could do about it by then. Best option I had was a 3% critical with Wolf as a one-shot kill, but even that failed because it also depended on the Thief's HP growth. For the sake of real-time/my sanity, I gave up on that idea quickly.

But anyway, Mike has all the recordings now. Once he sends me some DVDs with those files, I can trim all of them and mail some DVDs to Nate. I'm not sure how tough it will be to get verifiers for this run, but I'm hoping it's not that bad.

P.S. Mike likes Dead Rising. A lot. :)

P.P.S. This is probably the last time I write about Shin Ankoku here. I need to find a new game to write about...

New Shin Ankoku time: 14.30

Believe it or not, I'm not dead. I've just been very lazy about updating this blog for some reason. Since I have a good reason to update it now, that's why I'm writing this.

As you can tell from the post title and screenshot, I improved my Shin Ankoku normal time from 15.08 to 14.30. Honestly, I wasn't expecting such a drastic improvement and aimed for something barely sub-15. I'm certainly not going to complain about this result though.

I know I've said it before, but this time I really think I've hit the brick wall for improvements. It can go a few seconds lower with an extreme amount of effort, but I'm convinced that this is close to the best I can ever hope for.

I plan to sleep over at Mike's house on the 24th of this month, which is when the real run will be recorded for submission to SDA. It shouldn't take more than 2 days of solid effort to get the new run completed, so I'm not really worried there. It's going to be insanely difficult for me to even match this though, so I already expect it to be a ton of work. Hopefully it doesn't take up ALL the time, because having no time to relax/have fun would be horrible.

By the way, I decided to not be an idiot and actually wrote down benchmark times for future reference:

Prologue-1: 0:00.35
Prologue-2: 0:00.59
Prologue-3: 0:01.47
Prologue-4: 0:02.44
Chapter 1: 0:03.19
Chapter 2: 0:03.51
Chapter 3: 0:04.44
Chapter 4: 0:05.05
Chapter 5: 0:05.43
Chapter 6: 0:06.14
Chapter 7: 0:06.36
Chapter 8: 0:06.56
Chapter 9: 0:07.13
Chapter 10: 0:07.40
Chapter 11: 0:07.59
Chapter 12: 0:08.39
Chapter 13: 0:09.05
Chapter 14: 0:09.24
Chapter 15: 0:09.40
Chapter 16: 0:10.01
Chapter 17: 0:10.41
Chapter 18: 0:11.01
Chapter 19: 0:11.20
Chapter 20: 0:12.04
Chapter 21: 0:12.23
Chapter 22: 0:12.40
Chapter 23: 0:12.57
Chapter 24: 0:13.19
Chapter 24x: 0:13.41
Chapter 25: 0:14.30

Results time: 0:13.37 (817 seconds)

No joke, that's really what the results times added up to. Isn't it great?

Anyway, I just wanted to update the blog with this new run. Expect the real deal to be in the verification queue sometime in very late April or early May. Also, don't worry about the video quality sucking. Mike's camera is ridiculously awesome, so that's definitely not an issue.