Challenge of the Month #21 - Space Mama's Crater bonus challenge

[Hunchman801]

Great job, I'll definitely give it a try soon, not that I plan on improving my submission (I've got too many other things to take care of), but it's the occasion to give LiveSplit a try and get to understand how it works, as I've never used it before.

And thanks a lot for timing my submission, by the way! I shamelessly tried to copy your strats, though quite obviously I'm still far behind.

Now is Steo going to submit an entry before Sunday?

[Steo]

Now is Steo going to submit an entry before Sunday?

I plan to try it, not that I expect first place or anything, but I'll just try take part. I might try get one in later today instead of constantly putting it off until I forget.

[Hunchman801]

Beating PluM was satisfying enough for me.

[1234]

Great job, I'll definitely give it a try soon, not that I plan on improving my submission (I've got too many other things to take care of), but it's the occasion to give LiveSplit a try and get to understand how it works, as I've never used it before.

Thanks! Actually, two or three weeks ago I didn't really know LiveSplit either. I guess this challenge did its part in convincing me to give this tool a try, and it was worth it. It's really quite good, in my opinion.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention that you might have to run LiveSplit as an admin for the autosplitter script to work properly. At least that was necessary in my case.

And thanks a lot for timing my submission, by the way! I shamelessly tried to copy your strats, though quite obviously I'm still far behind.

You're welcome. As for copying strats, I guess that's part of the challenge. Probably I also just copied the strats from some old WR I saw some years ago.

[Hunchman801]

Well, February is well over by now, and it's high time we closed this session of COTM! A very good one by the way, it was fun and we learned a lot of things along the way. The final results are as follows:

1234 - recorded 1:28.63, in-game 1:25.13
Hunchman801 - recorded 1:41.13, in-game 1:37.07
dr_st - recorded ?:??.??, in-game 1:42.70 (no recorded time, doesn't count)
PluMGMK - recorded 1:46.43, in-game 1:44.28

Thanks to everyone who participated, and congrats to 1234 for winning this session! Will you do us the honor of picking a challenge for March?

[1234]

Thanks and congrats to all participants as well!
To be honest, right now I can't really think of any challenge. Looking at the first page, it seems like a Rayman 1 challenge is dating furthest back (unless you count Redemption). Otherwise I guess it'd be time for either R3 or RO. If anyone has any idea, feel free to post it here. If not, I'll try to think of something within the next three days.

[Hunchman801]

Since there's been a quite few Redemption challenges lately, I like the idea of a Rayman 3 session more. It also looks like all the previous Rayman 3 challenges were score-based, so maybe it would be interesting to speedrun a section this time? We would probably have to disallow the use of major glitches though, as OOBs aren't really much fun. Or a good old scoring challenge is probably fine too, whatever people like!

[Steo]

I got a bit sidetracked with other things and didn't get around to it. Congrats guys!

I have no idea for another level unless maybe a Magician challenge or something from the first game? The only other speed related ones than this would be Redemption or the UbiArt titles.

[Hunchman801]

I got a bit sidetracked with other things and didn't get around to it.

I saw that.

Just kidding, hope you get to participate this month.

[1234]

Since there's been a quite few Redemption challenges lately, I like the idea of a Rayman 3 session more. It also looks like all the previous Rayman 3 challenges were score-based, so maybe it would be interesting to speedrun a section this time? We would probably have to disallow the use of major glitches though, as OOBs aren't really much fun. Or a good old scoring challenge is probably fine too, whatever people like!

Ok, here are some ideas. Maybe there's something interesting among them. And yes, I'd probably also ban all/most glitches for the following suggestions.

- "Finish the second part of Tower of the Leptys with as few presses of the jump button as possible. In case of a tie the faster time wins." Other levels might work for this challenge as well, but this one was the first I could think of, considering how vertical this level is. The biggest problem with this challenge would be that it might be hard/annoying to count the jump button presses. Certain tools might help, but I don't want to overcomplicate anything.

- "Finish the last part of the Clearleaf Forest (Teensie Highway) with the lowest score possible. Each time you fall down 101 points will be added to your score." LOTLD6 would probably work just as well. The trick would be to try jumping around as many gems as possible and possibly fall down at certain spots to avoid racking up too many combo points.

- "Finish the fifth part of the Bog of Murk as fast as possible. You also have to free all the Uglys." Considering how convoluted Razoff's Mansion is, I think it might be interesting since one could think of many possible routes. One would also have to think about how it'd be best to weaken Razoff along the way.

- "Choose any level/part you like and try getting as many points in one combo as possible." Might be interesting to see what parts people would choose.

- Another possibility would be some Arcade-related challenge, such as "Kill as many Knaaren as possible in Sentinel" or "Pop as many/few ballons as possible in Balloons".

- We could also simply take a look at https://www.speedrun.com/r3/individual_levels and choose an empty cell to help filling up the table. This might be the most straightforward challenge, but maybe that's the way to go to get a higher number of participations.

[Hunchman801]

Well, I completely forgot about this, and given the date, I guess the next COTM will be for April, not March! Those are all pretty good suggestions and I think it's best for us to stick to one of the simplest ones, so that we can get as many participants as possible. I especially like the one with Razoff and the Uglies, even though people might want to spend hours just planning the route, and of course the basic speedrunning of an individual level that has no entries yet.

[The Jonster]

At this point, the correct answer is definitely not April!

Shame I missed out on the last one.

[Steo]

We'll do one for this month but we need to think fast.

[Hunchman801]

I think we need to aim for something easy to play, then!

[Steo]

All I can think of is to just randomly select another Ubiart game timed challenge. I guess there's the Magician from Rayman 1, and there's also Rayman 3 scores, but the latter is definitely not easy.

[The Jonster]

Yeah and plus, scoring for Rayman 3 is stressful at times. Like hitting your head on the wall stressful!

[Steo]

We have decided that we will resurrect this contest in 2023. We will go back to Rayman 1 to get things started!

The goal for this month's challenge is:

Complete the Bongo Hills Magician challenge as fast as possible!

Any version of the game is allowed to be used (original, not Redemption!). Have fun competing, and good luck to all who participate!

[ItzalDrake]

Nice!
I am not sure if I'll participate, but if I will, how could I get quickly to the Magician challenge without playing the first parts of Bongo Hills on PC?
Another option is playing it with an emulator using savestates

[Steo]

Nice!
I am not sure if I'll participate, but if I will, how could I get quickly to the Magician challenge without playing the first parts of Bongo Hills on PC?
Another option is playing it with an emulator using savestates

One way to do it is to use RaySaves and just take a save which puts you in the level you want.

[Hunchman801]

I suppose Itzal meant playing from the beginning of Bongo Hills to the magician stage itself? Though I can't imagine that would take too long!