Joe & Mac (22:55 - Easy) (SNES)
1https://www.twitch.tv/junkyard_dave
Fate gave me Joe & Mac for the SNES for the mystery speedrun event @kat_k and I recently held.
Overall, I actually didn't like this as a speedrun very much.
There's a huge amount of RNG in almost all of the boss fights, and not only that, the bosses are very slow and have way too much health. Despite the speedrun movement being passable, there's another RNG barrier when it comes to running it: level 2 and an early wheel drop (which is about a 20% drop chance). If you don't get the wheel from an egg in level 2, you end up losing about 5-6+ minutes in the course of the speedrun as the next time the wheel is guaranteed is level 11 & 12 (out of 12 total stages).
Even if you do find the wheel, the bosses still have an obnoxious amount of health. Some of the boss fights take two or three times as long as the stages themselves, and, overall, the tech & movement in the game is again alright. There's some weird stuff that happens with the sprite limit that I don't understand, as certain amounts of enemies or sprites have to be on screen (or not) for other items and stuff to spawn, which equally can make the speedrun & strats sometimes inconsistent. One example, is in a stage, when I run by an area, sometimes meat spawns so I can recover my health - but sometimes, it doesn't spawn. Sometimes there's a campfire there, and sometimes there's two campfires there. What makes everything spawn exactly? I have no idea!
Overall, this was probably the worst game that the mystery event rolled for me so far. I don't really like it much to the point I have a lot of motivation to grind it down. The early wheel RNG and RNG in bosses that just take too long to kill would make it a grind that sucks.
I might return to it randomly, as I only finished maybe just over 10 runs, so I know my time could be so much lower, as I learned everything compared to the record at the time and even improved 2-3 levels for strats compared to the record. I did get a 22:55(?) and the record is 20 something. I think without grinding incessantly for RNG I could get a 21 something pretty comfortably before the grind to lower than 21 would be necessary.
I might try to beat the coincidental 2 way tie right now on SRC of 22:45 to be under 10th place.