Game:

Super Mario Bros. (1985)

Duration: 20:14

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12

This video contains my completion of the Sub-20 minute speedrun achievement set for RetroAchievements.org. Since the main goal here was Sub-20, I chose strategies that I felt wouldn't be too likely to lead to death, but would give me some leeway for mistakes and time losses throughout the run. I figured it may be helpful for people attempting this set if there was a guide of sorts, and the video could be a fun watch regardless even if you just want to see the run. I'm not an expert, so this is more of a combination of "These are the strategies I used" and "These were my experiences" than a proper tutorial.

This can't be uploaded to speedrun.com since it doesn't follow any of the verification rules. For one, the RetroAchievement emulator isn't one of the emulators that speedrun.com accepts, so I was never going to do a "legit" run anyways. I probably won't go back and get another time just to submit to speedrun.com

The video may seem a bit choppy, but I assure you that's just the RetroAchievements emulator. The emulator it's based on (FCEUX) doesn't run very smoothly, and I couldn't find any settings that would fix the issue.

I was pretty happy with this run overall, but I just couldn't escape the fireworks here. If you don't know, if the last digit of the timer is 3 or 6 at the end of the level, you'll lose time to the bonus fireworks that appear. A single firework will also appear when the timer ends in 1, but this doesn't cost time. In this run, I managed to mess this up so many times that I lost probably 10+ seconds to the fireworks alone. Other than that, I made fewer mistakes than I expected, which is good because I didn't have much leeway on the Sub-20 time otherwise.

I've heard Small Mario recommended over Fire Mario for beginner runners, but I think the Sub-20 barrier is probably low enough that Fire Mario starts to make more sense. If you want to use Small Mario, you're losing 20s of your 1m 10s buffer against the WR by default. From what I can tell, some levels would be easier with Small Mario, but others would be tougher, so you're probably looking at similar difficulty runs with less leeway on the Small Mario run. The real deal-breaker for me is 8-3, which appears right at the end of the run and is much easier with Fire Mario. Personally, I never practiced a Small Mario route at all. If you think you'll be more comfortable with Small Mario, you can always watch Kosmic's Warpless Tutorial for a complete guide on that route.

If you're going for your own achievement, keep in mind that these strategies aren't gospel. For example, I don't mind moderate precision or complex setups, but I am allergic to reacting to enemy patterns. If you feel differently, then you may want to adjust your strats to favour rushing through reaction-based sections at full speed, but skipping out on some of the more complicated setups.

When practicing, I recommend that you don't just try to learn every level in the run individually and then start doing runs. The process takes long enough that you'll start to forget the details of the earlier levels by the time you've put together strategies for the later ones. Instead, build up your skills over time. Learn each level in a world, then try to do the entire world at once. Then move up to combining that world with earlier worlds. You should also make some time to refresh your memories on earlier worlds as you go through this process, especially if you don't try to blaze through learning everything in a week. Eventually everything will become second-nature, but it takes a while to get to that point, and before that it's easy to get rusty on levels you haven't played in a bit.

Finally, make sure you make liberal use of save states to avoid needing to spend time replaying earlier levels. It's definitely not cheating, and it's also definitely not worth it to practice in Hardcore mode.

If you're wondering about the music, I didn't listen to or record the original game sounds; this is just what I was listening to during the run.

Shoutouts to Kosmic, who made a Warpless speedrunning tutorial that gave me some useful info and inspired the achievement set. Also shoutouts to suspect15 for making the achievement set, as well as Liqquify, whose run I arbitrarily picked to steal some strats from.

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