yay new personal record! 01:24:11 100%. This is about as good as I can get with the route I'm most comfortable with - getting power grip and hi-jump before Kraid.
This is a speedrunning site, and this is how progress is made. At the rate you're decreasing the time, I suspect that on a perfect run, you'd manage a 1:15.
If you wanted to crank it right down, it looks like you may need to work out a new route.
I knew that playing with a D-pad vs. a gamecube controller would increase my time, but I was surprised (quite pleasantly) that it increased by an entire 2 minutes. Morphing/unmorphing is much faster plus I seem to have a much faster firing rate on the DS.
I don't have one (GBA SP is my handheld of choice) but my brothers and dad have ones just a little over a year old. But I've always thought the buttons were squdgy instead of clicky, which I find more responsive.
It does feel ingrained at this point. I make several small adjustments everytime I watch someone's run and find a new idea, but the basic item acquisition order stays the same. I have tried to the sub-hour 100% route, but the HBJ-ing is very frustrating. I would have to completely master bomb jumping to accept that route, and I haven't really had any breakthroughs trying to get better at it. Even now I just mash the button to do an IBJ, there's no precise timing involved other than the rapid button mash. I haven't even gotten good at the normal 1...2,3 rhythm of normal bomb jumping, I'm ashamed to say. I have thought about looking at dragondarch's and breaking it into sections, practicing each one over and over. Because of the BJ-ing tricks involved, I bet that his route would take me 2.5 hours to complete.
I'm currently doing it this way:
morph ball long beam missiles charge beam bombs unknown item#1 power grip ice beam high jump unknown item#2 speed booster super missiles (the ones that you have to speedball into the left side of the blue brinstar shaft) varia screw attack wave beam unknown item#3 gravity power bombs item cleanup in the following order: crateria, norfair, ridley, norfair, kraid, thru brinstar to crateria, tourian, crateria, and then that last fucking PB tank way up high in chozodia.
I don't want my route to be 'ingrained'. I think I'm just having so much more fun going that route vs. the frustration of trying a new one. Maybe over time I'll get bored enough with it enough that I become more receptive to changing it.
1:17:26 100% SS. 4 seconds shy of my record, but I can think of about 5 serious mistakes I made including a not-so-great mecha ridley fight. This is very good news to me, because a few weeks ago I had thought that my skills were gone completely, but now it looks like they are better than they were before. This makes me happy.
I really wish that I didn't keep losing my copy of MZM (or at the very least get a good GBASP, I've gone through 6 or so). I'd so have sub transcience any% and 54:xx 100% by now. >_>;;
I tend to play all games on easy, get used to the game,
Most games just make the enemies weaker n easy, that I can understand. This game removes enemies from the game on easy because it doesn't believe you can handle multiple Zoomers on screen at once.