Shmups VS Speedrunning, Natural Vs. Fan-Made Meta | Ft. @neoxaquas

Electric Underground Podcast

Shmups VS Speedrunning, Natural Vs. Fan-Made Meta | Ft. @neoxaquas . Today's topic has been a subject that has fascinated me for a long time, the difference between shmup scoreplay meta and speedrunning time meta. What's interesting is that for a long time, I've heard speedrunners talk about scoreplay in the tone of an outdated style of competitive design. Like if you watch the history of speedrunning video by Karl Jobst, he describes score play as essentially the ooze from which the glory of speedrunning was born. This makes some sense if you only look at speedrunning from their community perspective. However, over the years I have become more skeptical of community / fan made meta (see my discussion of the subject with the Crimson Blur about Melee) and in today's video I am joined by Aquas who is the perfect guest on the topic as he has world records in both speedrunning and shmup score play (a rare accomplishment!). We cover a variety of fun topics, including his world record progression in Pink Sweets, and the heart of the conversation for me is what are the strengths and weaknesses of fan-made meta, like speedrunning, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of natural built in meta like scoreplay. In the end, I find that I greatly prefer the natural meta of scoreplay (and fighting game tournament play) because it is less arbitrary and prone to manipulation from fellow players and outside forces (besides the developer). However, this doesn't mean that I don't think speedrunning in itself isn't a cool idea, and I even offer what I think is the best solution for the issue in the form of what M2 Shottriggers have been doing with their shmup ports. Imagine if Nintendo actually put some care into their wave of ports and re-releases, and included speedrunning modes and leader boards in their ports. Also I love that Aquas brought up how heavily nostalgia plays into a speedrun game's popularity, because there are tons of speedruns that I think could be fascinating (Dead to Rights Super Cop), but sadly the non-nostalgic games tend to be extremely under-explored. That being said, there are also issues that can rise up from relying solely on the natural meta of a game, like Battle Garegga and its infinite milk, so again I think this is where having robust ports with patches really smooths out a lot of issues, other wise competitive score play is going to rely very heavily on replay analysis and community leader boards and we've seen enough "I GOT A CHEATED RUN PAST THE MODS!" vids for a lifetime.