SMB3 was an absolute banger and revolutionised the platforming genre while making the hardware run things it had no business doing, so much so that even id Software took inspiration from it.
World just improved the formula in every single way though. Far from ragging on SMB3, World just took an amazing game and polished it up beyond what was expected.
Perhaps it’s because I grew up with adventure puzzle games and point’n’click games, but GameFAQs was always the nuclear option for me.
I much preferred the Universal Hint System - an approach more suited to nudging you towards figuring out the answer for yourself.
There’s no denying that it was (and is) a fantastic resource though. Hell, I’ve even written a guide myself. One of the last bastions of the 90s and 2000s WWW experience.
I do quite like the self-awareness of Bubsy 3D being absolute donkey tonk. The redrawn sprites in 3D looks cool, let’s see if they learn the lessons from thirty-ish years ago.
Worth playing with the PS1 Descent soundtrack too for a different experience (or Descent Maximum as it was across the pond), it got me in to Type O-Negative too.
There’s been a pivot away from “classic” speedruns games over the last few years - I get that Doom or Sonic 2 or Goldeneye or other 90s games aren’t guaranteed a place every year, but it seems like the games that kicked off the speedrun scene are often overlooked these days.
That said, there is Quake, and there is SMB3 where I dont know who the runner is but that couch is a banger.
I was looking forward to seeing Still Wakes The Deep runs, but I find them really… unexciting, I think is the sentiment. Like the 2016 Doom onwards, the runs are technically outstanding, but there’s a lot of walking on invisible geometry with collision detection, or random tricks like railboosting in Doom that seems to break a game. I get that that is an entirely subjective opinion though, maybe I’m more suited to No Major Glitches runs!
Outlook 2000 was magic, even if it had more security warnings than a trip to Yemen. The current iteration of Outlook that they’re pushing with Office 365 is an absolute disaster, as if they’ve dragged it down to Teams’ level and let it rot away.