Speedrunning shmups???

[ARF]

Speedrunning has become incredulously popular these last few years while STG's are steadily reclining, and basically, we have all been fucking stupid by not jumping on this bandwagon earlier!

Now, you might be thinking that speedrunning something which is basically and autoscroller isn't exactly fun or exciting to watch, BUT!!! You can totally get creative with shotgunning speedkill strats and advanced bomb timings to make short work of otherwise super tedious bosses where you'd regularly abuse safespots or milk for score! Games where the shottypes require some amount of technique are particularly awesome to speedrun, think about the 2hu photo games!

I assembled some of the top 2hu speedruns for your viewing pleasure!

LET's Double Spoiler RTA in 31:32 Aya 100% and Hatate 100% along with similar runs of StB on his youtube channel. These are pretty much as good as it gets for 2hu speedrunning, I think.
SA lunatic in 17:59.12
MoF lunatic in 14:34 with 1.82b score
EoSD NMNB extra speedrun in ~7:29
ISC 100% in 37:53 Something not done in this run: you can do a glitch which allows for early hammer (after the 1-1 tutorial scene) but idk if that's allowed or even faster if some other items would require leveling anyways...

[Shepardus]

Shoot the Bullet and Double Spoiler stand out to me as prime candidates for speedrunning due to their scene-based structure (maybe ISC with sick mallet strats?). Mecha Ritz might also work for speedrunning, since pushing up rank supposedly causes the game to scroll faster (which is really interesting, and I haven't heard of any other game that does that) and gives you more shot power (thus allowing you to kill midbosses and bosses quicker).

[Frenetic]

FYI, http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=56621

[copy-paster]

All of your thoughts is on the one game, In The Hunt.

[gs68]

Space Invaders Extreme 2 has a time attack mode.

[ELabit]

Armed Police Unit Gallop

[gs68]

Shippu Mahou Daisakusen. Fitting. considering that the 2nd loop condition is to finish the first loop in 1st place.

[EmperorIng]

Considering that shootemups are mostly auto-scrolling, the only way you can really "speedrun" games is if you can control the speed of scrolling (e.g., you can, but only haphazardly, in Kingdom Grandprix).

The only shooters that really benefit from this approach are manual scrolling games like Twinkle Tale, Granada, Kiki KaiKai, Mamoru-kun.

I don't think the genre on the whole is conducive to "speed runs", but high-skill play, honestly.

[pegboy]

I don't like the idea of "speed runs" of shmups unless it was something built into the game already, i.e. a special mode or part of the scoring system.

Ex: Gradius IV, which has a boss rush time attack on the PS2 version, Recca '92 has a time attack mode too. I'm sure there are others.

[Chaos Phoenixma]

scoring in Judgement Silversword also has some speedrunning elements. The area bonuses are based on how quickly you can clear the areas.

[Jeneki]

Hangeki, the timer is your score.

[1up]

An interesting speedrun shmup could be a boss rush mode where you take down bosses crazy fast

[Obiwanshinobi]

Speedrunning Warning Forever?

[Shepardus]

Well, Warning Forever doesn't have an ending, so... There are things like Project Repliser, though (which I've never played).

[Perikles]

And no one mentioned Atomic Robo-Kid yet, I wonder why that is.

[Observer]

There is also Cloudphobia which is all about speed running since you can manually accelerate the stage scrolling which makes everything appear faster too. My avatar is the mech from that game.

[ProjectAKo]

Dude just score attack them. It's basically the same thing except you're trying to make an arbitrary number really high instead of really low. You have tons of really solid gamest scores to compete with, and no good speedrun times to compete with.

[EmperorIng]

An interesting speedrun shmup could be a boss rush mode where you take down bosses crazy fast

Winter Carnival '16: Thunder Force V - Even Less Fun Edition

[trap15]

Dude just score attack them. It's basically the same thing except you're trying to make an arbitrary number really high instead of really low. You have tons of really solid gamest scores to compete with, and no good speedrun times to compete with.

Fuckin this. Just play the goddamn games people

[BIL]

There is also Cloudphobia which is all about speed running since you can manually accelerate the stage scrolling which makes everything appear faster too. My avatar is the mech from that game.

Mo peeps should play Cloudphobia period. Good to see you've kept the flag flying!

Also it would bring the genre mad hipster cred with its stages all being named after Joy Division songs

[gs68]

Sadly, Westerners care more about people beating games in short order than people making numbers go up; to them, scoring is a relic of the old days™ of arcade gaming.

[Nameschonvergeben]

Well in this community it's mroe about people being scrubs than not caring about score

[Shepardus]

Dude just score attack them. It's basically the same thing except you're trying to make an arbitrary number really high instead of really low. You have tons of really solid gamest scores to compete with, and no good speedrun times to compete with.

Fuckin this. Just play the goddamn games people

You could say this about most games people speed run - just play the games as they were intended to be played! I agree that most shmups don't work well for speedrunning for obvious reasons, but there are a couple that do work well (as I listed before), probably better than many games that end up in GDQ.

[Kiken]

Sanvein works well for speedrunning as the game's structure is more like a timed arena shooter... playing quickly is playing for score.

[gs68]

Eschatos's Time Attack mode is kinda time attack, but with the remaining time limit (which increases with extends and decreases (faster) with deaths) being deducted from total time it still feels like a score attack.