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Metroid Prime 2: Echoes was released in mid-November 2004. Samus lands on the planet Aether to investigate missing Federation troops and finds a world with a split-personality. In the dark version of the world, she takes damage just from the air and faces an evil black goo called the Ing that can possess all sorts of creatures.

 

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Single-segment 1:27 by Charles Griffin.

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Author's comments:

Thanks to:
- The entire SDA staff (mikwuyma/nate/Breakdown/Flip/dex), without whom you wouldn't be watching this run.
- Paraxade, who was the first person to complete a 14% run; this led me to try out 14% myself, and I pretty much haven't stopped playing the game since.
- All previous runners for their runs, for initially getting me interested in Echoes speedrunning. This run certainly wouldn't be the same without them.
- Everyone at M2K2 and my stream chat for their support and encouragement. But no, you can't roll jump there.

After completing 14%, I recorded an example 14% playthrough, in order to get it on video. Because this was just an example run, there were a lot of areas that could've been executed far faster, and I became interested in doing an all-out low% speedrun. I didn't feel that I was skilled enough at the time, so I decided to do 100% and any% single-segment runs for practice. I ended up getting far better times than I expected to get, and pretty soon I started focusing solely on any%... Basically, that ended up spiraling into this. It's weird how quickly this came about; six months ago, I never would have imagined myself speedrunning a Metroid game.

However, most of the run is spent rolling around as a ball, so I guess I should have expected it at some point. :P

Unfortunately for this run (but very very fortunate for Echoes running in general), about a month and a half after this run was completed, doninss found a way around losing your items at the beginning of the game. This means you get to start with Missiles, Bombs, Space Jump, Boost, and Spider. This is absolutely massive; it'll save a ton of time in future any% runs, and it cuts the lowest percent from 14% to 7%. Oh, well, I hope you still enjoy this run in the meantime; just expect a completely broken run to come along later in the future.

Low % 1:55 by Alastair Campbell, done in 21 segments.

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Author's comments:

This was my first true speed run, played and recorded in summer 2006. It is now eligible for submission to SDA following a rule change that legalises runs utilising out-of-bounds glitches, assigning them their own category. Of course, between the completion of the run in 2006 and its submission in 2009, I spent fourteen months administering the very site on which my runs were not legitimate. Bizarrely, in my role as SDA updater, I frequently found myself defending Radix's "in-bounds runs only" policy, and it was not until the site's current administrators softened SDA's stance towards this sort of beyond-the-walls chicanery that my 17% became compatible with the site — or rather, the site became such with my 17%.

I have always thought "Secret World" to be a wholly inappropriate name for what is in reality a hole in the game's scenic collision detection, but these unintentional portals that Retro had left lying around had been allowing players to view rooms from the outside in the Metroid Prime games for some time. Methods to use them to enhance sequence breaking and reduce completion times on the original Metroid Prime had been discussed and developed to some degree, mainly by Andrew Mills and Jonathan Wilson at the now-defunct samus.co.uk. The sequence breakers had left little still to be done, though, and so MP1's pickings were slim. For Prime 2, the developers fixed some bugs and introduced others, which inevitably meant that alternative approaches would need to be found to make serious inroads into the game's completion percentage or time; the secret world dabblers found themselves well poised to take advantage of this opportunity, having a well-established set of techniques to hand already. So, to long-entrenched vocabulary such as "ghetto jump" in the sequence breaking vernacular was added strange new terms like "wallcrawl", "skywalk", "door-warp", "room dump", "aether jump", and so forth.

This run brought together a lot of low percent theories which had existed to that point only as short, inexpertly deinterlaced video clips in diverse locations. I wanted to assemble from them a coherent presentation performed at breakneck speed, with the sort of respect for fractions of seconds that characterised the original Metroid Prime sequence breakers who had inspired me so much, and to shatter the myth that secret world techniques were too slow to be used in speed runs. Inevitably, my playthrough became one of the primary exhibits brought out by both factions in the resulting forum-borne wars over the eligibility of out-of-bounds techniques.

This run was also somewhat experimental in at least one other regard: It was one of the first to feature commentary, as an optional second audio track. Although sternn's Devil May Cry contributions carried audio commentary some time before this run arrived, my videos were important in continuing to popularise speed run monologues, and continuing to prove their workability both compositionally and technologically.

SDA did not officially allow multitrack audio productions in 2006, but this was no problem for me since my run was already ineligible for submission. This freed me from the compatibility problems that plagued the AVI and MP4 containers preferred by SDA at the time, and allowed me to release the run as a set of Matroska DivX files, which you should still be able to find at archive.org. For this re-release, I have of course made the now standard two-audio-track H.264 MPEG-4 — the videos are probably most easily played using VLC. So, if you missed it the first time, you too can now listen to what some have assured me is the quintessential speed run commentary (although to me it still sounds more like some English guy droning insufferably on about the unpredictability of the camera), and get higher quality H.264 visuals while you are at it. (This speed run was digitally remastered ... on my laptop.)

The run was played on a GameCube, and the PAL version of the game was used. Since my DVD recorder was incapable of capturing a PAL-60 signal, I played the game on an NTSC console, and booted it using a Datel Freeloader disc. This does not affect gameplay in any way.

I was already most of the way through this run before I learned of a glitch that I later came to use extensively in my 1:38 any%. Nobody had named it, so I called it the "rollshot". By hitting X and A at at the same instant, the player can unmorph and shoot simultaneously, without having to wait for the unmorph animation to complete. This is useful towards the start of the game for opening doors and activating portals quickly, although its usefulness decreases once the player collects the Boost Ball. This bug could have been used to optimise further the earlier stages of the run, but nobody had told me about it, so unfortunately it does not appear in this contribution.

I do not intend to write detailed segment-by-segment textual comments this time, since the audio commentary provides most of the relevant data. Of course, since the run was completed in 2006, some of this information is now out of date. Therefore, I will provide notes on each of the segments, in which I will correct any anachronisms in the commentary, and clear up a few other issues.

And so, to the segments. Times labelled with [c] denote errors in the commentary. Times without this annotation refer to events in the run.

Single-segment hard mode 2:24 by Kim Siafa.

Author's comments:

This a hard mode any% run completed in one go, without loading and without dying. The route I used in this run isn't the same as the one I used in the normal mode SS any% run. I defeat Amorbis and I grab dark suit in this run. It is possible to complete a hard SS any% run without the dark suit but you need too many energy tanks to survive against the bosses, especially the boost guardian and Quadraxis. 4 energy tanks are on your way before the boost guardian battle, you can grab these e-tanks without losing too much time. The problem is that 4 isn't enough to defeat the boost guardian in hard mode without dark suit. The "real" maximum you can get before fighting the boost guardian is 8 but you would have to grab e-tanks which are very far away from your way : one in temple grounds near windchamber, one in underwater Torvus near catacombs, one in Agon wastes near the temple and the last one in Chykka's room. Getting these 4 e-tanks is very long and they make you do backtracks. You can grab 6 or 7 e-tanks before fighting Quadraxis without really losing time, it's obviously not enough to defeat Quadraxis in hard mode w/o dark suit or at least in a SS run. It's possible to get 10 before fighting him but it would still be difficult to beat time. Between doing countless and endless backtracks to get additionnal energy tanks and grab the dark suit I did my choice : grab the dark suit.

The biggest problem with a SS any% hard mode is the last boss, the emperor ing. DS3/DS4 is a piece of cake in hard mode. The emperor ing was killing me about 85% of the time and it was very frusterating because it is at the end of the run, after playing during 3 hours. He killed about 5 SS runs. I took the first run I killed him succesfully in but it is full of mistakes. The biggest mess up was in transit station where I have to get the early power bomb expansion, I think that I lost 1min 40. There are often other mistakes in the run costing between 5 and 15 seconds. I had luck in this run with the power-ups and the invisible pirates, they didn't appear too often. Though, I didn't have luck with seekers door. I think that I was also lucky to beat the emperor ing and to complete a hard any% in one-go without dying.

Single-segment 100% 1:56 by Charles Griffin

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Author's comments:

Thanks to:

- bartendorsparky for his previous 100% run.
- The SDA staff, for maintaining this awesome site.
- nate for encoding the run.
- Everyone who watched my stream and gave encouragement; sorry I finished this run during the morning. <_<
- Paraxade, since it's mainly his fault I'm now playing the game constantly.

I was planning on writing detailed comments for this run, but experience has shown that I completely fail at doing so. >_> There's a few important things I want to mention, though:

- There's a glitch in GFMC Compound that lets you collect the Missile Launcher twice. You can avoid triggering a cutscene by the ship, collect the Missile Launcher, and then trigger the cutscene afterward; the cutscene reloads the room and replaces the Launcher allowing you to collect it a second time. Both times add to the percent, so the run finishes with 101%. Technically this means you can skip a single item and still finish with "100%", however, this is against the rules; a 100% run requires collecting every upgrade, not glitching some number to say 100. I do this glitch in the run simply for the extra 5 missiles, which are helpful early on.

- This run cannot use the Item Loss Skip. There's a missile expansion in Hive Chamber B (where the item loss occurs) that just plain doesn't exist until after you trigger the item loss (so no collecting it from out of bounds or anything). Technically, with the Missile Launcher glitch mentioned above you could get "100%", but like I also mentioned it's against the rules.

- Grapple Pirates are the worst things ever.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the run. For those that want to see a run using the Item Loss Skip, I'm currently working on an Any% Segmented run; you can check out my current progress on my YouTube channel.

Hard-mode 22% 3:37 by 'kip', done in 30 segments.

Author's comments:

Yes, this is another "who cares" run, a lot like my other hard 22% run in the original Metroid Prime. I put minimal effort into optimizing it and used many more saves than I normally would (some that were very out of the way). I didn't do this out of laziness. I just feel that since the game has just been released, and things are being found every day, I don't think it would be a good idea to put everything I have into a run only for it to become outdated before I'm halfway through it. That's what happened to this run; over maybe 10 minutes worth of time savers were discovered by the time I was done. I'm not annoyed by that, because I knew it would happen, and I was half expecting an item to be skipped before I was done, which would have meant restarting.

As far as I know, 22% is the lowest percentage in the game right now. It's the default percentage, like the original MP's 29% (collecting no expansions but getting all the main items). If a lower percent were possible, this run would have reflected whatever that was instead of being 22%. Here's a list of what counts for the 22%, going by the game's item order, as some things can already be gotten out of order:

missile launcher
violet translator
morph ball bomb
amber translator
space jump boots
dark beam
light beam
dark suit
super missile
emerald translator
boost ball
seeker launcher
gravity boost
grapple beam
dark visor
cobalt translator
spider ball
power bomb
echo visor
screw attack
annihilator beam
light suit

There's also the energy transfer module and 18 temple keys, but those don't add to the percentage for some reason. It's possible to skip the dark suit, but that requires several energy tanks, as there is currently no way to survive against Boost Guardian and Quadraxis with no tanks and an unavoidable life drain of 6 energy per second (if reaching Torvus is even possible in the first place). It's not about just never getting hit, because Dark Aether's life drain will gladly kill you; it doesn't stop at 1 energy or anything like that. So, skipping the dark suit means ending up with a higher percentage, much like skipping the varia suit in the original MP.

If the percent ever drops, I'll probably try to record another run on hard unless someone else wants to instead (but even in that case, I might anyway just for proof). I felt recording this would be better than not just because it doesn't look like 1:04 or something. That said, I'll definitely try harder if/when I do another run.

I died once against Dark Samus at the end, because I forgot about this one attack she has and didn't know how to dodge it yet. The game lets you start back at the escape sequence if you choose to continue from your last save, and it doesn't even count against the final time... so I guess expect to see people killing themselves here until they get a good enough fight.

If anyone's only interested in a certain part, here are most of the bosses: Amorbis (part 5), Boost Guardian (part 8), Chykka (part 13), Dark Samus 2 (part 20), Quadraxis (part 23).

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