You have the skill to be a top runner in one of the biggest speedgames out there, looking forward to the times you put up.

I did three completed runs and crudely timed myself with my phone. My best run out of the three I got 52:XX minutes. The run I have posted for my score was better than the 52 minute by atleast a minute or two.

Still plenty of room to improve
 

My all time gaming goal is to beat Hotarubi's any% time. Thinking about it now, I was probably damn close to beating it with that run. Coincidentally, Hotarubi has the 100th best any% time on speedrun.com so that still means I'm not top 100 in the world. His time is from almost 10 years ago and with all the new tech that's been found since then I should be able to pass him.

If some of you don't know what it means when I name the tricks I'm doing here are videos highlighting some of my favorites

Kraid Quick Kill




Ocean Fly




Two Round Phantoon with X-Factors




One Round Botwoon




Full-Halfie (Get's it on his second attempt)




Draygon 2-Round Kill with Blue Suit and Reverse Full Halfie




Zebitite Skip




Sorry if some of these videos aren't the best of quality but it was what I could find on Youtube in a short time. I didn't want any video to be too long. Just a snapshot of what the trick is.
 

The leaderboard has been updated.

Not sure I understand what the Botwoon one is.

So, Draygon can take massive damage from Spineshark?

And for the Zebetite, you freeze one of the rings before it launches, hurt yourself near the zebetite, and you can hop through it?

Man I probably won't even beat Metroid before the month is out. Way too much searching around for stuff. I just don't have the time these days to bomb every inch of every screen hoping to find the secret room that holds the item I require to move forward. I'll play some more Axelay though if I can find the time.

The Botwoon video really isn't a trick but more of a speed strat. Botwoon has 3000 HP and can be killed in one round quickly with either 10 super missles (300 damage each) or with an x-factor and 6 super missles. Each X-factor particle does the same as a super missle.

Draygon's invincibility frames are very small so a shine spark can hit it multiple times. It only works if you go through it's head though. The nice part about this is if you kill Draygon with a shine spark there is a chance that the game will give you something known as a blue suit. Once Draygon dies it'll force Samus into a standing position. If this is done while shine sparking it will lock samus into a shine spark state. This shinespark can be used later if the run button isn't pressed until needed. (Primarily used to return back across the colossuem.) Colosseum is the name of the room with all the grapple blocks before Draygon.

Freezing the rinka, orange cheerio, as soon as it spawns and then jumping on top of it will put Samus a pixel inside the zebetite's hit box. Since you're already in the hitbox you can freely move through it. You need to have invincibility frames already or the zebetite will spit you back out. That's why in the video, Samus gets hit by the upper rinka before jumping onto the frozen rinka then jumping through the zebetite. If you don't kill the first zebetite none of the other ones will spawn and you can run straight to mother brain. There are other ways of getting through the zebetite but the video I posted is the easiest and most common.
 

That's what the x-ray vision is for  

There are very few, if any, secrets you have to "hunt" for in Super Metroid (versus Metroid on the NES).

 

Reading about this blows my mind.

I had no idea these charge combos even existed.


Come to think of it, in all my years of playing this game, I've never bothered to change what weapons I have equipped -- I just let them stack in the order I get them  

I'll give those 2 a shot. My runs have always been just straight forward runs as fast as I can.

I didn't know about any of the beam combo's either until I started speed running. The one that really blew my mind was the "Crystal Flash". First time I seen a runner do that I had to stop and rewind the video back multiple times. I had no clue that existed. All of the secrets and hidden things the developers put into this game makes me love it more and more. Now that I speed run the game it really has shown me how truly amazing this game is. The amount of variation and different techniques / routes taken to speed run this game can be overwhelming when you are first starting.

Just in the last year a new technique called Moonfall was discovered that doesn't cap your falling speed. With this new tech runners have found another new technique that if you perform enough Moonfalls you can accumulate sufficient downward momentum to clip through one block spaces. This theoretically will save time in 100% categories and Reverse Boss order categories. I only know of two runners that have really been using this but it already has taken the Reverse Boss Order world record down by a couple minutes. Shiny Zeni just got the new record in the last week. If you want to watch a crazy run utilizing some insane gameplay and glitches check out Shiny Zeni's world record video.

I had completely forgotten about the Crystal Flash, but I vaguely feel like this was covered in a Nintendo Power Counselor's Corner at some point.
 

That's how my run's were too until I really started to learn how the game works. In the route I use I don't grab the ice beam before heading to the wrecked ship and I don't grab spazer at all. This makes the red tower a lot harder to manage. Without the ice beam you can't jump on the wavers to climb up and need to wall jump all the way up.

When I first started running I'd grab the ice beam and spazer before the wrecked ship. Then when fighting phantoon, I'd deselect ice beam but keep spazer equipped and forget about trying to do x-factors. With charge, spazer, and wave, a fully powered shot will not enrage him. Also try to avoid using super missles. A super missle will do 600 damage against phantoon but will also put him in his enraged state. That's when he sits at the top of the screen and spits the flames down.

To do an x-factor, you need to have charge and wave equipped but no other beams. Then select power bombs and charge your beam fully. The only bad part of doing an x factor is that you will be unable to fire your gun until all the particles have either hit something or have despawned.

To charge a shine spark in the fight against Draygon you will need to perform a short charge which is anoter strategy that takes some time to figure out how to do. http://deanyd.net/sm/index.php?title=Short_charge There's the link to a page that will explain it much better than I ever could.
 

I've beaten Crocomire. Hold onto your butts!

Crocomire is my favorite. Congratz. You'll be getting a nice progression item shortly

Crocomire IS the big fat green guy, right?

Oh shit, he isn't. Is he?

No, that's Kraid.

I killed Kraid! Revel in my greatness.

Still get something cool for that! Woot Woot!

Kraid is my favorite. I prefer the NES version, though.

If you get stuck I could always point you in the right direction without directly telling you where to go

 

IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS DON'T READ AHEAD. LOOKING AT YOU GLOVES!

If you want to save the most amount of times with these runs. Here are the two biggest time saving skips and used.

The first one is to skip spore spawn and his super missle pack by grabbing the earliest located super missle. The game intends that the first super missle pack you grap is located behind spore spawn but you can skip this completely by doing a mockball across the crumble bridge in green brinstar. This is the first super missle pack that every category of speed runs will grab.

This video explains it in great detail




The second major skip is to forget about crocomire and the grapple beam. The grapple beam makes the game much easier but is a big detour out of the way. The main areas that grapple is needed is to cross the moat and ocean before the wrecked ship, access wave beam, get to the top of the mountain in maridia and to cross the colosseum before draygon.

The moat and ocean before wrecked ship can be crossed by using a horizontal shine spark. Its demonstated in the ocean fly video I posted earlier. That video shine sparked across the moat and ocean with the same shine spark but it is easier to do two seperate shine sparks through each area.

Wave beam is fairly easy to access by wall jumping.

Mt Everest, this room in maridia, can be traveresed by diagonally shine sparking from between the second and third hill up to the top right doorway



You can get through the room before draygon by wall jumping or doing the Halfie / Full-Halfie. Doing either of the halfie variations requires some precise inputs and some serious practice.

 

So is there a clear list of how much time each pro technique is "worth"?