Metroid 2: Return of Samus, Any%

Check out my interview I did with Nicholas van der Waard for the, "Mazes and Labyrinths" series on his blog https://www.nicksmovieinsights.com/20...

First ever 51. In a similar situation to the 100% run I feel as though there's a bit more left in the tank to get this down to a 51:4x. However it was turning into a grind where the game started inventing new ways to troll me out of achieving this. Either way I'm happy and relieved I finally got this tough minute milestone.

This run uses a new route I developed that was inspired by the any% TAS in 45 mins by Cardboard. Where the old route would end up with 3 energy tanks/120 missiles, this route goes 2 energy tanks/100 missiles by skipping two large item rooms in the early stages of the run. There's an initial 61 second save from skipping these two rooms but what ensues is a much tougher route due to the constantly lower max health, along with a dependency on farming for missile drops and health to enable you to proceed without losing bags of time. In the end after all the room adjustments and farming the route only saves anywhere between 10 to 25 seconds, depending on how lucky you are. This is a game that normally takes pride in having such little RNG and accessibility, yet this route kind of gives that accolade the middle finger, bringing it a little closer in spirit to more luck based speedruns of other games in the series. I put a ton of work into developing this route and number crunching every detail. Finding out that it did indeed save time and to finally run it was very satisfying.

The Colour scheme here was achieved after hours of experimentation with a complex arrangement of OBS filters, so I'm still playing the game on my TV with the usual dominant blue scheme for M2 that the Gameboy Player (GBI) provides. Below is my filter arrangement if you want to recreate it or something similar. Note: The order in which you put the filters also matters so if these were to be jumbled there will be some undesirable effects. I got my LUT filter from this site https://www.rocketstock.com/free-afte... ,and zeke39 is the final LUT in the downloaded list.

Streamlabs OBS filter arrangement:
Visual presets - Heat map.
Chroma key - blue, similarity 1, smoothness 450, key color spill reduction 1.
Color correction - gamma 0.5, contrast 1, saturation -0.25, hue shift 35.
Color key - black, Similarity + smoothness 1