Beginners Route

This video is a demonstration of a route that I think would be excellent for anyone who has played Super Metroid casually, and wants to do their first ever speedrun of Super Metroid. There is already an excellent beginners' tutorial by Mishrak, but that route has several techniques that you want to learn early on when speedrunning, but still might require some practice to get them reliably.

• This route assumes you can walljump, but have trouble chaining multiple walljumps together
• This route avoids mockballs entirely
• This route assumes you can shinespark vertically, but don't know how to do horizontal shinesparks
• This route assumes you don't know how to short charge the speed booster
• This run does one diagonal shinespark, but you could use the Grapple Beam to traverse Mt. Everest instead
• This route doesn't do the Zebetite Skip, so you need to pick up enough Missiles to destroy the Zebetites
• This run avoids Arm Pumping entirely. It's a "free" timesave, but I didn't want to introduce new runners to it in a video with no commentary, because then I can't explain why you want to avoid it on downward slopes.

I was inspired to create this video because of the recently-added "Nintendo Power%" category, which follows the route laid out in an issue of the magazine. The problem is that the route is very inconsistent in the skill level that it expects out of the player -- it makes you get Grapple Beam before you can pick up Wave Beam, even though that's a fairly simple walljump, but it expects you to get the Norfair Reserve Tank before Grapple Beam, which means you need to get there through either a very precise walljump, or by using a Damage Boost. This run collects largely the same set of items, but doesn't require even a moderate level of skill to do so. Compared with Nintendo Power%, this run collects one less missile pack (the Grapple missiles), skips Spring Ball, skips X-Ray, and collects one additional Energy Tank (the Fireflea E-Tank in Lower Norfair).

I uploaded my splits file here. I use an autosplitter script that I wrote, which is included in LiveSplit. For the video, every split setting is enabled, except for "Spore Spawn RTA Finish" and "100 Missile RTA Finish".

Some mistakes that I made in the video:

• I left the room after grabbing the Alpha Power Bombs without grabbing the missiles behind the statue, so then I had to go back to get them
• I grabbed the Golden Torizo Supers before fighting Golden Torizo, which is a perfectly valid order to do it, but it's not what's reflected in my splits
• At the start of Mother Brain's Room the autosplitter splits twice. This is a bug that pops up occasionally, and I haven't had a chance to debug and fix it yet. Hitting the "Undo Split" button once put the timer back where it should be.