(former WR) The Impossible Quiz Book Chapter 2 any% in 3:43
You heard that right, I improved the world record for this game by 45 seconds. How? Simply by spending waaay too much time on it. I’ve been playing this game for years, and started speedrunning it back in january, while I’m pretty sure previous wr holder benbenq only spent like a day or two trying to beat green fan.
After a lot of practice and some long breaks I was finally ready to start recording attempts and gradually lowered my time, absolutely smashing my sub 4 goal. I had a few other runs I wasnt too happy with, but this one really blew my expectations, proving that at least a mid 3:3x is possible.
Of course this massive improvement didn’t just come from practice, I also found a lot of major timesaves:
q60: Being one of the slowest and most boring questions, I really wanted to find a way to speed it up. The trajectory and angle of the ball is always the same, so hitting the ball with the side of the bat didn’t cause it to go in a weird direction. Instead, it allowed me to hit the ball later, offsetting its trajectory just slightly. These small changes were enough to cut the required amount of hits from four to two, thus cutting the time in half. Timing the bat movement is pretty tight, so I made a setup that starts at the very top and moves down once the ball reaches a certain point.
q70: This was the biggest obstacle to running this game. I not only had to make a good route, it also needed to work every time, and the ghost patterns are rng. After a lot of trial and error I was able to make a decent route, which is insanely fast with good rng, and can be recovered easily with suboptimal rng, at the cost of some timeloss.
At the end I take advantage of the fact that pressing tab during the minigames doesn’t cause a game over, to advance past the update screens faster (mashing tab and space while holding s)
q80: Pretty much just optimized platforming. I also wanted to find an alternative to the platform jumps at the bottom left. My first idea was to bounce off of the spatulon to jump over the spikes, but this turned out to be very inconsistent, since the other spatulon would often kill me once I landed. While trying this I sometimes landed on the high platform, without knowing how it was possible. I tried different combinations of holding and letting go of jump, but eventually I realized it had to do with hitboxes. The hitbox of a spatulon has a shape similar to its sprite, which means bouncing off of the helmet gives you a bit of extra height, enough to make it onto the high platform.
q86: This question has been done without the fusestopper before, and the trick is to focus on making proper circles. With practice I was able to get more consistent, and eventually I stopped getting the fusestopper in q77. It’s still very easy to mess this up, especially if I’m nervous, but luckily you still have a little bit of time after the bomb explodes to finish the question before the game over happens.
potential improvements:
My overall execution of the regular questions definitely wasn’t perfect, I’m nowhere near being a top runner for any of the other games. Specifically question 69 can be done faster by better runners, I can only reach 10 clicks per second at best. Overall though I think I did pretty well, especially near the end, since I actually took the time to practice that part.
In this run I got the weirdest pattern on question 72, which threw me off a bit. Luckily it was one of the faster patterns, I could’ve easily lost more time to worse rng. The fastest pattern has all four ducks on the screen immediately, which would’ve saved 1-2 seconds.
There’s more timesave in question 80, you can bounce off the final spatulon before it moves to the right, saving about two seconds. This requires very good movement and is very risky, and I’ve lost too many runs to it. I’ve only ever executed it once.
In this run I didn’t get the best rng on question 94, but it was still decent. I only lost 7 seconds instead of losing the entire run. 94 is the most brutal question, it can take over a minute before the correct popup shows up, completely destroying a run. I’ve gotten this question first try on runs before, but with dumb timelosses elsewhere. I’d rather lose time to rng than to messing up myself.
How am I playing this game when flash is dead? I downloaded the swf file and played it on the standalone flash player. The default size for this game is quite small, that’s why my cursor is so big. I’ve thought about resizing the game to be bigger, but I’d have to make it the same size every time which is just not doable.
Am I going to run other games from this series? Probably not. All the other games involve a lot more skill with the mouse, so if I play them for too long my hand starts to hurt really badly. So even though I’m half decent at chapters 1 and 3 (I can do 138 without the fusestopper and all that) I won’t be going for the full story record.
