Happy May! It's time for another recap! Here is all of the major events of the HPSR community in April 2023.
First let’s take a brief look at community activities on April 1st. We had a number of World Records from HP2 PC Glitchless by Thomy and HP3 PC Insane% by Miney. There was also the creation of a whole new category by Nixxo in Upside Down and er … oh just thinking about that makes me wanna puke!
Anyways, speaking of Nixxo. He’s been quite busy this month collecting a number of World Records. The three most notable ones being Hogwarts Legacy Any% for PC - Story Mode, QWC GBA 100% (the best category) and most importantly and special of all: HP3 PC Insane% in Japanese, taking the record from the evil Rene. The run was very eventful and in the end finished with the new category to the board All Wizard Cards which was … Interesting to say the least, having to play a game of hide and seek with missing cards. But if we close our eyes and pretend it isn’t there, it never happened right? RIGHT???
On the subject of World Records being broken, there was the battle of the glitchless crown this month between runners Cake and Flo. Cake claimed the HP1 Glitchless World Record on April 4th with a 1:21:23 bringing the wr down 5 seconds, in the same run Cake also beat the Glitchless Duofecta world record by an astounding 3 minutes. Then a week and a half later Cake proceeded to bring down the HP1 Glitchless time even further to a 1:21:11. However Flo was not having this, so he took to the grind and on April 27th achieved a 1:21:08, beating Cake’s record by just 3 seconds but it was enough to return him to holding all 4 categories, giving him back the crown of World Records in HP1.
While Flo may be reclaiming records in some places, he’s losing them in others.In HP2 GBC Any% SMP took back the record Flo had taken in January beating Flo’s run by just shy of 1 minute.On the topic of claiming WRs though, a new runner to the community Izlia took the HP2 Xbox/GCN Any% emulator WR this month after it had been held by WonderBread for 3 years and 1 month exactly. The record was achieved on the 12th April and broke the record by exactly 50 seconds ending WonderBread’s astounding 1146 day WR reign.
While there have been a lot of world records this month, there have also been a lot of events. Firstly Potterthon 9 dates have been officially announced. The event will be held from September 22nd - 25th and submissions will open on Harry’s Birthday on July 31st. However before that there will be an entirely different event of “Pottergone”. Pottergone will be an event to give HP speedrunners a chance to showcase the non HP games that they run. The event will take place on July 29th - 30th and submissions will open on June 1st. Be sure to join the potterthon discord linked in the description for more info and to receive more frequent updates.
Turning to the here and now there have been 2 events taking place this month the first of which being a Full Series Bingo race between Nixxo, Flo and ComplexBeaver. After a difficult and testing time Nixxo surprisingly took the win being the underdog beating Flo to a triple bingo by mear minutes. A truly spectacular and persevering performance by all lasting around 11 hours. When asked for comment Nixxo said “I couldn't have been happier with the close end that it had. It's been incredibly fun. We all blundered a lot and made mistakes so I ultimately won with a lot of luck...”. Congrats to Nixxo for winning and equal GGs to Flo and Beaver for being so very close behind.
Finally this month we turn to the HP2 PC All Wizard Cards Tournament. The tourney got off to an … interesting start when Miney took the reigns of restreaming. There were many tech issues but the team agreed that the show must go on and they continued and had a great time, however by the end of match 2 it was clear Miney’s PC might explode if they streamed for the whole day so the amazing FeelMyGoods Aka Ryan jumped in to help save the day. However in a shock dramatic turn of events, after a sound of screeching tires and a crash outside his house, Ryan’s power went out resulting in Miney having to restream the last match. While yes the last match was very laggy visually, audibly it was a hilarity of commentary from the exhausted Miney and the early bird and Wizard card encyclopaedia SammyPebles. We’re happy to say Day 2 went much smoother and Weekends 2 and 3 can be seen on Nixxo’s channel in a much higher quality. Please Note these comments only apply to the restreaming, the runners put on some amazing displays much love to them all including dark horse Araca ... (That’s his name … right?) who shocked everyone in his game with Felix and caused the biggest upset in prediction history!.
If you don't like the reading and also are not a fan of the video recaps linked below these blog posts, we now have an audio only recap too! At the moment you can find it exclusively on soundcloud but we're open to suggestions of where else to put it too. You can find it here.
And there you have it, as mentioned, continued coverage of the tourney can be found on Nixxo’s channel. There’s lots to continue to look forward to this month including the continuation of the AWC tourney and more including hopefully a little special project reveal.
But for now, you are up to date on the biggest stories In the Harry Potter Speedrun community for April 2023.
Here we are again! Here is your recap for March 2023:
First we turn to the unstoppable record achieving machine Mipmip98. Mip you may remember last month took 4 of the 5 HP2 PC main board WRs from community (is he really a machine) man Flo. Well this month.he took them all. Mip achieved a 45:58 in glitchless and officially claimed the HP2 PC crown. But is that trouble brewing I smell?
Next on the topic of glitchless runs, community veteran and long stand TK found a new way to skip Diffindo in HP2 PC this month. Yes, another one to add onto Breath Diffindo Skip, Pixie Ride, Shroom stacking, Snail Door blocker thing and a smattering of others. The new skip involves pushing a snail to the entrance doorway of the challenge and getting it to kill you. As it does so and Harry falls down you fall into the exit challenge trigger embedded in the doorway. Once respawned through the doorway some quick damage prevention allows you to continue on towards Boomslang. While this trick was deemed not allowed in glitchless, it is allowed in NMG which has brought some runners to the category. Most notably TK themselves, as well as Gawb. Between the two of them the time has now come down from a 44:21 by Flo before the trick was found, to a 42:43 by TK at time of writing. Just how low will this record go? Only time will tell!
Speaking of records being broken, a HUGE record was broken this month by Flo. This month he broke the longest standing community WR dating back to 2015. The new record, set on the 5th beat the old one by just 13 seconds but was enough to end the 2749 day reign of the record set by SMP way back on the 26th September 2015. A huge congrats to both Flo for beating the record and SMP for holding the record for so long, a record I doubt that will be beaten any time soon.
Moving to HP4 now and this month Ablazeknight, (new mod to HP4 PC) set a sub goal on his stream that if it was met, he would do a HP4 PC Insane%. Well the goal was hit and on March 10th Blaze did a run which got not only 100% WR but also the overall insane% WR by an astonishing 24 mins. The new record encompasses much of the new stuff found in the last few months since Deano attempted the run back in November. However, the run does not include what happened in the latter half of this month.
In the 2nd half of March Blaze and Human began a deep dive glitch and strat hunt into hp4 and they found some … interesting stuff. This includes rock ride in the herbology level allowing you to save 45 seconds by ending the level early, cauldron rides in both bathroom and rooftops saving 15 and 10 seconds a piece. And the most … truly ungodly strat you can imagine. Blockless Forest. A trick that Blaze himself spent hours practising on stream before even doing it in runs and is yet to even get it in a run. All of these tricks allowed Blaze to get his time down well into the 57s with a 57:43 though Blaze is convinced it can go down even further. I guess only time will tell.
And now, back to HP2 Glitchless where a new competitor has joined the ring. In a shock surprise to everyone on the 24th March Cake swooped in and took the record by an impressive 14 seconds using the shroom stacking method in Diffindo. The run officially broke Mip’s HP2 PC crown after just 19 days and remains to this day as the current HP2 Glitchless world record .
Finally in recap this month, we turn to a truly disgusting and horrific record break. This month, Pretend cries Rene … Rene broke my record. On the 3rd of this month Rene completely obliterated my HP3 PC insane% WR set after All Wizard Cards was added to the main board, which meant all the previous runs were no longer valid.Rene’s time came in at 5hrs, 42 mins and 50 seconds, a whopping 36 mins ahead of my record. In response Miney said "Whyyyyyyyyyyy Reneeeeeee?".
Anyways, there’s plenty to look forward to this month as we go into April. Towards the end of this month the HP2 PC All Wizard Cards Tournament by Beaver and Nixxo will start as well as Nixxo, Flo and Beaver competing in Full Series Bingo as a part of Nixxo’s sub goal!
And that's it! You are now up to date on the biggest stories In the HPSR community for March 2023.
A new year is here and there's lots in store! Here is your speedrunning recap for January 2023:
The year got off to an exciting start when Portal and Rene hosted an HP1 PC Any% Tournament on both of their Twitch channels. 21 runners took part and after 3 weekends of matches the HP1 master Flo203 won in the final against ComplexBeaver, thus wining the tournament.
It's been a pretty crazy start to the year with world records this month as a whopping 28 world records have been broken! These range across multiple platforms though the majority seem to be around HP (no matter what platform). A small battle did break out this month between Flo203 and community veteran MikeKatz45 in what some have called the "worst category in HP speedrunning". The two fought for HP2 PS2 Any% Console World Record and after several back and forths with the record, as of January 22nd Flo has the record with an astounding 42:39, completely destroying the 43 min barrier.
Returning, ironically enough to Flo and MikeKatz, this month saw the breaking of the communites 2nd oldest non Category Extension world record. The record for HP2 PS2 No major skips (formerly Glitchless) was held my Mikekatz for just over 6 years. However on the 30th, Flo came along and toppled this long standing record and bringing Flo\'s total world records to an astonishing 59 world records across the entire community.
There's a couple of exciting things comming up as we continue into the year. As the HP1 tournament came to a close Nixxo and ComplexBeaver announced their first event of the year! A HP2 PC All Wizard Cards tournament will take place in late April and Early May across 2-3 weeks (depending on how many people apply). You can find more information in the PC discord server.
And that is it! You are now up to date on the biggest stories in the HPSR community for January 2023
Wanna get this recap in video or audio form? Check out the embeds below!