Thanks to everybody at SDA for doing what you're doing. Big thanks to ballofsnow for making Anri-chan, too. I'd be totally lost without it.

So Hyperzone is a really fun game. It's a really easy and relaxing game to play. It's pretty trivial to make it to the end of the game, and it loops forever so you can just keep plugging along. It's not a terribly interesting game to speed run, though. In fact, I don't really think it is suited for speed running at all, but since there was already precedent on SDA, I decided to go for it. The main reason I ran this was just to improve the existing run. This is almost 3.5 minutes faster than the previous run, which is pretty insane considering this is mostly an autoscroller.

I mentioned most of this in my audio commentary, but I'll reiterate a few points about this game:

-You constantly accelerate until you reach the max speed of 448. There is no acceleration button, just "shoot" and "brake".

-Braking slows you down. Don't do that.

-Getting hit or flying off course also slow you down. Avoid that as much as possible. Death very slows you down.

-When you earn enough points for an extra life, your ship gets upgraded at the start of the next level. This animation takes like 8 seconds or something. There are a total of 6 ship upgrades, IIRC. It is possible to earn enough points to gain two lives in one level and skip one ship upgrade animation. The most common place for this is in level 3. You need to end level 2 with just the right amount of points and then you need to have a phenomenal level 3. I missed it by like 6 enemies in this run.

-Killing bosses accounts for a LOT of time in this game. Mashing is always faster than using charged shots when the boss is always vulnerable. Some bosses can only be hit with charged shots in certain phases. It's pretty weird.

So yea, that's basically it. This run was very successful at avoiding damage in some levels and very unsuccessful in other stages. My boss fights were really strong overall; even though I missed the double ship upgrade, my boss fights more than made up for that time loss. I go over most of this in detail in my audio commentary so I won't waste my time retyping everything. If you're actually interested in hearing more, I highly recommend listening to the audio commentary as you watch.

In summary, this is an adequate run. I wouldn't say I'm truly satisfied with it, because there is still room for improvement. Mistakes look extremely sloppy in this game because getting hit is so obvious, so even if it doesn't cost time (for instance, I got hit an extra time in one level but still gained time over my previous PB) it still looks bad. There is definitely room to be gained, but my main goal was to improve the run on the site with a run that is significantly more optimized, and I think I succeeded with that.

I hope you enjoy the run! ^_^