Quote from Pink:
Second, is the 61 star route a good route to go with, or should I work on another one (with help if someone is willing)
Yes, I think the segmented 61-star route is good for single-segment as well. I'm trying to remember if the route had anything designed specifically for segmented runs, but I can't think of anything. (I know at least one of my old routes did have something like that, though... manipulating comet appearances, mainly.)
About using a second player, I'd be interested to see if you can find some new shortcuts! One thought off the top of my head: you could try and see if you can jump directly to the Starshroom in Space Junk star 1 (without freeing the Toads and watching the cutscene).
If you can find a significant shortcut in a level that's not in the route, then I might be able to help with tweaking the route if you like.
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Also, I'm (really) working on my segmented run, but I have a question related to the video. So far my run segments have been done in 4:3 (non-wide) screen resolution, but while playing Galaxy 2 I realized that recording in 16:9 (wide) is not a problem. Could I (or should I) switch to 16:9 mid-run because it looks better?
There are a couple of minor Galaxy-specific considerations related to widescreen, since the game area covered by the screen actually becomes wider. I don't think they will amount to much, but just to give all the information:
(1) The width of my star bit range (both for collecting and shooting star bits) will become wider in widescreen. Honestly though, I don't see this being a real issue - I'm not hard pressed for star bits in this run, and there's not a lot of star bit shooting.
(2) Pull stars *might* become easier to grab in a couple of places if the screen is wider, but I'm not sure on that. I think the limitation on grabbing pull stars tends to be Luigi's distance from pull star, not whether the pull star is on-screen or not.
(3) Some moving elements of levels (obstacles, enemies, etc.) will only move when they are onscreen or nearly onscreen. This fact is connected to my strategy in Drip Drop Galaxy (panning the camera toward or away from the eels so I can reach them quicker), so I did some testing there. I'm not 100% positive, but the eels seemed to stop near the side of the screen as easily in 4:3 and 16:9 - and of course the side of the screen is situated differently, so the strategy might have to change a bit (for better or worse, I don't know).
There may be other levels where widescreen changes the strategy, but I can't think of any right now.
Overall, I think sticking with 4:3 or changing to 16:9 will be a style choice and won't have a significant time impact in such a long speedrun. I think I'll take the issue to Tech Support.