Bingo 3/09/26

I love bingo. Specifically the speedgaming kind, lol. I have been doing it for Majora's Mask for a while now, but I think its cool in many other games too! To me, it's just my favorite way of speedrunning a game, since it requires an ever growing expanse of knowledge in order to know what is the best thing to do in every situation. Rando is similar in that sense, although I do prefer the more consistent routing of bingo over rando, although routing through logic can be cool. Basically, it never gets old... in theory anyway. 

Majora's Mask bingo does suffer from a bit of a balancing issue at the moment, which leads to a lot of similar rows tending to usually always be the best option to do. This isn't always the case, as sometimes you can get good rows from unexpected goals (usually ones which involve going into Great Bay Temple lol). But in general, it is a bit of a problem, but one that is being worked on and will hopefully be fixed eventually. Balancing bingo actually seems like a huge tedious pain lol, so huge props to the people who actually work on it (which in this case, is mostly Jimmie). In the mean time however, I have found that doing different types of bingo can help remedy this! Rather than simply doing a single row, you can do 2 rows (or more), especially in an anti-bingo scenario. And of course, you can always do black out bingo, which actually is fairly well balanced comparatively.

Over my time playing bingo, a goal of mine has always been to improve and become better at it (a common goal for all speedrunners I think lmao). I think I have made great progress towards that goal, very often coming in 1st or 2nd place in races (depending on if Jimmie is playing lol), and pretty consistently getting times around the low 50s (minutes), and high 40s range, sometimes even lower if the row is really good. Although, there is still a lot of room for improvement, a lot of which can be achieved by also just becoming faster at the game in general. Part of that could come from actually doing more traditional speedruns of the game, which I have done to some extent of course, but I often will get bored of that after a few weeks, so it's always been hard for me to stay on a consistent grind like some other runners are able to. 

A solution I have thought about is to combine the best of both, which would done through the monthly async bingo that Jimmie hosts on his bingo site! Essentially using that as a form of traditional run, while still having that unique bingo essence which keeps the game interesting to me. Although in order to do that effectively while the bingo is still unbalanced, I would need to do something other than just grinding the best row on the board every month, as that would lead to doing very similar things, which I want to avoid. Something I used to do when I was first learning bingo for this game was to just do a row without actually looking at the rest of the board, essentially randomizing the row I would do every race, which you can do by just picking the same row number every time (in my case, it was row 4). I think that was very effective actually, leading to me doing a lot of good rows, some of which you would never normally think to do, and also a lot of bad rows. But it was always interesting and fun to see what I would have to do. 

I think using that approach to the asyncs would work best for me, basically just doing the row 4 on whatever board is chosen for the month, and trying my best to route it as optimally as possible, as well as improving my movement and trick execution for whatever is in that route, and then doing runs of it a few times a week. This is something I have actually been wanting to do for a while now, although haven't actually decided on whether I should commit to it or not. I think the time to commit is now though, as I have felt a little lost on what I've actually wanted to do within MM recently, so focusing on this would help me a lot.

I didn't actually pick row 4 this month, but the row I picked was pretty different to what you would normally be doing in bingo, so I think it would be fine to keep doing that one. However, in the upcoming months, I will be doing row 4 for this. LetsBingo!

The Async Board for March (I am doing Row 3 this month)