Awesome run and a gigantic realtime-improvement I didn't expect to be that high!
It looks very well optimized and shows some new and really cool stuff. The Red Brinstar shaft on the way down, where you managed to completely avoid the last platform before falling into the ripper area really surprised me. I didn't manage to do that. Also I especially liked the completely different and crazy Lower Norfair strategies. The way you manipulated the last Super Missile refill before Ridley was very clever, and saved far more time in the fight than the slowdown it required to get before. The other highlights are surely the crazy Draygon fight and the completely new CWJ+mockball strategy in the MB room, which was very unexpected to see. And of course top ammo/health management here once again.
The only minor mistakes I could see:
- Of course the Ridley grab. However you got really excellent Super drops for that, so it probably isn't much of a loss due to less forced refills in the end.
- The WS lake jump + CWJ was executed with a slightly slower momentum than possible. This loses like 2-4 frames I guess. See Cpadolfs version for the optimal way here.
- The mockball before WS entrance indeed is 2 frames faster. Just compare the frame counts of your v1.51 run with this one to see.
- And congratulations to find the direct jump into the shot hole after WS lake before falling down to the Red Brinstar elevator room. I actually used this tech in my any% as well. However if you don't need a refill from the crab below, then my falling technique saves ~30 frames compared to what you did there. As a reward for this nice run, I decided to make a demo vid directly ripped from my any% to show everybody how it's done:
http://www.freewebs.com/saturnsmovies/SM%20Tech%20%2D%20Saturn%20Fall.rar
This is all pretty minor though, so I still have some doubts whether a 0:23 will ever be possible with this route. Your run is very tightly optimized already, and I just can't see more than at most 10 sec improvements in it.
Voting YES on a really huge improvement to the previous run. Very well done, hero!