Metroid Prime Done Quick

Xs writes "A story over at Gamerfeed.com states that a gamer from Berkeley, California, Henru Wang, has completed Metroid Prime in 1 hour and 46 minutes! Here's the interview with Mr. Wang from Twin Galaxies." Speed records are a slightly bizarre but rather cool corner of gaming nowadays, it seems.

Comments

you know, he could just not save at every corner..

[cybergeak]

he could have played a section once, reloaded his saved game from before that section and play it much quicker the second, or third or how every many times over. having played the game myself and having a displayed finish time of just over 4 hours i could see how to easily cut that time down...

Wonder how many people will spot this...

[Xenex]

...as a Red Dwarf quote?

Re:you know, he could just not save at every corne

[PurpleFloyd]

From what I got from the article and interview, the 1:46 is the time spent in front of the Gamecube, not the time as recorded by the little time-record thingy on the "load a saved game" screen. After all, you could just redo sections over and over until they were perfect; if you screw up or die, there's the reset button right there. Also, twiddling bits in the save cart probably wouldn't be that hard; give the player a 1:00 time in the Impact Crater save point (the last one in the game for those who haven't played MP), then beat MP and get a new "world record."

Another thing to consider is that game speedruns tend to increase in difficulty exponentially; to cut a 4 hour run down to 3 hours is much easier than cutting a 1:40 run down to 1:20, as you will have already used up your tricks just getting to the 1:40 mark. Either you have to come up with a new trick or just get the timing on your old ones simply impeccable.

Finally, I'm curious as to how the heck you got a 4 hour finish time on your first run through. Mine was more like 12 hours (admittedly, I did chase down a lot more missile/energy expansions than were necessary, but a 4 hour first run seems damned quick).