Videogame Speed Running Speeds Up A Notch

Radix37 writes "The PlanetQuake-hosted Speed Demos Archive, dedicated to 'trying to complete a videogame in the fastest time possible', has been updated with an improved speedrun of Half-Life in 0:45:45, over 5 minutes faster than the previous run - some more crazy level-skipping shortcuts were added to cut the time by so much, and there's very detailed commentary from the creator. The Metroid Prime record was recently dropped to 1 hour 4 minutes from 1:17 by a lot of new tricks and exploits, too. Also of note, recent improvements on Super Metroid, on Metroid Zero Mission, and, interestingly, on Super Mario 64 (including a glitch collecting 'only 16 stars' instead of 70) have been impressive."

Comments

Re:What's the point?

[KDR_11k]

Actually it's another chllenge. Many games have goals, right? So why not make it your goal to, e.g., complete the game as fast as possible or only with the basic pistol/knife or without killing any enemies or some other challenge? It's for those people who think hard isn't hard enough.

Speed runs via exploits?

[Cecil]

I can't really garner much respect for those sorts of people. It just doesn't seem that interesting to me. In the same way, someone who finds a place where they can't be hit by anything and then proceeds to kill a million enemies, I don't consider them a skilled player either, really.

People who complete the game as intended, but do it in the quickest time, I might find that a little more impressive, but I guess it's hard to judge what's an "exploit" and what isn't.