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

"N" - A Platformer made for speed runs

[BlueCup]

If you enjoy speed runs you should check out the game N. It's free, and it was practically made for awesome speed demos. Your replay is recorded for every best run through every level, and the top 20 runs of every level (and episode, which is a collection of 5 levels) are saved online and downloadable in game. Trust me, its worth checking out.

What's the point?

[th1ckasabr1ck]

I never understood the point of making speed runs through games... When you're trying to run through as fast as you can, aren't you kind of missing the point of actually playing the game?

John Carmack had a quote I liked when talking about how they slowed down the pace of DOOM3 because, "It would be a shame to just have you running past all of this hard work at a hundred miles per hour..."

Re:What's the point?

[Snowmit]

I never understood the point of making speed runs through games... When you're trying to run through as fast as you can, aren't you kind of missing the point of actually playing the game?

If you're making speed runs, you've played the game so many times that you already know the way the levels look and the beautiful graphics in intimate detail. For example, the guy with the 1:37 Metroid Prime run says that it took 3 months to reach that point.

Speed run people know the game so well that they can exploit all kinds of insane tricks and glitches and other things about the game to play it in a completely different way than the way that the designers intended.

Personally, I think that's prety cool. Someday I hope to work on a game that's so robust and open-ended that people are able to find crazy tricks that I had no idea existed and fun enough that they're willing to spend months finding and exploiting them.

Re:What's the point?

[ksiddique]

The other day I felt like re-playing Half-Life but didn't *really* feel like going through the entire game from beginning to end. I think I felt more like watching it rather than playing it. So when I saw a HL speed run on the SDA I grabbed it right away. It was fun to see it again and check out the crazy tricks used. And it only took an hour or so.

So I guess another point of speed runs is to let lazy guys like me re-live old games without wasting too much time. :)

another site

[hoferbr]

another site for speed demos. The difference (big difference) is that they seed videos from games running on emulators (most, if not all, of the Speed Demos Archive videos are recorded directly from the TV).
Except from the site: These are movies of various console games being played extraordinarily using an emulator as a tool to get over humanly limits such as "skill" and "reaction".
But it's interesting anyway.

Id rather play the exact opposite...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this just makes no since to me, but I would much rather play slow and make sure I get to kill every monster, see every corner on every level (expecially well designed games) even tryn to make sure i take as least amount of damage as possible. Or even Finding that one special hidden place, that takes 2 weeks looking around heh.... U get the idea.

I mean some of my most favorite games are the ones with what seems like unlimited content (like Privateer and such).

Id much rather seem movies of some one clearn all the levels perfect then this :)

Re:Speed runs via exploits?

[Pluvius]

Speed runs with exploits can actually require more skill than speed runs without. Normal speed runs require you to know everything possible within the intended rules of the game, but the exploited ones require you to know everything that's possible outside of those rules as well. Certainly it's cheating to get a faster time, but that doesn't necessarily make it less skilled.

Of course, there is a line between using exploits to get a little more speed (Morimoto's use of wall- and ceiling-crawling bugs in Mega Man 2, for example) and using exploits to skip most of the game. I saw a speedrun for a Flash game that involved using the "Play" option in the Flash player a couple of times to skip just about everything. That's not very skilled.

Rob

Re:Impressive?

[Jerf]

The time on both Earth and the spaceship would appear normal from each point of view; that's relativity.

But compared to each other in terms of a round trip by the spacecraft eventually returning to Earth's reference frame (the only way to compare them, really), the spaceship will be arbitrarily slower. So hiking off in a spaceship is indeed the wrong thing to do if you want to break time records. Remember, in the twin paradox, it is the twin who goes into space that comes back young; that can't happen unless he's the one experiencing slow time.

(Actually, it suffices to jush put Earth in the spaceship.)

You can get the opposite effect if the spaceship exceeds the speed of light; the equations say that then time will indeed "speed up" relative to the rest of the universe, ironically eating the "advantage" of going FTL in the first place. There is no evidence this is anything more than an amusing mathematical diversion, though. (Note, this does not refer to "warp drives", where the ship is techncally stationary and space moves, this is refering to an actual tachyonic space ship. It may be written in a sci-fi context but this article from a PhD in cosmology might help.)

Re:Impressive?

[Jerf]

Think about it for a second, seriously, instead of replying off the cuff. 50 years of science fiction ought to give you a clue. If you can travel to a star 20 light-years away in a month your time, but it takes 20 years (and change) to the guy on earth, the guy on earth sees the guy it the spaceship going slower and slower, not faster and faster. Otherwise, to the guy in the spaceship, it would take longer than 20 years and even slower-than-light travel would be impossible.

Think, McFly, think. It is the guy on Earth living at a hummingbirds pace. The guy on the spaceship has the distinction of playing the slowest ever video game.

I don't get to say this often on this site, but I am unequivicably correct and if you disagree, you are simply wrong.