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Videogame Speed Running Speeds Up A Notch

Posted by simoniker on from the roadrunner dept.

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."

5 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. "N" - A Platformer made for speed runs by BlueCup · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
  2. Re:What's the point? by KDR_11k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
  3. Re:What's the point? by Snowmit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
  4. Re:Impressive? by Jerf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

  5. Re:What's the point? by ksiddique · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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. :)