Sunday 13 January 2013

Speed Running

With the end of the great Speed Demos Archive charity marathon, I thought I'd take a brief moment to talk about Speed Running.

Even though this sort of thing seems like basic knowledge to me, I know a staggering amount of people who don't really know what speed running is all about.  Speed Running, as you can probably tell from the name, is the art of beating a game as quickly as possible.  Some people have asked me "how can it possibly be fun to play a game like that?" Well, it's not exactly the kind of thing you can do the first time round, so you still get to experience the game as is on your first go.  The fun comes from trying to figure out tricks to shave that time down.  It might be something as simple as finding the most efficient way to move the character, or something really awesome like going out of the game boundaries.

The most awesome thing I saw on the stream was a guy who beat Ocarina of Time in 22 minutes by fooling the game into placing him in the final encounter after the first dungeon.  It required an immense amount of technical knowledge and it was super impressive to see pulled off right before my eyes.

My Speed Running experience however, is rather limited.  I tried to put one together for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, but gave up due to my move to Japan.  That said, I've been thinking about putting a run together on Biohazard with a friend just for the funsies, so maybe one day you'll get to see how that turns out.

In short, speed running is awesome, look up some videos!

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