i was into listening to the commentary more then i was watching the speedrun. ever speedrun i've seen never has commentary so you don't know what the heck the runner is doing. it was really kewl knowing what the thought process was in pulling these off. Awesome find!
I never would have imagined it would be entertaining either. Until I ran into this speedrun of Yoshi's Island randomly, it was one of the most entertaining and fascinating things I ever watched.
Highly recommend this channel for well-researched and entertaining mini-documentaries on adventure game speedrunning: https://www.youtube.com/@OneShortEye
Excellent video. I'm impressed the author went to recreate the run frame by frame, and then used those findings to analyze what was happening. Never expected this video to turn into a full on reverse engineering explanation.
As a side note, this kind of speed run has become more popular in the recent years for a combination of reasons:
- First, it's difficult to improve on the regular world records since they're so optimized (just have a look at Quake Done Quick and its sequels).
- Second, the emulators available to the speed running community have evolved. They now include better ways to track what's happening in memory.
- Third, the games themselves are understood better (as recently exemplified by the Super Mario 64 full reverse engineering).
So it's creating a whole new genre of runs that simply isn't about execution anymore.
Why did I just watch this? Fascinating but I don't even know what a speed run is. In terms of the statistics, heat map and mini game breakdown - pretty slick. I just don't understand why so much effort was put into unpacking this game within a game :)
Every once in a while, I see a video that leaves me full of motivation, such as There Will Never Ever Be Another Driver Like Dale Earnhardt. This video, to me, is one of those. I know a lot of people here are interested in SM64 speedrunning due to the game's technical nature, and those people will certainly find it interesting. But, I think even people outside the community will enjoy this video. Very well done!
This video[1] did the same for me. I was so confused the first time I saw it I ended up spending the rest of my saturday reading speedrunning forums and watching caps of live speedrunning competitions.
Speedruns are amazingly interesting. When I tell people about watching them, their reaction is usually something along the lines of "why do people waste their lives on that?"
But there's so much interesting going on there. The parallels to optimization in programming are striking.
If you're into more of this kind of thing, check out SummoningSalt (on Youtube). Very entertaining history of speedrunning videos, with solid production value and the creator has good connections with the community.
> but I learned to love watching them. Their skill truly amazes me.
I got the impression that the game's author is seriously happy about all this. The timing of the article before a speedrunning event looks like it is intended for maximal publicity.
I'm not sure where you got the impression you did about the content of the article?
"I'm really fascinated by speedrunners who can beat my favorite classic games less than an hour, sometimes in minutes. Some of that is cutting weird corners but often it's pure excellent execution."
Ocarina of Time speedrunning has gotten to a really weird place now, where they basically set the character's name to a string of bytes which are executable code, and then de-reference a pointer to it and warp directly to the end credits, all within a few minutes of gaining control of Link. But, the community has a whole bunch of categories for different types of runs, from ones that are basically the Any% category before SRM (stale reference manipulation), to semi-legitimately beating all the dungeons (though with lots of sequence-breaking), to fully glitchless. It's a lot of fun watching some of those other-category runs for a taste of "normal" gameplay done at a very high level.
Another thing that's fun to watch runs of is randomizers (chest contents, quest rewards, sometimes even doors), since then you're not just seeing high level play, you're also seeing someone doing the live work of reasoning about their route through familiar-but-scrambled territory:
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