My favorite game to watch speed runs of is still Getting Over It. The game is notoriously frustrating, with many players spending multiple painstaking hours climbing up small sections of the level, only to make a critical mistake, fall back down, and have to start all over again.
Then you have people like this, who've gotten so good at the game that they're able to beat the entire thing in 1 minute 17 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnzTObVRwF0
"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:
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.
It's also about memorizing the tricks. I would recommend finding videos of it from Awesome Games Done Quick or Summer Games Done Quick. Bonus! An even more challenging variant exists: I Wanna Be The Boshi.
Here's the Boshi speedrun, it's entertaining even if I would never want to play myself.
super impressive stuff. I'm generally unfamiliar with speedrunning, but I am familiar with the billy mitchell controversies, so I'm surprised that people accept the legitimacy of streamed runs. wouldn't it be trivial-enough to fake?
By far my favorite kind of speedrun to watch is a non-TAS with commentary. Often, these runs are done by teams. There's typically one player who is good at executing, and then you might have someone responsible for planning the route through the game, and another person responsible for researching glitches and how they can be used most efficiently, etc.
Hearing these people discuss their craft, and hearing the dynamics between their interactions (personal and practical) is fascinating. The best example I know of this is the ingx24 speedrun of Majora's Mask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85k0fo1qnyo
Humans are amazing animals. The fact that this level and coordination is possible even when the stakes are, ultimately, pretty pointless, is a testament to that.
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