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.
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'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:
Yeah, that's why the community has specific categories for different runs. I appreciate glitched runs because of the acumen needed to accomplish them but it's 100% runs that truly impress me most as a gamer.
The speedrun world is almost like a scholarly domain, with all the usual bickering about terminology, whether this qualifies as that, and so on. I would be interested to read an ethnology of the community.
And this is why I enjoy "TAS" or "tool assisted speedruns".
People will basically write a program to do the speedruns for them with literal microsecond precision. My favorite are watching super Mario 64 TAS runs.
Stuff like a special way that they can jump perfectly on some slopes to build up hilariously high speed values then using that to launch across the map all in a fraction of a second.
There is also a Pokemon run where the guy built a way to input arbritrary code during a first generation Pokemon (red or blue) run, and used it to program in the opening to the next generation of the games among other things things.
There was a time where is discovered the speedrun and tas communities and binge-watched everything it has to offer. I was constantly amazed by what the players achieved, and I especially liked the ones where the gap between tas and human player closes.
SethBling made an elaborate, frame-perfect glitch exploit run of Super Mario World where he warps from the first level to the end credits - absolutely unbelievable.
There are also those to do tool-assisted speedruns, where they play a game and complete it frame-by-frame, doing precise inputs that a human might not be capable of in order to show the theoretically best time that a game can be completed in.
Karl Jobst has some great in-depth explorations of the techniques and effort put into some amazing speedruns. He also has some good videos that go into how various communities have moderated themselves regarding techniques that verge on "cheating".
Search youtube for "AGDQ" or "awesome games done quick". It was a charity speedrun livestream. They have cameras on the people in the room doing the speedrun and talking, the amount they actually talk about the game varies from video to video.
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.
I absolutely love speed runs and think they’re a great expression of the hacker mentality.
To take a subtle bug in something like a physics engine and bend it to your will to eek out another 5s save off the world record is absolutely fascinating.
Not to mention things like TASBot which always makes a great GDQ watch https://youtu.be/7CgXvIuZR40 and got me interested in speed running in the first place!
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.
I'm guessing based on the overlay that this was a tool assisted speedrun (TAS)? If so, I wouldn't fret if I were the author. These players are able to exploit collision glitches and timings that are almost impossible for a human player!
Well, most games with decent speedrunning communities end up being more intellectually stimulating if you get involved in that sort of thing. The amount of tech and number of strategies you have to learn to master the likes of Zelda Breath of the Wild at a high level is pretty impressive. Same with everything from Ocarina of Time to Super Mario Odyssey to any Metroid game to whatever else. Heck, if you want the equivalent of a phD in either Super Mario 64 or Paper Mario, then videos by pannenkoek and Stryder7x are fascinating:
I suspect competitive Pokemon would probably be pretty intellectually stimulating too, if at the level of Smogon or the world championships. There are a crap ton of tactics in that series, and trying to anticipate your opponent's own strategies while countering with your own requires a lot of creativity and thought.
In a similar vein are videos from the speed-running community. Linked below is a video of an Ocarina Of Time speed-run where the guy explains a bit of what it's all about. The level of reverse-engineering is impressive.
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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