The Incredibly Deadly Deku Stick
October 28, 2013 7:04 AM   Subscribe

 
I'm less impressed that he beat the game in 22 minutes, and more impressed that he did it without spending a whole week stumbling through the @#%*& Water Temple.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:08 AM on October 28, 2013 [8 favorites]


I don't know; it's speed over quality. Reminds of the old joke about the teen boy who boasts to his peers that he's now really good at sex because he's "got it down to under ten seconds".
posted by Wordshore at 7:34 AM on October 28, 2013


Hey, li . . .
Hey!
Hey!
HEY!
. . . Would you just fucking listen for a second?
posted by bibliowench at 7:37 AM on October 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'm less impressed that he beat the game in 22 minutes, and more impressed that he did it without spending a whole week stumbling through the @#%*& Water Temple.

True Story: I just recently picked up the 3DS Ocarina of Time remake again after putting it down for three months because I couldn't be arsed to find my way around the fucking Water Temple again.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:46 AM on October 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


I don't know; it's speed over quality.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that view - there's quite a bit of intense technical prowess crammed into those 22 minutes. When he mentions a trick being "frame perfect", for example, that means there is (in OoT's case) a timing window of 1/20th of a second that he needs to hit the correct input in.
posted by NMcCoy at 7:58 AM on October 28, 2013 [13 favorites]


Speedruns aren't the same as playing a game as it was meant to be played well, but they are still really cool. And this speedrun showed a lot of technical prowess.

Plus, I feel like sequence breaking shows a lot of interesting tricks used in programming a game.
posted by mccarty.tim at 8:04 AM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


...I actually never beat Ocarina of Time on the N64 because I would get really nauseous in the Water Temple and I just couldn't play long enough to beat it.

BUT I finally beat it on the 3DS. BOOYAH.
posted by littlesq at 8:05 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I can remember, in the mid aughts, killing time between classes in a computer lab by watching a ~2 hour speed run of OoT on the SDA. At that time a 2 hour speed run just blew my mind and I was a little late to my class so I could finish the whole run in one sitting.

Beating it in 22 minutes though? Just, wow.
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 8:10 AM on October 28, 2013


I don't know; it's speed over quality.

Speed runs are less an alternate way of playing a game than they are a New Game+ with totally different goals and challenges.
posted by griphus at 8:15 AM on October 28, 2013 [6 favorites]


I started it thinking I'd skip around seeing what areas he had to hit in what order, but then actually ended up watching the whole thing.

It's crazy that he casually mentions while collecting chickens that one of the guys made "like 600" runs trying to improve his time using just one method, then says that the best time for that run was around 45 minutes. Even if he abandoned a significant amount of those runs halfway through because he didn't do something perfectly, that could still easily be 300 hours spent doing one type of run. Incredible.
posted by DynamiteToast at 8:19 AM on October 28, 2013


True Story: I just recently picked up the 3DS Ocarina of Time remake again after putting it down for three months because I couldn't be arsed to find my way around the fucking Water Temple again.

They even made it easier for the remake.
posted by vogon_poet at 8:26 AM on October 28, 2013


If anyone else is interested, here is a Link to the already past 100% OoT speed run that was mentioned by Cosmo.
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 8:27 AM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Even if he abandoned a significant amount of those runs halfway through because he didn't do something perfectly, that could still easily be 300 hours spent doing one type of run. Incredible.

If you ever feel like screwing with a World of Warcraft player, tell them to type "/played" on their main.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:28 AM on October 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


Apparently, the reason Cosmo and RunnerGuy are playing the Japanese version of the game is because the Japanese characters take up less space on the screen, and thus display quicker. This saves something like 20 minutes total in the 100% speed run.
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 8:34 AM on October 28, 2013 [11 favorites]


Just beautiful! That guy is THE MAN.
posted by zscore at 8:42 AM on October 28, 2013


The commentary is great. As is one audience member's condescension towards another at the end of the video when someone asks how child Link could use the master sword, when ordinarily he can't equip it even if it's in his inventory.

"Because he picked it up."

*exasperated at life*
posted by jsturgill at 8:46 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Cosmo's one of the more entertaining speedrun streams around. OOT is definitely one of his babies, but so is Wind Waker (both the original and he's started running the new HD release). But also for funsies he does a bunch of the Commander Keen games, Symphony of the Night, but also CV64, which is a way more impressive speedrun than it has any right to be.
posted by sparkletone at 8:54 AM on October 28, 2013


Is someone like Cosmo doing this as a profession or as a hobby? I ask because it sounds like they raised a good bit for cancer treatment but, even after looking at this article, I can't really tell if the top tier speedrunners are sponsored or supported by their fans somehow...
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:03 AM on October 28, 2013


Is someone like Cosmo doing this as a profession or as a hobby?

Profession. While he's an exception in terms of popularity (he gets thousands of viewers, myself included, that will watch even him working on his 'off' games), he gets enough money off twitch ad revenue (in addition to youtube revenue and also donations from fans) that streaming is his job basically.
posted by sparkletone at 9:14 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


That's really cool. I enjoyed the heck out of this and I've never even played Ocarina of Time. The running commentary really made it for me as it's cool to know not only what he's doing but why and the whole history behind it.

"Oh the game considers X and Y to be adjacent so you have to wait for these many seconds to confuse it" It's crazy the understanding he has to have of the game as well.
posted by Carillon at 9:38 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's crazy the understanding

I'm afk-watching/listening to the 100% run linked above and this is even more apparent there.
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:41 AM on October 28, 2013


And his commentary could be cut down to five minutes if you removed all the times he says "like"
posted by ReeMonster at 9:45 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've never watched a video like this before but found it really entertaining. Are there particular games that have gotten more attention for having glitches that allow these kinds of speed runs?
posted by BurntHombre at 9:51 AM on October 28, 2013


Are there particular games that have gotten more attention for having glitches that allow these kinds of speed runs?

Yes. What categories of runs are considered varies depending on the game (glitchless vs glitched among other things). Some games are more broken than others. OOT is actually one of the more broken ones (in really, really neat ways). Among the more glitchy N64 games is any of the games made by Rare. Diddy Kong Racing is a favorite of mine. So broken.
posted by sparkletone at 9:54 AM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Are there particular games that have gotten more attention for having glitches that allow these kinds of speed runs?

There are speed runs of practically every game, but "find the next device" games like Zelda and Metroid are particularly prone to sequence-breaking.
posted by sonic meat machine at 9:54 AM on October 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


BurntHombre : the Metroid & Castlevania series were two of the first to really feature and exploit "sequence breaks", where the game is expecting you'll have done X and acquired Y before you are able to access Z but due to glitching you can actually access Z much earlier than intended.

they're a great place to start learning about this kind of thing.
posted by radiosilents at 9:55 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Are there particular games that have gotten more attention for having glitches that allow these kinds of speed runs?

Curious about this myself, it has always seemed to me that OoT hit that crucial point of impressively scoped open world-ish layout (with warping and saving) and 3d technology (basically the early years of such, much like SuperMario64) thus making it a prime candidate for alot of this sort of thing. The addition of the time-manipulation layer/dimension is just the sexy sugar coating.

... said the amateur who doesn't really know anything about the topic and only played OoT for a few hours before getting really jaded with it for some reason.
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:57 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


For those of you who might want to watch a more modern speed run, Dark Souls is actually pretty awesome to watch:

Glitched run (0:26:58)
Black Knight Halberd (0:59:49)
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 10:04 AM on October 28, 2013


Speaking of SM64, Siglemic is the superstar there. It's one thing to appreciate all the ground that sm64 broke in terms of 3D game design, and another to watch someone just completely decimate it the way he does.
posted by sparkletone at 10:06 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I believe the Nintendo 64 lacked the memory protection that would otherwise have prevented things like the portal glitch from doing anything more interesting than crashing the game. Speedrunners in more recent games can't use things like that.
posted by LogicalDash at 10:10 AM on October 28, 2013


Ok, I just watched (again,@ 1:31:50 in the 100% video) the player defeat a boss, drop a fish from a bottle, pick up a fish with the bottle, play a song of sunlight on the ocarina, drop the fish, pickup the fish, and move around some within the boss room to.......... warp to Gannon's Castle!

He called it the voodoo dance. I can't really argue with that.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:12 AM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Related: This Battletoads and Double Dragon run is one of the funniest I can think of (PJ's Super Ghouls'n'Ghosts run from the same marathon was a laugh riot also). You couldn't script it better than it just happens to be naturally.
posted by sparkletone at 10:22 AM on October 28, 2013


Oh, and one last of my favorite speedrun links for people who are new to speedrunning: Mike Tyson's Punch Out. Blindfolded.
posted by sparkletone at 10:25 AM on October 28, 2013


Blindfolded....

Wow, I had no idea that category even existed. Although I should have guessed from my previous investigations into FFIII runs. I've seen categories there based upon fewest steps taken, fewest party members at the finale, and, of course, time based runs.

So, and I'm guessing here, there's 100% runs, fastest possible human runs, fastest possible tool assisted runs, blindfolded modifier, maybe fewest items/most basic equipment, perfect (take no damage) runs... what else? For example, I wonder if there's any interest, or comparable interest I should say I suppose, in something like 'fastest traditional run' as in not using wall glitches or frame specific jump glitches or even bomb jumps.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:29 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I think the "traditional run" would have to get really, really concretely defined to the extent that it becomes practically an obstacle course, because you're telling the person they have to take this, then this, then this. Straight-up glitching is one thing, but there's a lot of gray area in what's considered clever playing and what's considered "breaking the rules" just because there's usually no final authority on it.
posted by griphus at 10:33 AM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Right. I understand that but it makes me just a tiny bit sad there's not a way to go about it beyond tools vs. non-tools runs. Again, it's something I completely understand, I was just hopeful.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:35 AM on October 28, 2013


there's not a way to go about it beyond tools vs. non-tools runs.

Care to clarify? Do you mean no-glitch Speedruns? Because that's absolutely a thing.

Also, Pacifist runs, No Shots runs.
posted by tychotesla at 10:42 AM on October 28, 2013


Well, there's no truly general way to classify runs beyond what tools you used out-of-game, but there are lots of common game elements that players forego just to challenge themselves. No reason bomb jumps couldn't be part of that.
posted by LogicalDash at 10:44 AM on October 28, 2013


What's funny to me about speedruns isn't that you can break the game — as a programmer, I know how easy it is to break shit — but that you can break some things without breaking the whole thing.

Like, OK, I get his explanation of how you can jump to an arbitrary cutscene, but I'm still amazed that you can resume the game from that point without it going completely batshit. I would have expected a fuller dichotomy between child Link and adult Link, rather than just a model swap and a soft, under-enforced list of which weapons you can use with which Link. I'd have expected it to freak out and freeze or reset or something because nobody did the animations for young-Link-plus-Master-Sword because that's not supposed to happen.

It's contrary to my instincts as a web developer. It'd be like me hiding the admin interface through CSS. I feel like those constraints should be enforced on a lower level. Don't just have the door not open if I haven't gotten Item X; make it so that the cutscene doesn't play, make it so that the character doesn't talk to me, make the game refuse to put my character into this broken state.

Of course, this isn't serious business; this is video games, and I'm sure the QA priorities are completely different for video games than for web apps, and of course this was an era of greater hardware constraints so I'm sure they didn't want to introduce extra overhead for things like that. I guess I'm just surprised that, after a sequence break like this, the game is still in a stable enough state that you can actually finish it.
posted by savetheclocktower at 10:44 AM on October 28, 2013 [5 favorites]


Quake Speedrun. The entire game in nightmare mode in under 14 minutes. The grenade jumps are amazing.

All runs were recorded separately. The runs were improved again and again throughout the ages since 1996, when the game was released. We feel that the current times are really close to optimal after 14 ages. That's why the naming: Quake done Quickest.
posted by tychotesla at 10:45 AM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


With only, what, 2MB of non-video memory? They had to be real parsimonious about those state flags.
posted by LogicalDash at 10:46 AM on October 28, 2013


A cool game for playing around with sequence breaking, for the uninitiated, is Metroid: Zero Mission, which, unique for its genre, was actually designed with sequence breaking in mind.

LogicalDash, what speedrunners mostly do is find ways to provide unexpected inputs to the game's engine, so it does things that weren't intended by the designers. Of course it varies, but often this means screwing up the scripting layer of the game, which probably won't care about memory protection, because on some level it's doing what it's supposed to, just at the wrong time.

I think all these runs are interesting for what they reveal about players and their reactions to prevailing game design trends. In the old days, of course, the classic era of arcades, all games were skill-based, and what we'd term "score attacks." That's what a video game was.

Now, most games try to provide a "cinematic experience," offering a "progression" and a "feeling of accomplishment." Some will actually secretly make themselves easier if you die several times.

Speedrunners throw all that in the bin and find ways to make it about skill again. I love that.
posted by JHarris at 10:47 AM on October 28, 2013 [6 favorites]


Care to clarify?

I can't really besides how I phrased it above. My vocabulary could be wrong, so bear that in mind.

For example, I wonder if there's any interest, or comparable interest I should say I suppose, in something like 'fastest traditional run' as in not using wall glitches or frame specific jump glitches or even bomb jumps.

I mean, maybe only using moves/items/features that are explicitly described in the manual or in-game. That description sort-of might serve some purpose that aligns with what I'm describing.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:47 AM on October 28, 2013


Wow, I had no idea that category even existed

Not to speak for sinisterwon or spoil the ending, but I'd argue it doesn't. Eventually, you run into a boxer that has random patterns and no audio cues. That said, it's an insanely cool display of skill and even normal MTPO runs are super entertaining just because of the knowledge involved and the amount of frame-perfect hits required.

As has been mentioned, there's no real authority as to what categories exist for what games. Just community standards about what's cool/not cool. Most games at least have a 100% and any%, but others exist including TAS runs which are frequently just hilarious to watch.
posted by sparkletone at 10:49 AM on October 28, 2013


That description sort-of might serve some purpose that aligns with what I'm describing.

While this is totally workable (and exists in spades) on an individual game level, I don't think it works as a general speedrun category like manual vs. TAS. The biggest issue is that you have to draw a dividing line, and in every game, that place is different. In Super Mario Bros. for instance, the famous wall-glitchy thing is obviously out, but what about warps? They're an open secret, but a secret nonetheless. Cheat codes are obviously out, but what if the game has a way to bypass much of the level (e.g. running over the top of the level as you can do in a bunch of platformers.)

So, yeah, for any sort of run you want to see, there's probably someone who either did it, or would do it if interested enough. It's just that you can't reasonably have a blanket condition like the one you set out.
posted by griphus at 10:55 AM on October 28, 2013


Well, Speed Demos Archive does actually review videos and make decisions on which qualify for what categories. That's as official as it gets, though.
posted by LogicalDash at 10:55 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


A cool game for playing around with sequence breaking, for the uninitiated, is Metroid: Zero Mission, which, unique for its genre, was actually designed with sequence breaking in mind.

Yeah, the really interesting thing about it is that Zero Mission is an enhanced remake of Metroid. So it's not just pattern breaking but enshrined pattern breaking that is not getting a nod from the devteam.
posted by griphus at 10:57 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I mean, I'm just saying that if they ever want to get into the Olympics they're going to have to figure this sort of thing out.

It's serious bizzness!
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:58 AM on October 28, 2013


Actually wait I might be totally off on that because I got Metroid and Super Metroid mixed up.
posted by griphus at 10:59 AM on October 28, 2013


Lots of Olympic sports have judges...
posted by LogicalDash at 10:59 AM on October 28, 2013


Super Metriod was such a great game.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:59 AM on October 28, 2013


Lots of Olympic sports have judges...

That'd be fun too, less of a 100-yard dash sport/scoring and more of a figure skating format, or heck even biathlon-esque. I like.
posted by RolandOfEld at 11:01 AM on October 28, 2013


Incidentally: 69 days until AGDQ 2014, I think? The schedule for which is looking pretty sick.
posted by sparkletone at 11:02 AM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Goddammit now I just want to see glitching at the Olympics.

"We're here for the long jump and Klaxx005 is taking his place. He's squatting down, and now back up. Now down, and up again. Now he is turning around and running in place slowly while he rotates back into position and ... he's at the other side of the stadium stuck halfway into a bleacher."
posted by griphus at 11:03 AM on October 28, 2013 [22 favorites]


Hotline Miami or Dark Souls speedruns. Well now... the thought of which one of those makes my butt pucker up more.
posted by RolandOfEld at 11:04 AM on October 28, 2013


One of my favorite speedruns: Super Mario World on the SNES in 00:02:36.40. Yes, that says 2 minutes and 36.40 seconds. The long explanation for how this works can be found here and here. This is probably only interesting to programmers.

The record for this type of completion is actually 00:01:39.74, but I think that video is a bit less entertaining, although the methodology is still pretty fascinating.
posted by IAmUnaware at 11:06 AM on October 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


A Secret of Mana 3 player coop speed run! The hell you say, I'm setting up a google reminder now. Ohhh, for that and Chrono Trigger.
posted by RolandOfEld at 11:07 AM on October 28, 2013


Super Mario World on the SNES in 00:02:36.40.

Oh, man. SMW is super fun, but Yoshi's Island is even craizer (linked run isn't WR). Yoshi's Island in particular just because of the mechanics in the game is super technical, and very, very fun to watch.
posted by sparkletone at 11:08 AM on October 28, 2013


So it's not just pattern breaking but enshrined pattern breaking that is not getting a nod from the devteam.

Metroid was one of the earlier games that used items and player ability to set up a sequence for the game (Zelda is similar, BTW), but in the original it was a really weak sequence. You need a quantity of missiles to open doors, and destroy the Zebetite gates and Mother Brain. You need bombs for some places and to get through the boss check room. That's almost it. Star players could win by collecting less than 15 items. Zero Mission recognizes this and gives an official way to collect 15% of the items, and even gives you special ending screens if you do it.

Super Metroid has a much stronger sequence design, but players found ways to overcome it. But that requires some degree of trickery that wasn't necessary in Metroid, meaning the art of how to do it is more obscure. People sequence broke Metroid all the time, it didn't require glitches, and sometimes people did it accidently; in Super Metroid, like most games with strong sequencing, you have to do things a certain way and take advantage of glitches.
posted by JHarris at 11:11 AM on October 28, 2013


"We're here for the long jump and Klaxx005 is taking his place. He's squatting down, and now back up. Now down, and up again. Now he is turning around and running in place slowly while he rotates back into position and ... he's at the other side of the stadium stuck halfway into a bleacher."

"Now he's somehow in the hammer throw. He's twitching spastically -- it looks like he's trying to run in two directions at once, and -- and now they're giving him the gold medal, for some reason, and he has $99,999 dollars and 39 Economizers. I quit."
posted by JHarris at 11:13 AM on October 28, 2013 [3 favorites]


:D Let's not forget the artificial oddity of Olympic qualifications both now and in the past.
There was also a prevailing concept of fairness, in which practicing or training was considered tantamount to cheating. Those who practiced a sport professionally were considered to have an unfair advantage over those who practiced it merely as a hobby.

The exclusion of professionals caused several controversies throughout the history of the modern Olympics. The 1912 Olympic pentathlon and decathlon champion Jim Thorpe was stripped of his medals when it was discovered that he had played semi-professional baseball before the Olympics. His medals were posthumously restored by the IOC in 1983 on compassionate grounds. Swiss and Austrian skiers boycotted the 1936 Winter Olympics in support of their skiing teachers, who were not allowed to compete because they earned money with their sport and were thus considered professionals.
Wikipedia's Olympic Games: Amateurism and Professionalism

And then there's the current odd standards surrounding what exactly qualifies as unnatural performance enhancing.
posted by tychotesla at 11:25 AM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


It's not exactly a sequence-break, but if you glitch through the storage shed between the biking and running sections of the triathlon and re-equip the bicycle (the NPCs judges take it away from you in a cutscene), you get some really impressive times.

There's a similar break to be found in the winter biathlon, but it's seriously frowned upon.
posted by griphus at 11:46 AM on October 28, 2013 [8 favorites]


The other thing I liked about this video was the description of a similar glitch that took you straight to the credits, so that you didn't even have to beat Ganon to win the game, and how it triggered a heated discussion about whether or not that actually counted as a legit glitch speedrun.

The broadly-agreed-upon start and end points for a speedrun seem to be (a) the user input that begins the game; and (b) the point at which the game relinquishes control from the user and begins the endgame cinematics. For a given game, I think it's a good sanity check that any speedrun, whether tool-assisted or not, glitch-exploiting or not, uses the same boundaries.

I imagine the glitch in question was seen as beyond the pale because it actually jumped past point B, rather than just elide stuff in between points A and B.

This is why I find the 100% speedruns, or the ones that embrace constraints specific to the game ("let me try to beat Zelda without using the sword") are more interesting to the gamer in me. Though the glitch-exploiting speedruns do tickle the programmer parts of my brain.
posted by savetheclocktower at 1:28 PM on October 28, 2013 [4 favorites]


What's funny to me about speedruns isn't that you can break the game — as a programmer, I know how easy it is to break shit — but that you can break some things without breaking the whole thing.

When bugs corrupt program state, all kinds of things can happen. Most - but not all - of those things are plain old crashes, or overwriting things that will just get reset later anyway. When the "attacker" gets to choose which bugs get triggered under which circumstances, they get to choose the most desirable (to them) from that multitude of options.

The scary thing is that people are able to pull off exploits like this with nothing but a game controller. Just imagine what they could do with a few lines of Perl.
posted by swr at 2:44 PM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


It's not exactly a sequence-break, but if you glitch through the storage shed between the biking and running sections of the triathlon and re-equip the bicycle (the NPCs judges take it away from you in a cutscene), you get some really impressive times.

Oh man, yeah, that reminds me of the exploit in bobsledding. The event adjusts your sled's physics profile based on a 2- or 4-man team, but you can actually hack the course to get it to treat a two-man team as four or four as two, depending on what helps you optimize the speedrun best for a given track.

(The trick is that the folks developing the bobsled event saved time by skipping a proper headcount method for figuring out how many guys you have on a team; instead it just counts how many different kinds of shoes you have on. So you can trick it into reading a two-man team as a four-man team by having each guy wear two mismatching shoes! Reading a four-man team as two people is a lot easier, you just have a couple of the guys not wear shoes and, boom, it's like they aren't there. You can't mess around with different number of shoes, though, or you'll end up with some nasty crashes.)
posted by cortex at 2:51 PM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


If you like this sort of thing, he has a good commentary speedrun video of him beating Ocarina of Time Glitched with All Medallions in 1:18:05 which is really fun to watch. You need the commentary because otherwise you have no idea what's going on.
posted by tenpointwo at 3:22 PM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've just spent a very enjoyable hour and change watching the all-medallions run. I love it.
posted by pemberkins at 5:20 PM on October 28, 2013


That run is amazing. If anyone needs convincing to watch it, how's this: because he doesn't have an ocarina, he plays songs on his hookshot instead.
posted by rifflesby at 6:02 PM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


These are all awesome. Is there a list of the best/fastest speedruns anywhere? I really enjoyed his explaining the history of the speedruns and how they work.

That Quake Done Quickest video is amazing too. I remember playing through those levels and being so annoyed with them. Seeing them beaten in under 20 seconds is crazy.
posted by gucci mane at 6:48 PM on October 28, 2013


The Speed Demos Archive is the best resource I know for record non-tool-assisted runs, but they don't generally have commentary.
posted by rifflesby at 6:54 PM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]


Did he explain why he was running backwards? Is that faster somehow?
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:40 PM on October 28, 2013


Yeah. He mentions at one point that rolling is faster for short distances, but over long distances running backward is the way to go (presumably because the time it takes to stand up after each roll compounds).
posted by rifflesby at 7:52 PM on October 28, 2013


Speed Demos Archive is the place to go for current human-only run records, while tool-assisted runs can be found at TAS Videos. And if you just want to watch some live streams of runners doing their thing (and racing!), you can check out Speed Runs Live, which is operated by Cosmo (the guy playing Ocarina of Time in the original link).
posted by IAmUnaware at 8:02 PM on October 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Did he explain why he was running backwards? Is that faster somehow?

Yes, it's faster.

Speed Demos Archive is the place to go for current human-only run records, while tool-assisted runs can be found at TAS Videos.

SDA's runs aren't always that current, I don't think. They are however verified as being done without any cheating. SDA runs tend to be submitted when someone thinks they've got a run about as good as it currently can be (barring, say, the discovery of new tricks/glitches), though maybe I'm wrong about that. There's a lot more runs on YouTube, though sorting through them to find a current record is a little more involved.

One resource for current runs I'd really recommend is The Sunday Sequence Break. It's a weekly podcast type thing, and one portion of the show (sometimes the entirety of a show) is going through the freshly set records in a given week. Even if you don't want to listen to them talk about the runs, they include links to everything int he show notes.
posted by sparkletone at 12:11 AM on October 29, 2013 [3 favorites]


Ah, nice find sparkletone!
posted by JHarris at 12:49 AM on October 29, 2013


Ha, coincidentally I was looking through my old post about tool-assisted speedruns a couple of days ago. To paraphrase Steve Lacy, "In TAS you have all the time you want to decide what to do in 15 seconds, in non-TAS you have 15 seconds."
posted by ersatz at 6:45 AM on October 29, 2013


Still watching the 100% run linked above and wanted to drop this in here for folks that don't have the time to devote to it...

He's done WAY more tricks than are apparent in the speedrun posted by the OP, it's really impressive. I bet he's done 20 different things to add speed that the casual gamer would never expect.

He's entered an area of the game that was put in by developers and is totally inaccessible by casual gamers. He did it to get a hidden (normal people would never get it) heart piece because he got screwed out of a heart piece in the fishing quest. People had never seen that fish quest break in that fashion. So he lost time there getting that dev-heart, but otherwise his run wouldn't have been 100%.

He's died on purpose several times, he's also died on accident at least 2 or 3 times. He's made mistakes and has been short on bombs once or twice due to terrible drops. So, I guess I'm not surprised that his run has already been beaten.

There have been several glitchy cut scenes due to the fact that young/old link was where old/young link was supposed to be. Funny.

I'm about halfway through.
posted by RolandOfEld at 8:54 AM on October 29, 2013


Awesome technical breakdown of how the pausing to enable frame specific tricks works at 3:38:00 or so in the 100% video.
posted by RolandOfEld at 11:44 AM on October 29, 2013


Whoa, that was unexpected.

For those that didn't know the livestream generated quite a pile of money for cancer research...

Anyway beginning at 4:29:32 -

Lady in the second row:

"So, this will probably be my last chance to tell this story really quick.

I don't know if you guys noticed, but I've been knitting the entire time I've been here. I actually learned to knit from my grandmother. But she died of cancer a couple of years ago. ...and there's actually pretty much a 50% chance I'm going to die of cancer because, well because my dad's entire side of the family has died from cancer.

And, .... [indecipherable tears] ....


So pretty much this blue is the last blue of my grandmother's that I'm ever going to have to knit with...

So, until next ?we meet?"

*you could hear a pin drop in the room for about 10 seconds*

Someone Else:

"I believe your knitting deserves a break and round of applause from the speedrun."

*controller goes down and cue applause as Link stops running for the first time in quite a few hours*

posted by RolandOfEld at 12:49 PM on October 29, 2013 [1 favorite]


For those that didn't know the livestream generated quite a pile of money for cancer research...

SDA does two marathons a year for cancer research. The most recent one raised something like $250,000 over the course of a week for the cancer-related charity they do these for. AGDQ is usually bigger than the summer one though for whatever reason. I think the last one of those did a little under 2x that.

They do lots of cool raffles and donation incentives (letting viewers pick character/file names, or whether 100%, low% or any% gets done on various runs, etc). The next one is in January and I linked the schedule earlier in the thread. It's going to be a good time.
posted by sparkletone at 1:10 PM on October 29, 2013 [1 favorite]


Everything about this is phenomenal, and I much appreciate all of the links (heh, Links) that I will now have to watch in the lab.
posted by Buckt at 5:51 PM on October 29, 2013


I finished the 100% video. Where's my medal?
posted by RolandOfEld at 8:40 AM on November 11, 2013


We can't issue the medal until we know how long it took you.
posted by radwolf76 at 8:57 AM on November 15, 2013


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