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Light Sanctity

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gotta go fast brrrr—Speedrunning; is an enjoyable thing to do. So many things you can do within a game, which can be game breaking. Such as in Twilight Princess. In this game, you are normally suppose to complete: The Forest Temple, Goron Mines, Lakebed Temple. But can actually skip them momentarily and come back to them with the Master Sword :O as shown here that will link you to the trick called Early Master Sword. This is done during the Faron Twilight Section. There are many more tricks, glitches, etc. But too many to state but here is a full run By me that shows the run. Not the greatest but I enjoyed it :)

the other game I played a lot of was Lightning Returns: FF XIII, run can be found Here not as interesting as Twilight Princess but still cool :)
 

Plague von Karma

Banned deucer.
I've found myself enjoying Punch-Out Wii speedrun videos for a while now. Not sure how it started, just watched a zallard1 video and then it started invading my reccs. As I watched more I began to really appreciate the whole thing though, it's kind of incredible. And with zallard's constant world record breaking feats, I think I may actually be witnessing speedrunning history. It's nuts.

Have a watch of this and then read the description. In this same week he dumpstered contender Soda Popinski and made a really difficult Bald Bull record. I can't imagine how he does it...
 

Mr. Uncompetitive

What makes us human?
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Hi I used to speedrun Kirby Canvas Curse and have a lot of fun stories to tell
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So for those unfamiliar, Canvas Curse is a Kirby platformer controlled entirely via touch screen (Kirby is a ball now, so you gotta draw lines to guide him throughout levels and tap him to dash forward). What makes the game a bit more interesting is the movement options: The fastest technique in the game is something the game doesn't really tell you about called Looping, where if you draw a loop and have Kirby go through it, he will move particularly fast as he exits (kinda like Sonic). You also need to manage a very limited amount of ink for drawing lines, which replenishes in various ways, and need to consider the time it takes to make a loop. It's a lot to micromanage and makes the run incredible execution-heavy, especially because...this game is super jank. I think anyone who has played this casually can attest, but it turns out drawing lines quickly doesn't always work out well, and just by the game's nature (a touch screen controlled platformer) the physics engine gets wonky at points. You also need to keep in mind that the bosses act like minigames, which work entirely different from the main game but are also execution-heavy (Kracko Jr. has historically been the biggest run killer for me). And if that wasn't enough, everything you've worked towards can made or broken at the very end, since the final boss is an RNG-fest that can cause like 45 seconds worth of variation depending on what patterns it gives. To put simply, Canvas Curse is a wack speedgame, but damn there's just something about it that's fun.

I started casually running the game around 2014. At the time, very few people had run the game, but the world record holder was the pretty well-known speedrunner Kirbymastah; he did a lot of Metroid speedrunning back in the day, but nowadays he's most known for Fire Emblem (If you've watched Mekkah's Youtube content you might've heard of him, and he does couch commentary for GDQs pretty often). So needless to say I was kinda spooked about getting anywhere close to his 1:16:xx. But with some practice, I did eventually get there and managed to record a 1:13:xx at the end of 2015 (shoutouts to Ben for letting me borrow his 3DS capture card, the Wii U VC port hadn't come out yet).

But things started getting even more interesting in 2016. A guy named GloriousLiar started TASing the game and starting doing speedruns of the game shortly thereafter, so for the first there was more than person actively running this game lol. GL did eventually run this game at a GDQ (you can hear me mentioned around 1:15:00 :p), but during this time, we found a glitch called Velocity Clipping (or Position Correction Clipping) that pretty much breaks the game in two:. It basically works by aligning a line on a pixel very close to the end of a loop; Kirby then gets stuck on this line, and gets launched at an extremely high speed in another direction, often resulting in him clipping through walls. It's TAS-only at the moment since it's wayyy too precise and the camera shifting makes it very difficult to gauge (we do allow Wii U VC Menu pause buffering since it's the only way to make this trick remotely feasible RTA, even though no one has implemented it in a run yet), but it does result in an absolutely wild TAS. Check it out, GL worked very hard on it and it's pretty mindblowing if you've played the game before


Me and GL went back and forth with the RTA speedrun record, by the end I had a 1:05xx on Wii U VC, but GL had a 1:06:xx and a faster IGT on DS (Wii U VC is the faster release but it didn't come out in the US until late 2016 lol), but he seemed to consider me the WR holder regardless :/. Neither me or GL has seriously ran the game since 2017, and I thought I pushed it about as far as I physically wanted to...

But then in 2018, some Japanese guy, with no other speedruns, came out of NOWHERE and dropped a 56:xx. It sounds like a god damn meme to get my record broken by some random Japanese player, but this really happened. We were fucking stunned.

This runner is Wakaza and I highly recommend everyone follows him, he's a legend in the making. He was playing on Wii U VC just like me, and there was no evidence to suggest he was cheating/splicing, so his run was legit and...by god it's so good. He found a bunch of new strats (my favorite being using Spark in screen 2 of 6-3) but most importantly, his execution was absolutely unreal, and unlike me (and I think GL) who had never seriously routed the game, Wakaza clearly routed it to an extreme degree. His mistakes were minor at best, but it's crazy to think he was able to optimize a one hour game, one with a lot variation thanks to jank, by almost 10 minutes.

The best part though? Wakaza didn't just fade into obscurity, oh god no. He pretty much used this as a stepping stone to get into more Kirby speedrunning. He started going on a tear and got WRs for the main categories in Mass Attack, Squeak Squad, Super Star Ultra, Nightmare in Dreamland, and Adventure. Most of these games have a lot more leaderboard entries than Canvas Curse too (the latter two have about 100), and some of these are pretty decisive: His Squeak Squad runs are over two minutes faster than 2nd place, which is absolutely unreal for a platformer that short and with dozens of players. He's currently running Amazing Mirror to prep for the Kirby Speedrun Relay (April 3rd for those interested in watching ) and recently decided to pick up Canvas Curse again lol. Needless to say, y'all should follow his Twitch.
Note: His Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland record was only beaten 3 days ago...and it was only by 1 second too.
1614021434588.png

I don't really speedrun anything anymore (I've thought about it, but eh, have other commitments), and especially not Canvas Curse since I don't think I can come close to Wakaza at this point, but I still follow the community, and I'm really happy that people finally started Canvas Curse now that the relay is happening, feels nice knowing I'm not one of the only people familiar with this game, and I get to watch everyone get better at the game :)
 
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I've talked a lot about how I'm a speedrunner in other threads, so today I'm gonna talk about what I'm currently doing: Kingdom Hearts 2 Randomizer.

Long story short, it basically combines an existing mod of the game that gives you a world map room and lets you go anywhere from the beginning with the randomization that swaps the locations of all abilities and items. So knowing where all the chests are is pretty important, and working out how to manage important fights when you're missing some core abilities can be difficult.

The final boss can only be accessed when you find the 3 "proofs" which in 2fm are responsible for giving you the gold crown, and in races a hint system is typically used which turns all Secret Ansem Reports into actual useful info about the seed. These hints take the form "World X has Y important things" where the important stuff is proofs, drives, summons, magic, reports, and torn pages.

It's been a lot of fun! Routing on the fly is definitely an experience and the KH community is pretty active on this right now, holding tournaments about every other week. So if anyone wants to try it out or race me, let me know.
 

TROP

BAN DRUDDIGON. FIREWALL DRAGON DID NOTHING WRONG
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Speedruns are a really good resource even if someone never does one by him/herself because it helps expose how broken some commonly ignored things (like x-items in pokemon and magic and summons in kh1 and kh2 for example) truly are or what annoying and dumb parts can be ignored either partially or completely. Knowing how to break the game to do "fun/cool" looking things is the best thing about them though. Example of that last thing here for the otherwise dumb and stupid game known as Halo 2 in legendary using heavy use of the insane mobility and speed provided by the energy sword using the sword flying and sword cancel inputs details on those here they also work on the xbox and steam versions of mcc now.

New way to potentially play the game is also a nice thing.
 
I've dabbled in speedrunning for quite awhile, with games like SADX, SA2B, Celeste, SM64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Odyssey.

As you can see platformers are something that really interest me, but I always struggle with trying to keep the practice consistent, then I just lose interest and end up not playing at all, lol.

I really like how in speedrunning there's skips that are literally game changing, how some of us struggle with a certain boss fight, and seeing speedrunners beat those bosses in 5 seconds is awesome to me, I love the dedication and how the runners prove that you can become good at something if you try hard enough, also the speedrunning community is so tight-knit with each other, a very humbling experience honestly.
 
Hey all, first post on the website :)

On speedrunning: I'm a big fan of both speedruns and TASes, they're some of my favorite things to watch. I don't have any particular favorite runs or runners, I just watch anything that shows up in my YouTube recommended that's interesting lol. That being said, I really like the videos that SummoningSalt and TomatoAnus do highlighting different games. They're pretty different in tone but both are very high quality channels.

General gaming: I've been playing both Nexomon: Extinction and Dark Souls a lot. Nexomon is a pretty fun Pokemon clone with some decent writing and mon design but a kinda flawed battle system tbh. Mons' stats are too similar and a complete lack of status moves makes battles into "hit enemy, switch if you're at a disadvantage" even moreso than a typical Pokemon playthrough. Still pretty fun tho. Dark Souls is Dark Souls, not much to say that hasn't been already. I've just gotten through Sen's (WAY worse than Blighttown imo) and I'm having a blast. Can't wait to jam with O&S :)
Backloggery: https://backloggery.com/RonJenzy
 

Astra

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In all serious, definitely the greatest feeling you can get from speedrunning is slowly finding out ways yourself to improve your time. When I first started my speedrun, I was consistently always around 42-45 seconds, but as I continued to figure out techniques to complete it faster, I shaved it down to 36 seconds, which is an improvement of around 6-9 seconds and is better than the previous record by around 2 seconds. It's just such a great feeling to get better and better with your times, especially for speedrunning a game like, say, Minecraft, even if that game in particular has a good amount of luck involved.
 

Band

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Ok I was planning to reply to this a lot faster but other smogon and irl things came up.

I'll link some speedruns I enjoyed:

This Hollow Knight speedrun by Vysuals done on Games Done Quick. Hollow Knight is overall one of my favorite games tbf so i'm biased BUT one of the skipping strats used here is pretty insane and is the hardest one in Any%.

The player has the option to hang on walls for as long as they'd like using an ability called Mantis Claw. They can also obtain an ability called Super Dash, where they charge and dash at full speed until the player stops it or they hit an enemy/wall. The part of the game where the strat is used requires the player to hang above a very small ledge in an acid lake that has a bunch of spiky vines above it. This means there's only a small gap where the player can dash between the acid lake and the spikes. The player has to jump, turn around, dash normally, hang on the ledge literally just above the lake, and superdash to skip the acid lake, which you could otherwise swim on like it were water using Isma's Tear.

Problem is, Isma's Tear is hard to access, being all the way below the City of Tears in a very secluded area of the Royal Waterways. To get to the City of Tears, you need the City's Crest, which you get from defeating the False Knight. But that takes time to do and you can skip the fight. Doing this strat lets the player skip fighting the False Knight and traversing through the Royal Waterways. By doing this, you can reach the Queen's Gardens to fight the Traitor Lord and get the first half of the Kingsoul from the Queen of Hallownest earlier, which is needed to get the true ending. When I first saw this trick it completely blew my mind because its so goddamn ridiculous to do, and you don't know how hard it is until you play the game.

This very famous Zelda BOTW speedrun done by sketodara01414 that unfortunately isn't World Record anymore but still a very short and enjoyable watch.

This Zelda Majora's Mask speedrun done by popesquidward. It shows how the speedrun community evolved to find new ways to beat the game even faster, which is amazing to me. I also enjoyed watching it since I never played any other Zelda games aside from BOTW and wanted to see what the older games were like.
 

Light Sanctity

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Majora Mask, even if you don't speed run it. It is truly an amazing game. I never Speedrun that game, since it is sometimes difficult to do consistently. But I also loved Ocarina of Time, too.
 

earl

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Never really into speedrunning myself (I do love a good Summoning Salt video though), closest I've done are a few speedrunning achievements baked into videogames. Most fun I ever had with one was the Slay the Spire sub-20 minutes win achievement, which I managed to win a 17 minute run to earn it. It's such a decision-heavy, randomized game that being able to blast thru it in under a 3rd of the average run length was a really neat way to play, not to mention I just happened to have 2 friends watching over my shoulder at the time. But then again the seeded WR time is like 3 minutes so 17 minutes looks pretty ass compared to that lol
 

Mr. Uncompetitive

What makes us human?
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May as well bring up this up, but I just found that Go1den's bi-annual 12 Hour Challenge is happening this weekend O:

Basically it's an event to encourage people to spend a day learning a brand new speedgame, streaming their efforts to do so. I joined one several years ago to try learning Pokemon Emerald and I've been meaning to give another one a try. Anyone one here wanna join in and learn a game together perhaps? Might be good motivation lol
 

Light Sanctity

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May as well bring up this up, but I just found that Go1den's bi-annual 12 Hour Challenge is happening this weekend O:

Basically it's an event to encourage people to spend a day learning a brand new speedgame, streaming their efforts to do so. I joined one several years ago to try learning Pokemon Emerald and I've been meaning to give another one a try. Anyone one here wanna join in and learn a game together perhaps? Might be good motivation lol
I did not really Speedrun Emerald but I did watch one of AGS; All Gold Symbols— from beginning to end. Someone did that and finished it fairly quick. Took me about 40+ in-game hours to finish lol. Was a pain in my rear but I did 6/7. Noland's facility was hell so I gave up.
 

Mr. Uncompetitive

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I did not really Speedrun Emerald but I did watch one of AGS; All Gold Symbols— from beginning to end. Someone did that and finished it fairly quick. Took me about 40+ in-game hours to finish lol. Was a pain in my rear but I did 6/7. Noland's facility was hell so I gave up.
Ah yeah that was Werster! Definitely my favorite speedrunner, he was the guy who really get me interested in speedrunning all the way back in 2013, super entertaining and crazy good at the games he runs.

His collection of Pokemon moments on the channel are wonderful; he's basically seen everything RNG that can possibly happen in-game thanks to speedrunning (do be warned that some of his older stuff has some really nasty language and emotions, he has been on the mend with that behavior though). And this is my single favorite reaction anyone has had to finding a shiny
 

Light Sanctity

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Ah yeah that was Werster! Definitely my favorite speedrunner, he was the guy who really get me interested in speedrunning all the way back in 2013, super entertaining and crazy good at the games he runs.

His collection of Pokemon moments on the channel are wonderful; he's basically seen everything RNG that can possibly happen in-game thanks to speedrunning (do be warned that some of his older stuff has some really nasty language and emotions, he has been on the mend with that behavior though). And this is my single favorite reaction anyone has had to finding a shiny
Hahaha yeah that is nice "can not escape"

20DA74AA-FA03-4CB3-A797-CCF72BE9CA6A.jpeg

here is my image of 6/7 missing Noland's ;-; ExarionU also did it. He got terrible luck in Pile Gold (first) attempt. Got OHKOed by a OHKo move by a Gligar
 
One of the more enjoyable aspects of (watching content on) speedrunning to me is when it really starts digging into the game code, such as with RNG manipulation. It does mean that a lot of the videos I enjoyed the most are explanations of tricks rather than actual runs.

As for the tangent, I'm apparently the wierdo with more patience for the Factory than making a good team on my own
1614216439479.png
 

Light Sanctity

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Hey now ;-; that hurts did you do Open Level or Level 50? (I would redo it but going through Tower, Spencer's facility, and Pyramid ugh)
 
Hey now ;-; that hurts did you do Open Level or Level 50? (I would redo it but going through Tower, Spencer's facility, and Pyramid ugh)
Open level for factory, level 50 for everything else. It absolutely took ages (that file's got 240+ hours on it), but I happen to enjoy Factory battles, had a bunch of long bus trips, and still haven't internalized that my Switch can be used as a handheld.
 

DC

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Not a speedrunner myself, but I do like watching speedruns, especially of games like Metroid and Super Mario. For me personally, I think that 100% speedruns are more enjoyable than any% speedruns, especially for games that have a less linear progression system. The developers of the games put a lot of effort into creating them, and it seems sorta disingenuous to them to skip a majority of the game. You get to experience the full story of the game, which is super important imo.
 
I've tried the Emerald All Gold Symbols run a couple of times and I'm still planning on finishing it eventually but it's really long and that can be hard on you. Definitely beat the challenge itself legit, and done the speedrun route piecewise to practice too.

The deepest I went was 20 hours in and I bailed when I managed to lose on Dome Ace Tucker with the Arena and Palace still left to go. I still have a lot of work to do making the EV training faster, for instance. Maybe I should give it another shot.
 
I'm not a speedrunner, but I've looked into speedruns of various games every now and again and I find it really interesting. My first pique in curiosity came from this video by Practical TAS which was incredibly well made and dug into the mechanics and history of Peach's target test stage from Super Smash Bros Melee. I watched a few other videos on the channel too and they did not disappoint! Prior to this, I didn't know that there was a speedrunning community online and how deep it really went.

I'm really curious though, and this is a question that is directed at anyone who wants to answer, what got you into speedrunning? Did you want to challenge yourself? Did you want to set a record? Did you want to experience the game in a new way? Perhaps it was something else? I haven't had any desire to try speedrunning but I'd love to hear how others got into it.

Also, that Canvas Curse video is incredible. Sounds like a really cool game to speedrun and something you could get really create with, and the video showcases a lot of that possible creativity.
 
I don't often consume raw speedrun content, rather I love listening to speedrun explanation videos. Whether it is about an entire run, a specific glitch, or anything else.

Bismuth is one of my favorite content creators that creates this kind of thing. The explanations of glitches in a short but easy to understand manner, the visuals to aid viewers who don't know about certain mechanics or how they work (such as the editing of his Legend of Zelda speedrun explanation, down to creating a shadow link so we know how it affects the enemies movement), and the voice itself are all things I really like. Give him a watch if you like speedrun content. Even on topics, I knew about, I was entertained.

Summoning Salt may be more known, but I still wanted to talk about him. God, every video of his is a journey. The fact he can make me invested in runs that happened years ago, and how he writes down the narrative accurately and enjoyably is very impressive. Home - We're finally landing never felt so powerful.

Lowest percent brings more variated content to the table. From explaining how specific glitches work, to how glitches themselves are found, to more niche speedruns and just general speedrun community discussions.

Hope this still fits the topic!
 
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