Thursday, January 08, 2015

Get Yourself Speedrunning

The people at Speed Runs Live decided they want to actually capitalize on all the viewership from AGDQ by scheduling three 'easy' races for the 3 weekends after AGDQ. This isn't actually anything terribly special since as far as I know anyone can go and create a race for any game at any time as long as they have at least one opponent lined up. What is special is that they're sporadically advertising it on the AGDQ stream and it has a big banner on the front page.

I'm not sure if they're going to bring in a ton of new people or not, but I'm going to give at least the first one a go. I've actually been idling on the SRL IRC server since last year's AGDQ but never felt like I knew enough to join any of the races. (Both in terms of strategies for any games and in terms of knowing who to talk to.) But now there's a race that's expecting completely new people in both regards. So while I'm certain to get completely destroyed by anyone who actually plays these games I have a chance to not come last if there are enough other new players.

As an added bonus, racing for at least one hour is a requirement for getting your stream featured on the SRL page. Another potential source of viewers! (Only for speedrun related stuff of course, but I'm sure I'll get back to my FFII routing after AGDQ ends.)

Anyway, the three races are Super Mario Bros 3, then A Link to the Past, then Sonic 2. It's not clear if emulating games is cool or not, but luckily I have a copy of the first one so I can maybe find out then.

I was hoping to find good notes for what the actual SMB3 run is like but haven't had any luck so far. I did find one thing on gamefaqs explaining how they manage to keep their super speed thing even after it seems like they should have lost it by the physics rules that I remember from the game.

And I get to try out my SNES S-video cable. Woo!

2 comments:

Sthenno said...

I'm pretty sure that someone showed off a speed run of SMB3 this week that only took a few minutes. There was some kind of glitched pipe that went straight to the final room. Maybe it was a TAS. You might want to check.

Ziggyny said...

The race is for the 'warpless' category so that particular trick is out for this, but it sounds cool so I will look for it.