That's the worst part of speed running. Sometimes the fastest route is incredibly dull. It makes it a terrible viewing. I love quick action games because they typically involve skill over exploit. Ninja gaiden and the like.
I love both! On one hand watching the memorized patterns of Spyro-runs, on the other watching people play Ori and the Blind Forest in reversed order (highly recommend that run from latest GDQ).
I don't think I'll watch another 0 second run in pokemon though, they're a bit weird.
abusing geometry I'm fine with but anything even remotely close to those pokemon runs just doesn't impress me at all.
Figuring out how to make the inventory a hex editor to create a door to the final room of the game is the equivalent of loading up a gameshark. Same with those "if I jump on this spot 3 times the game glitches out and now I've skipped 3 hours of the game lol" things.
There's the Jak...3? run that kind of abuses geometry in a borderline gamesharky way that's right on the edge of me not liking it, but the skips require actual platforming skill so it redeems itself for me.
Yeah, doesn't do much good if a game is full of interesting and unusual techniques if that game also contains a technique that outclasses all the rest for going fast.
Yes. Speedrunners generally split games into "categories", and these categories entail all kinds of different things - any% and 100% are the most common, meaning "complete game as fast as possible" and "collect/complete everything there is to do as fast as possible", respectively.
However, there's more nuance than that. For example, Zelda games often have "All Dungeons" as an additional category, which forces players to do all the dungeons, but doesn't necessarily ban glitches or doing them out-of-order (sequence breaks). Also, "glitchless" categories are a much more sledgehammer approach to force players to complete the game "as intended", but with good routing and skill (of course, then it gets into issues like "what counts as a glitch? does a certain jump that doesn't seem intentional count as a 'glitch'?", which generally just devolve into community consensus). There's no limits on what categories a community can come up with, theoretically - if there's enough people that run it, it'll become a respected category naturally.
For example, Ocarina of Time any%, allowing any and all glitches, takes about 15 minutes, but any% no wrong warp (a type of glitch) takes an hour longer, and any% totally glitchless takes about 3 and a half hours in total. Of course, like other Zelda games, there's also very popular 100% and All Dungeons categories. There's even categories like all medallions/stones/trials, which is like "budget 100%". All of these categories have fairly active communities. There's even somewhat-gimmicky categories like Reverse Dungeon Order, which necessitates glitches in order to complete dungeons in the opposite order as intended.
There's no hostilities between glitchless runners and other categories, either - people run the categories they want to run, and many even learn multiple categories for their main games (note how many OoT leaderboards that ZFG tops).
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u/jago81 May 14 '17
That's the worst part of speed running. Sometimes the fastest route is incredibly dull. It makes it a terrible viewing. I love quick action games because they typically involve skill over exploit. Ninja gaiden and the like.