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Difference between revisions of "Speed run"

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In the gaming world, a '''speed run''' is any attempt to get from the start of a videogame/level/area to the end as quickly as possible.  Doing so may require the use of many different [[strategy|strategies]], tricks, and/or glitches. In racing games, speed runs are more usually refered to as '''time trials'''.
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A speedrun is a play-through, or recording thereof, of a whole video game or a selected part of it (such as a single level) performed with the intent of completing it as fast as possible, optionally under certain prerequisites, mainly for the purposes of entertainment and competition. The term is a compound of the words speed and run (as in "running" through a game, referring to the playing of a game).
  
The nature of a speed run can vary massively. Speed runs may be timed using an in-game timer or using a real clock; they may be segmented or single-segment; they may involve 100% completion of all in-game objectives, or minimal percentage completion, or disregard this percentage entirely; they may allow or disallow certain tricks that can be used in the game to save time. Speed runs are usually also separated by difficulty setting, and, when it makes a difference, by system region (PAL or NTSC).
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Commonly, speedruns are recorded on either media such as DVDs (predominantly when games on consoles are concerned), or as digital files, by the people ("players") who make them, for entertainment, time refinement, or verifiability purposes.
  
==Extremes of speed running==
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Entertainment has traditionally been the reason for the creation of speedruns, as the phenomenon was originally devised by enthusiasts who began comparing each other's playing skills via movies exchanged over the Internet, while verifiability stems from the necessity to provide evidence that one's playthrough went by the typical or game-specific speedrun rules and thus counts as a valid attempt to beat the record.
  
===Shortest runs===
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In order to attain the highest possible quality of play in a speedrun, the author usually has to look at and think about the game differently from the way that most casual gamers would. It is usually required that speedruns be planned out carefully before they are attempted; this need stems from the complexity of the separate areas in which the gameplay takes place. Additionally, games and their physics engines are not flawless and will allow the runner to do unexpected things that could save time. Despite their inherent differences, they seem to share a lot of common traits in this context, such as the ability to disjunct the common sequence of events in a game and thus skip entire parts of it—the act of sequence breaking—and the ability to use programming errors, or glitches, to one's advantage.
  
The best known time for the completion of a Melee under any settings in [[Super Smash Bros. Melee]] for the [[Nintendo GameCube]] is 0.00 seconds. This can be done using the following settings, devised by [[Sam Hughes]]:
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Some games are considered to be ideal specimen for fast completion purposes and have online communities dedicated to them, which provide (or have provided) a highly active platform for discussing the speedrunning of one or more of these particular games.
* Select a Stock Match and set the stock to 1 life each.
 
* Turn on the game timer for 1 minute (this is so you can see how long the melee lasts, that's all).
 
* Set the Damage Multiplier to x2.0.
 
* Select Super Sudden Death mode, so both players start on 300% damage.
 
* Pick to play as Kirby against a large character such as Mewtwo, as players three and four respectively.
 
* Select the Mute City stage, so the characters start off right next to each other.
 
Have Kirby immediately do a horizontal smash attack at his enemy. It is relatively straightforward to time this so that the blow connects and knocks Mewtwo off the side of the screen ''before the game timer starts counting'', resulting in the game ending with the timer still at 1:00.00. This is, therefore, a zero-time run (plus or minus 1/200th of a second).
 
  
The shortest speed run on record for a challenge ''without'' massively customisable settings as in SSB:M is [http://www.geocities.com/n64highscores/FiringRangeSilver.html 0.17 seconds], for completing the Silver [[K7 Avenger]] challenge in the [[Firing Range]] of [[Perfect Dark]], and was set by [[Chris Rayola]].
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While speedrunning initially started out as a small project, initiated by a few enthusiasts who shared their demos online, it has since become a phenomenon that encompasses several active websites and an increasingly expansive assortment of speedrun videos that are freely and widely circulated on the Internet.
 
 
===Longest runs===
 
 
 
[[Speed Demos Archive]] sets a soft upper limit of 7 hours on acceptable runs, and the longest run it lists is [http://speeddemosarchive.com/ChronoCross.html 7 hours 55 minutes 8 seconds] for a run through [[Chrono Cross]] made by [[Wesley Corron|Wesley 'Molotov' Corron]].  This time is based off the "bad" ending.  An alternate ending file was included to show the "good" ending on Chrono Cross, which has a time of 7:59:15.
 
 
 
The longest ''known'' "speed" run is a 101% run through [[Donkey Kong 64]] made by [[Wouter Jansen]] which was unplanned, has very little emphasis on speed and acts mostly as a walkthrough. His time was roughly [http://www.archive.org/details/DonkeyKong64_101p 13 hours 20 minutes].
 
 
 
Theoretically, there is no upper limit to the length of a speed run performed by a sufficiently incompetent player. Even assuming an active, capable player, an optimised route and a game with a definite ending (not a never-ending game such as [[Tetris]]), speed runs can have essentially unlimited length: for example, an exhaustive 100% completion of [[The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker]] would, optimistically, take more than 100 hours of play. Of course, such a run would be stretching the limits of "speedy".
 
 
 
[[Category:Terminology]]
 

Revision as of 17:26, 26 April 2014

A speedrun is a play-through, or recording thereof, of a whole video game or a selected part of it (such as a single level) performed with the intent of completing it as fast as possible, optionally under certain prerequisites, mainly for the purposes of entertainment and competition. The term is a compound of the words speed and run (as in "running" through a game, referring to the playing of a game).

Commonly, speedruns are recorded on either media such as DVDs (predominantly when games on consoles are concerned), or as digital files, by the people ("players") who make them, for entertainment, time refinement, or verifiability purposes.

Entertainment has traditionally been the reason for the creation of speedruns, as the phenomenon was originally devised by enthusiasts who began comparing each other's playing skills via movies exchanged over the Internet, while verifiability stems from the necessity to provide evidence that one's playthrough went by the typical or game-specific speedrun rules and thus counts as a valid attempt to beat the record.

In order to attain the highest possible quality of play in a speedrun, the author usually has to look at and think about the game differently from the way that most casual gamers would. It is usually required that speedruns be planned out carefully before they are attempted; this need stems from the complexity of the separate areas in which the gameplay takes place. Additionally, games and their physics engines are not flawless and will allow the runner to do unexpected things that could save time. Despite their inherent differences, they seem to share a lot of common traits in this context, such as the ability to disjunct the common sequence of events in a game and thus skip entire parts of it—the act of sequence breaking—and the ability to use programming errors, or glitches, to one's advantage.

Some games are considered to be ideal specimen for fast completion purposes and have online communities dedicated to them, which provide (or have provided) a highly active platform for discussing the speedrunning of one or more of these particular games.

While speedrunning initially started out as a small project, initiated by a few enthusiasts who shared their demos online, it has since become a phenomenon that encompasses several active websites and an increasingly expansive assortment of speedrun videos that are freely and widely circulated on the Internet.