EPTOn April 05 2017 21:03 Plexa wrote:
Yeah that's one reason why the most commonly run A Link to the Past category is Any% no major glitches, since you can use them to beat the game in under 2 minutes otherwise. So the category still include minor glitches like spin attacking on a ladder granting super speed and holding an item while dashing, but you still see every dungeon beaten in very impressive fashion. You're definitely not alone in thinking that speedruns need to have some lets play element to them - zfg is a prominent OoT runner who has the WR in every category (more or less) except any% because he thinks wrong warping to the end of the game isn't interesting.
Yeah that's one reason why the most commonly run A Link to the Past category is Any% no major glitches, since you can use them to beat the game in under 2 minutes otherwise. So the category still include minor glitches like spin attacking on a ladder granting super speed and holding an item while dashing, but you still see every dungeon beaten in very impressive fashion. You're definitely not alone in thinking that speedruns need to have some lets play element to them - zfg is a prominent OoT runner who has the WR in every category (more or less) except any% because he thinks wrong warping to the end of the game isn't interesting.
I think the standard categories are fascinating though, because I was thinking about my ideal category specifically suited for the Keen games and in the end I wasn't convinced they would necessarily make for better speedruns.
I watched one Keen 6 speedrun on YT and I was a bit annoyed that the person played the game on Easy to make the bullet glitch easier to perform, because I thought to myself: if you are going to glitch through one of my favorite games at least have the decency to try a higher difficulty level. But then I noticed that CapnClever doesn't always play the games on Hard either despite easily having the skill to do so. I was wondering about the rationale and my guess was that he was trying to avoid some random enemy behavior which would either necessitate a slowdown of the run or just depending on pure luck. Either way it wouldn't be quite as satisfying, but in the end it is still a compromise because now you have situations where he trivially clears some part which should be tricky to execute on a higher difficulty. I play the games on the highest difficulty myself just because it feels more involved, so it was disappointing to me to find he made a different decision.
And I noticed CapnClever didn't have a 100% run of Keen 6 available anywhere. He did have a glitchless run, but again, that one wasn't ideal because in Keen 6 the more difficult levels tend to be optional, and in general I did want to see them. I didn't look very hard, but I did find/watch a 100% K6 run on YT but this wasn't glitchless and all the difficult and more interesting levels were just quickly glitched through and while that might be fine for a quick run, for 15 minutes it's a bit lackluster to watch.
But even suppose I were to find my ideal, the 100% hard glitchless CapnClever run, I still would have things to nitpick about, because in the Keen games the most challenging content is almost always optional. 100% is actually deceiving, because it just means to complete all the levels, it doesn't mean you have to 100% complete every level and visit every area and make every possible jump.
However, even if one were to make this a new category: glitchless, highest difficulty, 100% & 100% area coverage, then it's still unsatisfying because e.g. some of the glitch usage seems really cool and should be encouraged. The irony here is that in trying to create a category which requires you to fully explore every aspect of the game you are already banning some of the potentially coolest parts.
And suppose that you would have this category, it wouldn't even work for all platformers, because linear platformers like Mario don't really have a ton of optional areas you can investigate, it's more like they have different routes through the same linear level that you can take. You could force the player to acquire every possible star, coin, mushroom, but that seems really pedantic and boring. For Keen too, it seems a bit silly to nearly complete a level but to have to backtrack to get one bit of candy somewhere.
I had a final disappointment when I contrasted the CapnClever speedruns with some TAS Mario ones I was used to, because I noticed that CC tends to play more conservatively, and make more mistakes, in the later parts of the speedrun. The obvious reason seems to me that if he makes a mistake early on he can just reset, but if he already has a really good run so far he's not going to risk it in the last moment just to save half a second somewhere. So this is perfectly understandable and good strategy, but it actually makes the runs slightly less pristine than they should be.
At this point I realized I was impossible to please, and furthermore, that most of what I desired was already available by just watching speedruns of several categories instead of demanding this Lovecraftian horror category which covers everything I specifically want. So now I'm more content and realistic in my outlook, but I have become more jaded.
13 Absolutely stunning.
