Key Points:
- Suigi has secured all five major speedrunning categories in Super Mario 64, effectively declaring the game’s speedrunning community ‘dead’.
- Suigi’s dominance is so profound that his records in all 5 main categories remain largely unchallenged.
The Five Star Categories:
- 120 star: Completes every single star in the game.
- 70 star: Completes all normal requirements to reach the final level.
- 16 star: Uses glitches and techniques to significantly reduce required stars.
- 1 star: Further optimizes the 16 star run for a single star collection.
- 0 star: Eliminates stars entirely, focusing on time.
Background Details:
- Some of Suigi’s records were set over a year ago; his 16-star record alone still leads by 6 seconds.
- Suigi estimates it could take up to a couple of years before someone else beats his current world records.
How do you feel about the dedication and skill demonstrated in these ultra-optimized speedruns? Do such efforts bring value to gaming or are they more of an academic exercise?
I’ve seen enough Summoning Salt videos to know that it’s never dead
Do such efforts bring value to gaming or are they more of an academic exercise?
I’ll go with neither as well. They are an interesting sidestepping of how most games “should be played” that often discovers interesting new glitches, bugs and exploits. Using a TAS to execute arbitrary code is interesting, having that transformed into a possibility for human players (SNES Code Injection – Flappy Bird in SMW, by SethBling) is amazing beyond belief.
Congratulations to Suigi getting the quadfecta! After watching Karl’s videos on Suigi’s 120 and 70 star records, I knew it only had to be a matter of time until he’d conquer them all.
Now we can all focus on the A-press challenge.
Do such efforts bring value to gaming or are they more of an academic exercise?
Neither? Speedrunning is entirely nihilistic. It rejects the rules of society to the point of rejecting the rules of games themselves in favor of meaningless tantric repetition. It’s the eternal pointless chase for a meaning that was never there and never will.
I find it fun and dreadful at the same time, as a concept, I would never do it myself in a million years.
In short, it’s an artistic performance.
i don’t get the nihilism angle. it seems to be all about selffulfilment and pushing oneself to see what one is capable of. simmiliar to triathlets, race car drivers or climbers.
Speedrunning is competitive QA.
Prove me wrong.
Their action do not assure any quality, they actually advocate for keeping bugs in, the opposite of what any QA wants.
Meh, debatable. QA finds the bugs, what to do with them is more a development/production call.
But I can compromise: Speedrunning is competitive QA testing. How about that?
If a bug makes the run take longer they don’t investigate it.
Actual counterexample, plenty of optimization came from random guys popping up in the community explaining something they found about the code, that was overlooked for years.
More? A huge emphasis is put on mechanically pulling the run off, which is pointless from a QA point of view, now we can maybe make an argument for TAS in that regard.
Nah, I’d say you’re mostly making my point. Optimizing getting through the game fast is absolutely part of the skillset, and random people noticing something obvious everybody had been ignoring is bread-and-butter for testers.
I mean, for testers that care and are going hard, which is where the “competitive” part comes in.
Well… They’re not paid to do so, so. Yeah.
I’ve seriously learned a bit about computer architecture from OoT speedruns.
Making your own valorial framework is a close cousin to accepting there is no inherent one.
This is true for many things (all things?), but I think we can agree that as pointless or challenging being fast driving a car, it still welcomes the intended use of the car, is surrounded by a broadly shared and accepted economical advantage.
Esports would be the equivalent, pushing to be the best at a game, the way it’s meant to be played.
Speedrun is getting into a racing car and mastering with an iron will getting in and out as fast as possible.
Making your own valorial framework is a close cousin to accepting there is no inherent one.
That’s absurdism rather nihilism, isn’t it? “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”
From an imaginary point of view, one could view it as a rendition of Ender’s game and transform these runs into models of potential attack vectors.
For example, a very specific silly scenario would be rearranging microbial growth in the shape of a Super Mario level and then using miniature robots to deliver a compound into a pinpoint location to be released after regular activities resume.
Think of it as having prearranged templates that reduce the risk of errors to a minimum.
