Speed-running

A favorite non-hobby of mine is video-game "speed-runs." I say "non-hobby" because I have never actually tried one myself. As of now, I just watch and enjoy. These things are recordings made by people who are just messing around, trying to make a name for themselves by beating video games, old and new, as fast as possible.

They fall into two categories, each with its own sort of home site and governing board. Natural runs can't be played on an emulator and generally discourage -- or at least make note of -- large-scale glitching and cheating. The best site for them is at Speed Demos Archive. I like these guys perhaps a little better because they're done without computer or emulator assistance. But sometimes, these videos do seem a little bit lame compared to their tool-assisted cousins, who reside all over YouTube and the internet but are governed well by the folks at TASvideos. The tool-assisted videos do use emulators to slow the games down and achieve absolute inhuman perfection, be it through manipulating normally impossible-to-control luck or executing frame-perfect moves that would normally be too risky... or sometimes just doing really, really weird stuff.

Some of my favorite runs are based on favorite games of mine as a kid. The Mega Man games have a sizable following, as do most platformers. If I had to choose one run in particular from each category, Super Metroid in 32 minutes is pretty impressive for a natural run, and Super Mario 64 completed with 0 stars is pretty hilariously amazing on the tool-assisted side.

A year or so of enjoying these movies and following the progress on certain games has understandably given me a bit of an itch to want to try this myself. I think if I did it, it would have to be on the natural side -- I love and respect the tool-assisted runs a lot but I am not sure if I possess the technical know-how or the patience to grasp the art form's (HA!) steep learning curve.

Also, the marks on the very popular games (Mario, Zelda, etc.) are impossibly low. So I kind of want to try a game that isn't already listed at SDA. My plan would be to practice for a few weeks on an emulator, and then when I go home, grab my Super NES or N64 (and a VCR) and get to "work". A huge part of these things, beyond the obvious complete mastery of the game in question, is planning and executing the most time-efficient route.

My initial thoughts:

Cool Spot
This is a Super NES game I loved as a kid, and it seems like a modest platform game that I'm honestly surprised nobody has tried yet. For those curious, you control the former 7up mascot, that red dot with the sunglasses, and shoot little bursts of 7up at things and collect "Cool Points" to save your identical Spot buddies from incarceration. While remembered mostly for its engaging plot* and certainly not for being a shallow marketing ploy by the folks at 7up, it's kind of a fun game, it has cool music, and it's one that I think I could really master given the chance.

Bubsy
Another SNES platform game, this one featuring an extremely fragile bobcat as the protagonist who starts with, hm, nine lives. The game seems made for speed, as Bubsy could run really quickly and the game loved to race forward, but doing that unprepared was basically suicide because, good Lord, any one hit in this game and you're dead. "Yikes," as Bubsy and our good friend Mike both love to comment. Bubsy 2 was a little more fair with three hit points, and neither has a run on SDA, so that's a possibility, too.

Eek! The Cat
Another cat-based platformer, I got this dog of a game from my grandma for my eighth birthday or something, and I was stoked because I liked the cartoon. This is easily one of the worst games I have ever played... basically, you don't just guide Eek! to the exit of each stage. Rather, you need to push and kick an old lady out of harm's way and get HER to the exit before her health runs out. She is constantly walking forward and this is even more unbelievably frustrating than it sounds. If that's even possible. Put it this way: I consider myself a pretty strong gamer, and I never made it past the first "world" of this game**. If I tried now, I like to think that I'd be able to, with another couple years' worth of wisdom under my belt. The only reason this might be an impossible game is because the damn thing has maybe the darkest, dingiest graphics of the 16-bit era (before the N64 really raised -- lowered? -- the bar in that department).

Any other suggestions would be welcome. This was really just a brainstorm for me.

* - not really
** - despite never making it past the zoo world of Eek!, I can sing -- from memory -- the music from the second world of the game, which you could listen to in the options menu. This is one of the most embarrassing iterations of my most useless talent: an ability to remember video game music from my childhood EXTREMELY well (but struggling now to remember why I walked into a room).