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Comment by krige | Hacker News Reader

It is seriously amazing how inventive the speedruns get once you do what is humanly possible to achieve the best time. Glitch hitboxes? Sure. Abuse internal map workings to skip to "parallel universes"? You bet it's been done. Hecking up the memory allocator? What?

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I'm not really a fan of such speedruns to be honest. It's just like abusing Mario/Pokemon buffer overrun to inject a jump to the credits sequence. Sure, you jumped to the end credits quickly, but have you really beaten the game quickly?

The communities for these games decide what categories are run, so if lots of people agree that e.g. memory corruption is no fun they can either restrict it to a special category or forbid it outright.

It's pretty rare to have games where only the deeply technical memory glitch speed runs are a thing, much more often that's either a category few bother with or its forbidden.

It's more common in TAS because a TAS can manipulate things to a state where it's hilarious. e.g the increasingly deranged "correct" answers to TASbot brain age.

> e.g the increasingly deranged "correct" answers to TASbot brain age.

Video link: https://youtu.be/mSFHKAvTGNk

It's stupidly funny.

There are different categories of speed runs on most games. It's not about "beating" the game (however you choose to define that); it's about satisfying the parameters of the given category.

For example, here are the categories for SMW: https://www.speedrun.com/smw#0_Exit

It's a bit like winning a game of chess by angering your opponent to the point where they have a heart attack and die.

You’ll find it valuable to dig a bit more deeply. Look for the 100% or glitchless category runs. Some of them are indeed breaking the game, but so many more categories involve skill to do crazy things.

A great example of the latter are the super monkey ball speedruns.

That's why there are various categories for the speedruns. I just checked speedrun.com and there are 13 categories for Super Mario World, one of the games most famous for a jump to credits glitch. 23 people have scores for "0 exit" (jump to credits) and there are 203 for "96 exit" (100% completion effectively).

You got to the end state of the turing machine, of course you did.

The people who speedrun have already beaten the games they speedrun dozens if not hundreds of times.

Abuse the exposed circuitry of the controller? Also done: https://youtu.be/tr6txZdNcc0?t=445

The whole popularity of the "parallel universes" thing seems weird to me because I think it's just modular arithmetic? Weird way to describe it.

this is precisely what’s cool about speed running, boring computer bugs and exploits become a kind of magic when you put them in the context of a game people already know and can understand.

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