- Joined
- Sep 29, 2018
It sounds pointed, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it; and if you listen to speedrunners talk about things, you mainly take away that once they start speedrunning, they don't really play a game any other way. When picking up a new game, they don't just go in blind and see what it's about; they go to the proper speed running sources and see what's what. Sure there are things they do to try and shake things up; Carcinogen (as whiney and shitty as he's become) does no damage runs which are cool to watch at times. There's also randomizers which I really don't care for, but is at least something different and requires more knowledge aside from getting from A->Z. But speedrunning at its core is repeating what others have figured out and having a "I know better than you" ego about it.Hearing all these stories about speedrunning makes me glad I mainly just follow a small subset of Pokemon solo-run speedrunning. It's fairly chill since they're not trying to break world records, just personal ones, no crazy glitch exploits aside from Gen I badge boosting since it's essentially unavoidable and they'll even shout each other out if a particular runner got a comparably impressive time with a pokemon that they couldn't get.
Once my brain figured that out, I stopped watching them because I just didn't find it appealing. Throw that they have an ego because they read a hyper-fixated FAQ about the game and committed it to memory doesn't make them better. I don't remember what year it was, but one of the GDQs, a dude who was running Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance screwed up and failed to recover. I'm not gonna say if you're skilled enough you can play perfectly 1,000 out of 1,000 times, bad luck does happen; but if you played and learned naturally, instead of copying what others do and just do that over and over, you'll learn more natural skills and recovery and what-not. Instead the dude flopped hard, and I contribute part of that being a lot of speed-running is doing shit over and over and hitting the reset when you fail. There's no practice or anything to get that X-Factor / In the Zone / Critical Adrenaline going; you just hit reset and learn nothing.
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