5 Must-See Speedruns from AVPQ 2020
It’s always sad to see the end of another August Videogames Played Quickly charity marathon, especially to those of us at SLN who took a bunch of pills and stayed up for every single one of the marathon’s 72 hours of duration. But hey, more casual viewers should rejoice; we’re here to link you to five runs you might have missed that are definitely worth your time. Head on down to https://runs.speed/aug2020/ and use the search bar to find the on-demand replay video of each entry when you’re done reading and have clicked on at least twelve of our in-line ads, earning us one eighth of a cent!
Alien 3 [Amiga CD32] by BloodborneFan1986
This port of the SNES classic based on the film is considered the definitive version to speedrun due to the infamous “magnet trick,” where the runner holds down the A button and then places a rare earth magnet between 18 and 24 millimeters from the right side of the system’s case, causing Ripley to glitch into an alternate dimension where prisoners Dillon and Morse have 65,535 health points each and David Fincher was happy with the final cut of the film. A single millimeter farther and the trick won’t work, and even half a millimeter closer and the CD32’s hard disk drive will corrupt and the entire system will become unusable. BloodborneFan1986 was an early pioneer of this trick, and in this run he shows off riskfree the new emulation of this trick recently added to the git nightly builds of the experimental Thre3Amigas CD32 emulator.
Domino’s Pizza Heroes: Revenge of the Noid [Nintendo Wii] by TealRuin
Utilizing several skips not possible in the HD rerelease for the Wii U, TealRuin shows us exactly why RotN is the finest entry in the Domino’s Pizza Heroes open world action franchise, at least for speedrunning. (Not to be confused with the Domino’s Pizza Heroes handheld platformer franchise, which has multiple contenders for best speedrunning entry. Please do not rehash those arguments in the comments section.)
Teen Titans vs. X-Men: Rival Schools [Sony PS2] by XStarfiresWifeX (tool-assisted)
While a standard “human input only” run of TTvXM:RS’ in-depth league management career mode can take hours of optimization to assemble the perfect team of superpowered adolescents to throw down in hundreds of brutal MMA-inspired bouts, XStarfiresWifeX demonstrates that with frame-perfect input while crossing the international dateline during the initial draft, you can recruit seven identical copies of Omega-variant Jubilee with perfect stats within the first hour of play. Since clones do not experience interpersonal drama in this simulation, it’s smooth sailing right up through the championship. (It should be noted, of course, that in the real world clones are even more prone to interpersonal drama than regular different people. Konami really dropped the ball there.)
Silent Hill: War of the Chosen [Xbox 360] Ashley Campaign by CircumcisionIsMurder666
Speaking of Konami dropping the ball, the oft-maligned real-time strategy entry in the Silent Hill franchise makes for a surprisingly compelling narrative experience when you’re not the one doing all the unit micromanagement! On the couch with the runner is his handler and legal guardian RestlessDreams1985, who keeps him from ranting about how the whole series is a metaphor for the horror of circumcision under threat of physical violence.
Doom II: Hell On Earth [Nintendo Switch] by ForeskinFlenser & Todd Howard, sort of
Bethesda’s Switch ports of Doom 1 and 2 are widely mocked by the Doom community (or “Doommunity”) for being lazy, buggy, DRM-ridden atrocities based on the Unity engine and not the original source code. So it was that one fateful day on a community IRC channel, a (relatively) young man born well after the original games were released hopped in and was like “you guys won’t fuckin believe this, dogg, you gotta see this shit.” Indeed, they did have to see this shit, and would not believe it initially: Taking advantage of a remote code execution glitch in Unity and using the time dilation chip that Brazilian-market Switches use to not get bored and fuck off to the beach during shipping, ForeskinFlenser was able to split the timeline and create a tangent universe. Having eliminated any possibility of legal retribution or other unpleasant consequences in our timeline/the “prime” universe, ForeskinFlenser was able to imprison the tangent universe Todd Howard in a pocket dimension where he is forced to continually beat his previous Doom II speedrun record in order to receive food and water. Exclusively at this year’s AVPQ, tangent Todd Howard beat our universe’s world record, and on commentary via further time trickery were tangent Todd Howard ages 8, 19, and 24. A true classic, not to be missed.
Image credit: “Gamers” by Taylor.McBride™ is licensed under CC BY 2.0