It won’t work well with this type of game and this game in particular.
E.g. in an adventure game the first thing you do when entering a room is to pick up everything and talk to everyone there.
But now you aren’t allowed to do this? E.g. you can’t talk to someone because it gives you information about a puzzle which can only be solved later.
Or e.g. in the workshop you aren’t allowed to pick up the check when you are there the first time because it’s needed for a puzzle in a much later act?
It just doesn’t make sense if you don’t play all those interconnected stuff as one.
Internally it keeps track of your time so when you beat it in under an hour you will see Ransom taking his cloths off when the credits roll
This is nothing but an argument for two categories: prepped and unprepped. The rest merely comes down to that you, personally, don’t see much fun in a particular type of custom challenge.
I hope you understand that “unprepped” actually means a *beeping* lot of preparation.
It takes a lot of work to get to a specific point in game (say Act XYZ) while touching nothing else than the absolute necessary items/dialog options etc. to get to this “unprepped” state.
And even then there could be arguments about placement of the characters.
I’d say only highly prepped ones or everyone using the same set of savegames would yield to proper comparable and reproducible results if you aren’t doing self-contained parts of the game like flashbacks.
Anything goes (“unprepped”) cannot have any arguments about placement etc. by definition. Pretty much the only possible argument is all glitches, specific glitches, or no glitches. Coming up with the best preparation prior to starting the challenge is the entire point. It’s not a category that would interest me these days due to the required time investment. Clearly it doesn’t interest you either. So what?
More strictly delineated starting points (“prepped”) may be impossible without savegames, but it’s not as if anyone ever argued against them. Savegames would be a widely used de facto standard due to their convenience even if no one thought to make them a formal requirement.
By logical necessity, @kcccc and the other speedrunners already tried many iterations of the bookstore challenge, the elevator challenge, the flashback challenges, and various other more limited challenges. I don’t think it’s a radically different suggestion than the Swordmaster challenge in MI1.
I don’t know about speedrunning terminology, it seems like I assumed something completely different from your “prepped” vs. “unprepped”.
I assumed “prepped” means you can do all kind of preparations (e.g. picking up objects, placing characters) before getting to the specific part you want to speedrun (e.g. from Act X to Y).
And I assumed “unprepped” means you can’t do that, i.e. you have to get to Act X with minimum effort, not solving anything else than what needed to get to Act X. And when speedrunning you have to actually solve everything necessary to get to Act Y.
That is what I meant, but I reversed it because you seemed to and replaced it with clearer terminology.
I thought you were making the valid point that bringing a rocket launcher is hardly less work than just speedrunning the whole game, which defeats my stated purpose of less up-front time investment. Which is why I never suggested it in the first place, but I may not have made that clear earlier.
Stating instead that to only bring a pistol it may be insufficient to stipulate characters’ starting positions and banned or permitted inventory items, necessitating the use of a savegame as a requirement rather than a mere convenience, strikes me as an oddly small detail to emphasize in such strong terms. Especially since I had already conceded the point in advance, by suggesting the use of “an official starting save, so that everyone’s equally (dis)advantaged.”
Because @Sushi mentioned Sonic I installed Sonic CD. I finished the first levels in seconds and somehow even managed to defeat the boss, all in about 10 seconds.
The secret is that the game’s giving me some 2000 fps (according to the Steam FPS counter). But apparently pressing left/right and jump occasionally is all you need to do, at least in the first few levels.
I don’t seem to see an option for vsync or frame limiting or something, so I guess this game is unplayable.
Oh yeah, and I even got a speed achievement, albeit one that I suppose everyone must get:
Edit: also, you die within seconds if you’re idle. I understand that’s supposed to take 3 minutes. For any wiseguys who’d say Sonic is supposed to be fast.
Okay, this probably isn’t quite the right place, but over breakfast I found that while the target framerate control, which I already tried yesterday, has no effect whatsoever, changing wait for vertical refresh from enhanced sync to always on keeps the framerate at 60 fps. (Not that I have time or inclination to play the game right now.)
Better yet, this also seems to apply in other games with framerate limiting issues. For example, Life is Strange insists on rendering far too many frames despite enabling vscync, making my GPU works its hardest when it could be close to chilling out, not to mention that it also reduces CPU stress.
Actually I think Life is Strange is CPU-bound over about 120 fps on UHD. I was getting some 100-120 fps, but with a 60 Hz display that’s a waste of power. Although even if I had a 144 Hz display, it’d probably still be a waste of power on a game like this… heck, even 30 might be fine, or at least 45, just so the GPU fan could potentially be completely turned off. Pity that the forced vertical refresh depends on my monitor’s refresh rate and not the target framerate.
PS Don’t expect anything even vaguely resembling Sonic speedrunning from me. A friend had Sonic Adventure 1 and/or 2 on the GC where I played a level or two, and I played some Sonic Generations, and that’s it.
Update to the WR, I recently got a 53:21 on the Any% run about 3 weeks ago. You can check out the video on speedrun.com.
I’ll just echo what kcccc said. I loved the game, and it gave me a good 15-20 hours of play time the first time through. I wanted more out of it, and speedrunning helped me find that. It gave me a new way to play a game that I enjoyed, and has allowed me to extend the “lifetime” of the game.
P.S. @kcccc You should check out the new route change I came up with. The main route was based upon aWay0fLife’s work, which was in turn inspired by yours. If you feel like speedrunning it again, I’d welcome some renewed competition!
Unfortunately late, but there are going to be speedruns of the first 3 Myst games in just a couple of hours at AGDQ 2020. Has anyone considered submitting their TP speedrun to a Games Done Quick event? Need more point-and-clicks there!
