Speedrunning the
Lemmings games has been getting quite a bit of attention on the forum and Discord lately, but I don't think we have a topic for speedrunning in general, so this feels like a good time to start one!
So... who else here has experience of speedrunning other games? Anyone have any achievements or anecdotes to share?
I know we have at least one speedrunner in our community:
Simon is (at the time of writing) the world record holder for
Jazz Jackrabbit, and has posted about his experiences
in this topic. Of course, trying to go fast is still speedrunning no matter at what level, so please don't feel you have to be a world record holder or contender to participate in this topic!
Some games have time as the sole metric for scoring or competing, so I suppose that my introduction to speedrunning was trying to surpass my personal best times in
Minesweeper, which occupied a lot of my free time when I was in college. My best achievement, and my first introduction to the thrill of setting a good time, was an 18 on Intermediate -- my best score on Expert was a much less satisfying 76.
Around the late 2000s, I discovered that my all-time favourite game series,
Repton, had been remade for PC, so I bought all three games, completed them within a month, and then started to compete for best scores. In
Repton 3, your score has three components: in-game score (diamonds, monsters and crowns); lives bonus (1000 per life remaining after each level); and time bonus (900 minus time taken in seconds). However, if you complete a full scenario (8 levels) in one sitting, then the in-game score will always be the same, since all its components are required for completing the levels at all; lives bonus will always total 24000 for a deathless run; so the difference in two scores will always equal the difference in times. In other words,
Repton 3 scoring
is speedrunning, just without an explicit statement of time in minutes and seconds.
When I first started scoring
Repton 3,
the online high scores were dominated by Chris Paul Andrews, except for the "Prelude" scenario, where Peter Van Ek's score was top. I remember that at the time, I felt Peter's score might be completely impossible to surpass -- the Repton games are entirely grid-based, so there are much more limited options for what you can do to improve a time, and the "Prelude" scenario doesn't have the luck-based elements that some other scenarios have -- for example "Egyptian", where on Level 5 one monster must be killed by fungus, which grows randomly. Still, I persisted with working out better routes, eventually surpassing Peter's score by 36 seconds, and claiming first place on all 32 scenarios, with a total score beating CPA's by just over 10,000 points (almost 3 hours!)
The trouble with
Repton 3 scoring/speedrunning was that I never really had any competition. My friend Jonathan also did runs (and beat CPA's time on "Oceans" before I did, so he briefly held a world record), and Matthew Thompson was a spirited competitor, but neither was a serious threat. It's now over ten years since I improved any of those scores, and all my records are still standing. I have half a feeling that I'd like to submit the
Repton series to speedrun.com so that I can motivate myself to play them again, but without the factor of competing with others, I'm worried that it would feel like drudgery and I'd lose interest quite quickly.
Recently, I've gotten a bit more into speedrunning through Steam achievements. Both
Legend of Grimrock games have an achievement for completing the first level under a set time -- LOG 1 gives you four minutes, which is very tight; LOG 2 gives you six, when four would be about the same difficulty as it was in the first game.
But by far the game I've spent most time on is
Hollow Knight. Again, my interest was kicked off by Steam achievements: there is one for beating the game in 10 hours, one for 5 hours, and one for 20 hours with 100% completion. The first and third of these are trivial to achieve on a second playthrough when you know where everything is; the 5-hour achievement is the interesting one. That may sound odd, considering the world record is a mere 33 minutes. But
Hollow Knight is a metroidvania, with upgrades all over its map. The WR achieves this time by skipping everything that can be skipped -- which makes the boss fights extremely hard. In order to make the 5-hour achievement doable, I had to plan out which upgrades I would get, and what order I would get them in so that every boss in the run would be within my ability with the upgrades I had available. This was a very puzzle-like challenge, which I enjoyed immensely. I intend, if I am ever able to afford a faster computer that can cope with recording HK, to make a video showing the route I constructed, so I have continued to practise on the same route, and got my time down to 2:49. I believe that with my current skill level, I could get my time down even further by skipping some of the upgrades, but again, I don't feel motivated to work on this right now when I am unable to record my progress. I have also done a 100% run in 6:54, which is far above a good leaderboard time, but serves as a starting-point for bringing my time down.
Well, that's my wall of text
Anyone else want to take a turn?
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