Speed Demos Archive

Confronted with smoke from the karaoke machine? Or flames from the smoke machine? Or karaoke from the... flames... machine? Fear not, that artesan Master of Ceremonies you've dished out dough like dirt for to keep your wedding reception afloat through the thick[-of-head] and the thin[-of-skin], one who just so happens to represent a wildly roving pack of thought-to-be-long-extinct Siberian tarpans, instead of allowing classic Aunt Bertha to sub in with a slap-in-the-face slide show from her trip to Graceland (or whatever it is young people hate their not-great predecessors for showing and telling nowadays), will step up and reach exactly as far in as it takes inside their age-worn saddlebag of tricks to come up with e.g. an improvised flash mob dance scene that no-one can quite tell who was and wasn't in on – or a brief but unforgettable lesson in wabisabi floral arrangement utilizing only cutlery, most-of-the-way detached hair accessories and your thitherto unitary wedding bouquet. This then ends up in the local paper (or whatever it is young people haven't glanced at once in their lives nowadays), under the succinct, siren-song headline of "A Horse MC Dives Deep", and Zoinks!, that's right, this has all been one drawn-out chintzy-af shANAGRAMaggy dog story. Scooby-Dooby-Doo! No wait, more like "Scoopy-Dupedy-Durr!"

Quote of the Run: "This has become my favorite part of the game to sprint through."

Things are boiling up in Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. The in-game time (IGT) is quite an arcane spectacle. You might think it puts sinful levity in the single-levels, the pertinent segmentation category, but such is the lay of New York, city of crime and hammy noir. See today's most belated front page entry for flamboyant flourishes which the runner ('VideoGameYeti') has no intention of relenting on after time, mouse cartwheeling like spinning dry a drenched giant panda, or satisfying one Osu wheel.

The second in the game series features a few sections where the playable character turns into a femme that, with my resources (and lingering childlike yearning for unspoiled first-hand knowledge), I'm left to assume is also a fatale, going half-to-three-quarters-suggestively by "Mona Sax". Appropriately, it's 69 hundreths for a new record of 0:13.45 and a table reservation time of 0:17:05.11, off what I'm being told is a revisitation to Russian frenemy vibes Vladimir's to-be blini bistro, which is to say Max is a repeater. Customer loyalty, perfect! Or is it? I think I see fresh coating still dripping down some of the walls knocked over last time. It's quite the miracle none of them ever are load-bearing. But he is a Payne customer after all, so there's plenty of Sax for those who Mona bout it. Ah, no wait, maybe it's not so bad for the borschteria after all. Because clearly... getting scars in your walls... will add to your grout... And so Max is no "rep-eater" after all. ;) Oh myne gosh Watson how very clever we are!

Quote of the Run: "With this submission, the individual level table on SDA is tied with the TAS for the very first time! I have wanted this to happen for a very long time, and I'm glad I was able to do it."

...and that's the summa summarum with this next one. We share in 'Akiteru''s rightful jabilee. Clown goes down in 0:00:09.01 (0:02:16.69 for all of Super Punch-Out!! brawls combined). I think I'll just come up with some taunts fit for anyone's next showdown with this disgruntled egg-head.

"Haven't thought of a good clown name yet? How about 'Dizzy'?"
"You're getting pounded foolish, Pennywise!"
"I see a big red button, should I press it?"
"When I slap you, it'll stick."
"You're theoretically a boxer, but practically a joke."
"It's nature's way: refer to the referee, clown on the clown."
"Can anyone put Humpty Dumpty back together again?"
"Hey, where's your posse at, poseur?"
"Heart failing? Try balloon therapy."

Quote of the Run: "Better execution would have resulted in completely different RNG and most likely a slower time."

This and "yes, there's gains it that, but it puts me in a higher lag tax bracket" are two such classical paradoxes in retro speedrunning aren't they?

This one got me thinking about the relative successes and failures of transitions movie-to-game and game-to-movie. Vise-like, These Horizontal Lines o' Mine will compact such musings until the soul's gone with the width, justice done to aught, but what I'll table for now is Beetlejuice's source material could not in and of itself fail to beget a sprightly festival of eccentricity across any arbitrary medium. And what's the perfect soundtrack to that? "NES Oddity" by David Lo-Fi. Expect the usual conflux of idioms from laissez-faire development and QA... with items that appear decorative, control inputs first having to pass a committee, technical limitations as features* and such and so forth. Weird fact: even the music was written in Assembly (!?) and this was prevalent? How didn't I see that 🤨 You know how I feel about bespoke retro: less pre-fab-ulous = more post-fab-ulous. Then there's the creativity called for at both ends of the art pipeline, in coding and decoding the audiovisuals. So all in all the informational density is higher than you'd think, and this is the very stuff of titillation.

Here's one fit for any confessional (or a wall, they have ears, or a smartphone): I was eyeing the run notes, cross-referencing with the startlingly Gen-Z-sounding "sdakb", and I still couldn't understand what their referents are in parts. "One of the scare attacks missed? Urm... yesss it sure did!" The games the startlingly Gen-Z-sounding 'ktwo' has been speedrunning and TASing have not been the most mechanically complex, but they sure have been swept edge to edge with a variety of gung-ho gizmos, like I'm sure microgravitometry would have played some kinda part in this one too. As many as 23 seconds of dividents, down to 0:10:29 in the "deaths" category.

* You need to WAIT for it to SCROLL DOWN MORE or you will SIMPLY DIE if you TOUCH the LOWER EDGE of the SCREEN, there is SO MUCH room in hell for the likes of you.

Made-Up Quote of the Run: "This run has audio commentary on track 2. Listen via VLC or a similar player!"

Is that how dolphins meet their ma[c]ker[el]? When they kick the bucket with the fish in it, do they enact this calculated half-back somersault, a final athletic slip-up ending a lifelong continuity of acrobatic elegance and merriment (and bullying things in the wild)? Flip they from belly laugh to belly-up, making somewhere between flotsam and jetsam, as if to say "you didn't get me... but you got me!" In speedboat racing, this manouver is called a "blowover", but marine biologists named it with far more rigor and precision — the "Semi-Circle of Life". Meanwhile, making waves with another 23-second improvement, the maneuver today's final runner and author is dedicated to around rival racers is more a Circle of Death. Yes, you keen-eyed colonizer of the murky waters of unbroached truisms, "eliminator" was very much already a component of the phrase "Eliminator Boat", but here's the deal: this run is what puts it in it AGAIN, and in case your bloodlust's been particularly closed to negotiations today, there's hardly anything here for Gandhi to abide by. Steve 'Elipsis' Barrios's got the munchies for the crunchies again, and Eliminator Boat Duel is the one way to sate those.

One thing that caught my eye here is how the race courses are oft outlined by a variety of slalom buoys and similar, and how these don't seem to have a purpose, at least not one of demarcating anything. Give it some thought: it's because of the curvature of the Earth. If you only keep going far enough left of the left-hand side poles, you'll eventually find yourself having completed widthwise motion across a whole other course. Somewhat more expansive, but not topologically divergent, and so how can you be seen diverging yourself from a course no matter where you point your bow?

In-between we stop for repairs and refreshments at a "drydock". Considering the blue background color never shifts, I'm having to assume we're talking about repairs at Mr. Drydock's, who's never hearing the last of the cheeky snickers. I see other deficiencies in the amenities. There's bikini girls, sure, but no machine guns to equip them with. A nice-looking guy does finish first this time, and one of the rivals doubles as the trophy wife. What could be handier? 0:28:11 of this SS one on Expert difficulty, and the other run on display comes with the low-down of mechanics.

Spanish Mothers' Eyes Bleary for Richter Scaling Party Ranks on Own Two Foots (Average Dissident Range)

Riddle me this, riddle me that! Who invented that vaseline camera trick, and while this reeks concerningly of one of those "Don't eat from that tree, man! Baaad tree!" moments, what the Friar Tuck WERE they doing at the time? I just wanted to do a little comparative study here between Doom 3 – ahead, taking the lead graphically – and Sniper: Ghost Warrior – a head taking the lead, graphically. The former first saw itself in the mirror and thought: "I am beautiful, but the world is not deserving. I must become one... with the night", and made its own brightness like a smartphone auto-adjusts in a 1) tar pit in a 2) coal mine in the 3) Mariana Trench, during a 4) solar eclipse, after all the 5) anglerfish die out. The latter of the games, by contrast, first saw itself in the mirror and thought, along parallel lines: "I am beautiful, but the world is not deserving. I must become one... with the mud puddle", faceplanting in a haze of glory. The rainy missions are one of the pretexts under which Sniper will indulge itself in EVEN MORE BLUR ("Song 3"? "Girls & Boys & Enbies Too"?), in a sly attempt to recalibrate the ophthalmological Overton window. This is like a restaurant hiring Mr. Creosote, the human biowaste bin from Life of Brian, to "Evac! Evac!" into the nearest bucket (or next to the nearest bucket, or the caked apron of the inured cleaning lady) at opportune moments to make you secure in how your dining experience must have been satisfactory minimum when the only adverse outcome was mild to moderate emetophobia.

Oh doggy bags, I just went back to blow attention oxygen into the simmering hot takes from the game's previous featuring and... I doubt I can crest that hill, folks! It's a little too enfiladey for me, I hate to say. What if they happen to be shooting actually lead instead of the peas, sugar crystals, sterile neutrinos (which may or may not exist) or whatever's tickling the runner's delicate hide on the "airsoft" setting here. This does still make me feel like Dastard McBastard in the light of 'elite1608' streaking as if raised in a Finnish nudist colony (Read: certain public saunas. Yeah, again with the snipers and Finns, you know). With exposure this matter-of-course, was there a secondary vanity goal of "make People magazine twice" where only pure efficiency may hold sway??! He's even enfilading to the croco-loco again, and I think they're somehow in cahoots.

It often feels like the NPC voice-overs are sort of oblivious to the actual state of [celeb] affairs. While opportunities for smalltalk are rife, codename "Mother's" words of rizzdom, "do not engage hostiles unless necessary" are taken to heart here. Eye contact like Judas Iscariot. Hey, hold the phone, there's a "Mother Two" as well, eh? Are they talking Earthbound, or are they just, like, a rainbow family? 🌈 The oft-disparaged "bringing a knife to a gun fight" seems to be going alright this time, with tons of haters-gonna-hate being engaged at a satchel's throw away at furthest in the Easy difficulty SS 0:33:58 (down 2:45 from previous and like me, Mother One: worth another watch). There IS, nevertheless, something nagging at me... and that is whether an end-level-stats-screen "accuracy" of 66.66% is not a case of truncation where rounding was due. I wouldn't be this detail-oriented normally (she said, making Pinocchio blush)... but isn't sawing things off kind of... antithetical, antipodal even, to the Way of the Sharpshooter? To "Pewdo", if you'll allow.

I should have realized the catchphrase can't possibly originate from [the] Japanese: they don't have "cowabunga", they have "kawaii bunka". There's certainly some 'cute culture' in little drippy droplets in the later cartoon versions of the Turbo Turts, keeping a Foot in the door into Asian markets, but... apparently they have little traction, or indeed Foothold, nowadays, buried in a tsunami of... well, you've seen it! Don't hesitate to go admire the effort to mega-Japanify them for laughs here though. And oh-how-autism-never-runs-out, I did geek out on a little further JP turtle trivia here, and you don't HAVE to click it. But you will. And on this. And this. Take this! One of those, won't tell you which, is about where I'm personally headed with no regrets, and inside which household item, but with some concern over the suitability of my old travel wardrobe from that England sojourn earlier. Suit yourselves over which dubs were the flubs.

A gyroscopic emergency ward of spin doctors could not pass it off any other way: our one prior fielding of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge was, and will remain until further notice, FAKE NEWS. Far from "this must be it", the hustle and bustle at the '4n6' Surgical Hospital has never abated, with more societally harmonious edits and maniacal manipulations of the patient's anatomy and public discourse, some 4 mins, 40 secs of appendages, hair, bottom ribs, coccyges and one of the excess livers are excitably excised from the Arcade Mode SS run on Gnarly difficulty as Raphael. "0:53:35 and a resounding success to the happiest nation on Earth" is the official party line, subject to change. Hmm... More things are missing here: this is a game that was lavished TLC instead of DLC, unfurling out of the main stages into an overworld romping grounds, here made waste by the made haste. Also lacking in apparency in these two speedruns alone is the expanded cast of playable characters that now sports the reports of April O'Neil, whom some continuums have already been splintering (!) into an adept martial artist of her own right.

I've fact-checked this not, but the game does exude that certain "existing engine energy" where they've been milking it for three games already, everything is slick under the hood, everyone knows the ins and outs of scripting it, and gets to focus on merrily melting ingots of imagination like Walt Disney hirees, with the tech team free to implement any crazy curve ball ideas chucked in their general area code. That would be one very big plus of working within retro 2D "lo-rezthetics" as well – the detail that counts is signing in dutifully, as with the level titles being read out by the character roster in turn; the separation of power moves for a dedicated roll bind; or the strange ï in "Strangeoïds", literally only mentioning it so I get to type it in, this quixotic mitotically duplicating markclamation ex (ʞɹɐɯ uoᴉʇɐɯɐʅɔxǝ).

Call to Trivial Action: Does anyone have some semi-definitive name for what the technique is called when you keep dashing between sides so you're always behind the boss' back in brawlers? Line-segment-strafing? Bait 'n' switch? I think I'll just call it the "Bitcharoo", no offence, if only because it's a defensive move. And in my corner of the Spideywebs, a move that is defensive... is a move that is a bitch move. This is largely how my egg cracked.

Quote of the Run: "They may as well call me Legolas, because I fire an arrow at my target. More specifically, an Arrow IV"

The "Arrow IV" there forces my itinerant mind to invent a gizmo that deploys an emergency drip at a distance. Like say you're one-quarter Spanish and you got Nana Mañana trapped inside the rubble after some tofu dregs came down like a synthetic virus upon humanity. So what if the impact causes a gushing gash that ups blood loss by an order of magnitude... if the blood was malnourished to begin with! (DramaticLookHamster.gif) I think I'm off to the patent office now, but okay, with the application form clamped in my teeth, I could spare the hands to finish the update for you.

Okay, the hands here! Now that that pesky thinking part is gone, let's type this out tappity-tap! No more overthinking it. No more perfection getting the way of greatness. No more... umm... ideas... anyone? Uhhhhhh weeee goooot two runs coming in next. The first one is an IL entry in MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat in 0:00:29. The other one is a full-game run of MechWarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy in 0:26:23. The first one is in a table that now has a table time of 0:29:48. The other is not in a table, or even a chair haha! The first one is by 'PROX'. The other is by... 'PROX' BRAAIIINNNN

I'm pleased to report I didn't even need the patent office, this Holmes lady's cutting me a 10% share when she gets production up and running. Says she's "on the inside", which is exactly where I wanna be in this budding telemedical industry. Ah, the update, tho. Hands? Oh perfect, they got like nothing done! I see they went for the quintessential "passing grade" technique for those soul-sucking assignments in school where you had to compare Thing A (a thing) and Thing B (another thing), while continuing to elucidate all the merry way why you think they aren't, in fact, the same exact thing. I, Baroness Simonéy de Rarefinesse, am most certainly... far, far removed from... oh I see I already did that once in this very update. Okay. So.

In a couch potato's double whammy to excess motion, these are more earth- and record-shattering runs stepping up to the tectonic plate of MechWarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy, alongside a Tori Amos -brand little earthquake in MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. The full-game run is in 0:26:23 and 2 mins 56 seconds to the good, working smarter not harder with strategies. The IL entry is for the Wolf campaign, Mission 3, "Blade Splint" in 0:00:29, and it makes a lotta use of a haphazard physics exploit to shuck 44 seconds of chips down the gullet, collapsing the table to 0:29:48. The one is by 'PROX', and the other... by none other! And that's how you pass that grade, the whole dang grade. 😜

Sorry about the delay again, mainly on me! There's no single force majeure, just my life has been enriched like Uranium in recent times, with not enough ballast to Anchor it, if you see what etc. etc. I'M SAYING I HAVE A LIVELY SOCIAL LIFE AND I'M GLOWING A PRETTY AZURE SKY COLOR and I want to know how to turn that into pink, minimum. So anyone wanna do writing? Or take the helm in verifications if you've been around a while? Both are fairly simple and lowly volumetric jobs, but ktwo has grown uninterested (after quite a while) in being the Ultimate Judge of Town. I wish him the best of luck whatever he'll be doing with the 5000 man hours he's not placing in speedrunning going forward. For now. We'll see!

Oh, I thought I might as well shout out the Quake side of things on this side of things for a bit of change -- around $6.41 as it seems, for there is no less than 6 mins 41 seconds off a full-game official original old-school run visible here! These updates normally tend to amount to a single second per level as a starting point. I think someone else is also working smarter not harder here to shake up these tremulations.

AND someone just made the front page by posting this ad for a fun-sounding event coming in June where runners get just 90 days to learn the game they're running. Now that's hard work, no bitcharoos.