![]() This might be "fun" to see in its own way, but it's just not what makes a speedrun fun to watch. The major problem is that it skips the actual gameplay, and replaces it with the player just bypassing everything, often in a jumbled incorrectly-rendered polygon mess. Sure, seeing the glitch being triggered is interesting to see a couple of times, from a technical point of view, but it gets old pretty fast. With many other games, however, out-of-bounds glitches just make the speedrun boring to watch. (Of course Quake speedruns constantly skip lots of "intended routes", but these are just minor skips, which are interesting.) I think Quake speedruns are some of the most awesome ones to watch precisely because the game doesn't have out-of-bounds glitches, and thus forces the speedrunners to complete levels "normally", within bounds. It's interesting to see how an extremely skilled player engages with the game's enemies and kills them marvelously fast, and solves puzzles at extreme speed, and completes the level, using its intended route, really fast. ![]() (Of course using such glitches successfully still requires a lot of skill, but not the kind that the average viewer is interested in.)Ī speedrun is interesting to watch when the game is played "normally", but with almost superhuman skill and speed. I think there is merit in the original idea that out-of-bounds glitches bypass what makes speedrunning interesting, and, partially, the requirement of playing skill from the speedrunner. Most speedrunners, and speedrun aficionados, just laugh at such comments and dismiss them as ignorant.īut should we? Why should we laugh at and dismiss such comments? on YouTube, there will be people in the comment section saying how out-of-bounds glitching is "cheating", or boring. In fact, such categories are a real rarity.īut an interesting question is: Should there be? And more precisely, is abusing out-of-bounds glitches a bad thing, from the viewer's perspective?Īlmost invariably when you watch a speedrun of some game with such glitches, eg. With many games (perhaps even the majority of games), there isn't a "glitchless" category at all, because there simply aren't enough people interested in making such speedruns. At most it can be imposed on a "glitchless", "low-glitch" or "in-bounds" run, if such a category is popular enough for a particular game. In fact, the very idea of banning such a glitch in an any% run is deemed completely obsolete and silly. In general, the default "any%" category usually allows pretty much everything by default, very much including out-of-bounds glitches. With many games these lists became really nitpicky and extremely subjective and contentious, often with disagreements even between the people at charge on whether something should be banned or not.Īfter some years of this mess, the principle was simply abandoned, and in most cases glitches are completely free to be used and abused at will, within certain basic ground rules that apply to all games (such as no hex-editing savefiles using an external program, etc.) The approach taken by the current largest speedrunning website,, is that besides some simple set of common ground rules, the speedrunning community of each game can decide on what's allowed and what's not, in different categories of the run. Essentially, the people at charge, the ones making decisions, would need to go through every single game submitted and make long meticulous lists of techniques that were banned. With other games, however, it became fuzzier and fuzzier. With some games it was relatively unambiguous what counted as an "out-of-bounds glitch" and what didn't. Of course one of the major hurdles in such a ban was a matter of definition. It was deemed back then that glitching the game so that the player can go out of bounds, skipping most of a level, or even the entire game, was unfun and bypassed not only the level or game, but also the skills required to complete the game in the normal way. The same rule applied in its then-major rival site, Twin Galaxies. For example, in the early years of Speed Demos Archive (which started as a collection of Quake and Doom speedruns, but later opened to all games), out-of-bounds glitches were banned. Or, more precisely, glitch abuse has become a quintessential technique. Glitch abuse is one of the quintessential techniques in speedrunning, in order to be able to complete the game faster than normally.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |