See title- I'm curious to see why people choose certain games.
For me, I was recently gifted Helen's Mysterious Castle. The night after I got it, I was looking for a relatively light, quick RPG to play through- and that looked like it fit the bill. It did, and I enjoyed the game enough to play through it all at once. From there, I looked up if there were any runs of it, and there were 2! Looking through, certain parts of the route seemed improvable, so I started rerouting the game. Finished my first run (of bad ending) just a bit ago, beating the previous record by nearly 3 minutes as a result of these changes.
I'd been looking for an RPG speedrun for a while and this hit all the bullet points I was looking for: ¤ Fun game casually (obviously, I have to like the game) ¤ Good soundtrack (I have to like listening to it) ¤ Low mashing impact (my mashing speed is pretty bad) ¤ Relatively short (so I can fit it in more easily) ¤ High action to downtime ratio (for high interest) ¤ Very few "luck or die" moments (obviously an annoyance- with my route there is one in the first 25% of the run and that's it)
This in particular nails the action to downtime- there are a few moments of cutscene that last about a minute each which serve as nice breathers from the fast running speed to avoid running into wandering enemy encounters. I've only finished one run so far but I can definitely see myself sticking with this game for a while.
tl;dr Helen's Mysterious Castle was a perfect fit for what I was looking for, tell me about why you run the most recent game you picked up. Or the most interesting pick. I just want to hear about the reasoning :)
Fallout 4, Bastion, Jet Set Radio, they are all fairly short, not alot of mashing impact, save for a bit of mashing in Fallout 4 but it's trivial mashing.. you can just alternate to buttons at basically any speed and it works.. but yeah.. their fun easy and replayable..
Well, as a very new speedrunner ("wanna be" at this moment :P ) I chose Resident Evil 3 just to challenge myself as it's probably my most played game of all time. Saw a WR speedrun on Youtube ( - hope it's ok to link, still new to the forums...) and thought if I could do a speedrun might as well be of this game. And here I am, just trying to get a decent time for the leaderboards as a non competitive speedrunner (at least for now, one step at a time....)
My most recent speedgame is Pokemon Red, which I've picked up for two main reasons:
1: The shift from IGT to RTA was decided largely due to the RNG manipulation strats that were found recently, which make the run infinitely more palatable for me. Being able to consistently get a god-tier Nidoran, clean Mt. Moon and consistent Surge trashcans makes the run a lot less frustrating, and overall easier to just pick up and get the hang of.
2: Red/Blue is one of my biggest childhood games, which is my primary criteria for picking a speedgame. If it wasn't a game I sank countless hours into as a kid and gained a very deep understanding of, I'm less likely to want to run it.
So more than anything else, I picked it up simply because I want to be able to say I've tried running it, and the RTA shift made it much easier to do so. Plus, turns out it's really fun!
My recent speedgame is Stuart Little 2. I picked it up because I want Jumpyluff-senpai to notice me.
Well, I thought about picking up INK, an indie platformer on Steam (the same route through which I found my main speedgame, Out There Somewhere). I just haven't had the time to commit to learning a whole new speedgame. What drew me to it were its amazingly fluid controls, low spec demands (I stream from a laptop), the fact that it doesn't need to explain anything through narrative (making it as fun to watch as to play), and the fact that a developer graciously donated a copy to me.
I still intend to complete and submit a run of INK within the next couple of months.
Dark Sector, I figured why not there is no page for it and wanted to run it. I run practically every game I have and wanted to play something different. And I have been routing it and trying to see what to do weapon wise. I'm thinking using the pistol only as finding rubles is not really worth it for weapons. I only wanted to get the Korbov weapon for this boss, but it turns out you can kill him with the pistol and glaive. My idea is just get upgrades and upgrade the pistol.
Plus the game is fun in my opinion to me and sure it may be annoyingly hard sometimes, but I have learned to deal with the AI better. And it's nice to learn a new game to run especially one you haven't played in so long.
One thing that hasn't really been mentionned and I thought I would bring up is games that have a very high skill ceiling / rough learning curve. I find there's a tremendous amount of satisfaction in getting good at games that have really deep mechanics relevant to speedrun. Prime example is Super Metroid (no pun intended), where strategies have been consistantly upgraded over the years. Also, in this game, practice can only get you so far until you realise there are a lot of intricaties that aren't necessarily noticeable. Thankfully, there is a large active community and people are welcoming and always happy to discuss the game, which helps not only personal progression but progression of the speedrun itself.
I notice it looks like I'm trying to sell the game itself, but it's mostly just a good example to illustrate my point, being that speedgames with a steep learning curve are extremely rewarding in the end. There are definately a lot of games like this in many different genres, and those genres might require a different skill set. Dr. Mario is similar to Super Metroid in the sense that there is a very high skill ceiling, but very different in that the difficulty is decision making rather than execution.
On the other hand, there is a high possibility that you burnout in such a game. That's when I usually look for an easier game I can just pick up and be decent at in a few months or so. In the end, I always come back to Super Metroid with some kind of renewed motivation or simply a new approach. If you really like the game, and it has a high skill ceiling, you'll find that it's very hard to quit for real. :>
I picked Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak for a few reasons.
1.) It was a 2016 release and I wanted to run a modern game. 2.) The Homeworld fanbase is incredibly small and tight-knit so I knew I would be the first to start figuring our strategies for this game. It was more of a test to see how well I could, on my own, without help from others, route the game and see what time I could achieve. 3.) RTS games don't get near as much speedrunning love as they should.
First run was a few mins over 3 hours. Current PB is 2 hours and 21 mins and some odd seconds. The improvement has largely been all on my own except for one strategy (one of the devs of the game watches my stream and gave me some backdoor knowledge on one mission, kinda cheap but it saved 4 mins!). I'm proud of my improvement and the best part is there are still ways to improve the time. Now I'm focused on trying to get some other people to run this game. Good thing I'm patient since no one has taken up the reigns yet.
I am working on Tron 2.0 because there is no runs of it and it is a sick FPS game with high octane thrills and chills. That and I can be the the Tron guy.
I routed and started running Compati Hero: Great Battle IV last week. I was hunting for a SNES platformer to submit to SNES Superstars, because all I had were two 10 minute runs of repeats. I literally stumbled onto that game while randomly choosing SNES games to mess around with, and thought it was so cute and charming and made such a good looking speedrun that I had to do it.
For me that would be Professor Layton. I chose it, because it is a great game casually and an easy enough run to learn, since it doesn't really need a lot of mechanical skill. So, it is a good game to start speedruns, even though it is not a typical "speedrun game", I guess.
I am currently running Metal Slug (Video Entry Coming Soon) because I love the series and wanted a fresh challenge from gaming and speedrunning is the answer.
I am currently running Sonic adventure DX because i was bored one day and tried running tails story. PB is 26:36. Pretty proud of that. Also nostalgia
I decided to switch to DMC4:SE because I took on the goal of being the best Vergil player. That sets out certain games, 4:SE, 3:SE, and DmC Vergil's Downfall and Bloody Palace DLCs, as the universe of discourse for my current goal.
However, just as I switched from Bloodborned to DMC, I could switch from DMC to whatever based on my obsessions at the moment. I am currently looking for a good classic game to learn for 12-Hour this year, and if I like whatever game I pick enough it will probably become a permanent addition to my repertoire.
Super House of Dead Ninjas. When STAR_ uploaded his speed run, I decided to buy the DLC because I was really into SHoDN back in the day. After trying out speed run, I knew that I could improve, so I practiced with blood and sweat. All that skill that I earned by speed running Sacred Ground in Cave Story+(Current WR holder btw) had to transfer over to somewhere after all.
I've been playing Moto X3M and Mario Kart Double Dash for a long time, and speedran both today
I have run flash games because they are free lmao. I've also done a few GTA individual levels, but I would want to do a full run because GTA is one of my favorite game series.