Article about videogame speedrunning

I got this link from board 8, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/52/14

DooM gets a few paragraphs, and Opulent, Panter, and Doomworld are mentioned, and they mistake rocket jumping for being invented by DooM, but it's a good read, and you should check it out.

I've been loading up a lot of speedruns onto my mp3 player from speeddemosarchive.com lately, they're always a good time. SotN with Richter in 8 minutes is my favorite, and the 43 minutes with Alucard is a ridiculous run.

Well, you can rocket jump in Doom sort of, but yeah, they got the whole "looking down" part wrong.

Epyo said:
and they mistake rocket jumping for being invented by DooM,

Of course it was invented with DOOM, unless you know of an earlier game. The secret exit in Inferno's 6th map was designed to be reached by doing a rocket jump. Unless I missed something, what the article says is that firing a rocket at a nearby object would cause you to zoom in the opposite direction, which is correct.

Myk's right. That's crazy though, I didn't know half of those times, nor didn't I even think it was possible. I've seen some speedruns of the oldschool NES games, and those were pretty neat, but I never have seen any newer games. I'm gonna have to check some of those out. Cool article.

myk said:

what the article says is that firing a rocket at a nearby object would cause you to zoom in the opposite direction, which is correct.

The article really said:

DOOM was built on a polar coordinate system that let the player move faster along coordinate axes and pass through diagonal openings that would ordinarily be too narrow. Running diagonally ("strafe-running") was 1.4 times faster than running straight, and firing a rocket downward while jumping would propel you high in the air. Later shooter games corrected the coordinate and strafe-running errors, but rocket jumping (though originally a bug) proved so fun and popular it remains in many shooters even today.

Eh, it did? If so they fixed it as we were posting...

Indeed they did. My router's proxy server had a cached copy of the page with the error intact.

I'm quite impressed with the talk about the morrowind speedrun, hell, I'm five years in and still havent beat the thing.

Lol, they "fixed" it to be less accurate and less descriptive

Doom isn't the only game with horizontal rocket jumping, but it was the first

The Quake speedruns are amazing given the difficulty and scope of the game.

The more open ended the game is, the shorter the speedruns. You can judge how deep, nonlinear and generally creative a game is by the ratio of how much shorter the average speed run is to the average regular victory time.

Sytem shock 2 30 mins

Doom 3 : 3 and a half hours

Yet another innovation that can be traced directly to john romero, who recorded par times in the original Doom.

Wobbo said:
Yet another innovation that can be traced directly to john romero, who recorded par times in the original Doom. [/B]

I think I remember some games having time-based scores before Doom.

For more recent games, my brother got a PC games mag with a Half Life 2 speedrun on the cover disc, i think it was about 2 and a half hours, they discovered various tricks like standing on something and pulling it with the gravity gun made you "fly", also throwing big objects into character's faces during cutscenes made them "skip" a section of cutscene by leaping to where they should be next.

Wobbo said:
Lol, they "fixed" it to be less accurate and less descriptive

What? It was saying you could rocket-jump like in Quake in DOOM, and they corrected the error.

Richo Rosai said:
I think I remember some games having time-based scores before Doom.

Indeed, in many older games; the special thing about DOOM and Quake is that Romero kept an arcadey element in a game gerne has the problematic of being like an emulator with its 3D environment and first person perspective. With tally screens and recording capabilities these games were saved from being merely unaccountable submersive experiences.