Saturday had the first of SpeedRunsLive's series of open races trying to give people an easy way into the speedrunning scene. I only ever got around to practicing world one, but I'd played the game 18 years ago or so... How hard could it be, really?
Well, I gameovered several times in worlds 2 and 3, so things sure weren't looking good. Oddly enough as soon as I got to world 4 it suddenly got easy. I recognized most of the levels! I suspect what happened is I'd always get a warp whistle in world 1 when I played the game as a kid. Use it right away, jump to world 4! But this race was warpless, and I really didn't have a good handle on worlds 2 and 3. I muddled through though!
Anyway, I got through worlds 4 through 7 without too much trouble and had built up quite the stash of items to use powering through world 8. Unfortunately Bowser's castle was tricky, Bowser himself used a brand new mechanic, and my thumb was starting to get sore from holding down the run button for 3 hours! It took me 45 minutes to beat the last level but eventually I did! (For comparison the 6 fastest people were done the entire game in under an hour...) All told my race was sub-4 hours! Woo!
The race ended up getting a whopping 140 people. 39 of those gave up without beating the game, and I managed to finish in front of 10 people. 91st place of 140 isn't too bad all things considered, but it is a little unfortunate that I wasn't even slower. The website had links to everyone's stream who was still going. When there were 10 people left I guess people didn't care so much as I only ended up with 3 viewers plus my sister in the same room when I beat the game. The last few people were getting 30+ viewers pretty much solely thanks to being slow but persevering!
It almost makes me want to really suck in one of the next two races. But the competitor in me thinks that's incredibly stupid. Doing a race when I'm naturally slow and bad is a fine thing to do. Intentionally doing worse than I could? That's just not in my genes. Of course I've never played a Sonic game so my best at Sonic 2 could well be the worst of anyone who shows up...
Or maybe not... The guy who finished in 101st place in Mario 3 took a little over 19 hours. That's a crazy amount of dedication to not giving up! I popped in to watch him from time to time and he sure was playing the game and trying to win. He just wasn't doing a very good job of it. But he did finish higher than the 39 forfeits, so that's something!
Next up... Zelda: A Link to the Past, up to the master sword. This is a game I've actually played a fair bit so I hopefully won't be needing to figure out puzzles from scratch like I did in Mario 3. Emulators are fully allowed too (well, ones on the list of approved emulators anyway) so anyone capable of streaming really can join in.
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