Wild Animal Sports Day Speedrun
Leanna Perr
Playing through games quickly, skillfully and legitimately.
[Game List] [Features] [Submissions/Contact] [FAQ] [Live Streams] [Quake] [Knowledge Base] [Games Done Quick] [SDA Forum] Friday, April 19, 2024 by LotBlind
Quote of the Run: "Most of the previous attempts had ended already on the 1st puff, so I didn't get into the fight with high expectations."
For those of you who don't like ktwo, there's 'ktwo'. And, I mean, I can't see someone continuing their OP unbreakable "NNNGGHHH NERF IT ALREADY!" air juggle combo this long without a condensation of jealous wannabes ramming down the gates of his save-stately* manor while he's just lounging in the pool room** minding his own NES. Haters gonna hate. I don't actually know if he has any dedicated anti-fans, I'm saying this just to cater for that very real possibility.
(*I'm not saying he cheats! Haha... he just also does TASes for the same games. XD)
(**This room has both pool tables and a swimming pool, with one of the tables inside the swimming pool so you can... well, you know.)
So ktwo's second hurrah today is Dragon's Lair for the you-guessed-it NES. This and related games were known for their extreme take on the eternal animation realism / control "feelalism" debate, and so the criticism is the same as that against Red Dead Redemption 2. The criticism, in fact, was so mouth-wateringly venomous that I would happily just quote Wiki here: "The game was panned by critics and gamers alike due to its poor controls, trudging movement, and immense difficulty level. Gamers especially criticized the game for the player dying from one hit by any object or enemy, DESPITE THE PLAYER HAVING A HEALTH BAR." (The all caps is mine but it shouldn't be!) In Dragon's Lair, you don't have to tame and ride any dragon... You just have to tame and ride the big ornery state machine that gets you to it!
As per usual, as per the other run above, ktwo has documented his knowledge in a laudable way. Warms my heart every time I see someone picking apart the game's steaming innards in memory addresses and/or variables. It's like catnip dip to a feline. Or bamboo salad to a panda. Or "32 seconds saved, down to 0:06:49" to the superparticular SDA speedrun "fastronomes". That's what you are, and what you are is why you're here!
Quote of the Run: "We wanted to compare which category is the fastest, the limits of Easy category and what kind of crazy strategies and optimizations we could find and employ in a segmented setting."
For those of you who don't like ktwo, OR ktwo, OR speedruns making appearances in pairs, there's 'Blacksecret', 'Tarakan3000' & 'Carbonehell'. This trio of true tradesmen of fast-tracking have traipsed the... you know what? Alliteration's ass. While we've seen speedrun relay sack races before, the elephant here, if any, is "why isn't the Easy difficulty necessarily the fastest in this case?". As explained in the run comments, it's just not masochistic enough! \_(ツ)_/ You can't hurt yourself with rockets, which as a rule adhered to by all serious FPS games equals "you can't boost yourself with rockets", which sorry condition both spacefarers and Nazi test aviators can confirm feels like nothing once you've had a taste of the good Stoff (look up "Messerschmitt Komet" nudge nudge wink wink). "More crazy experimental war machines" is one of the few good replies to "reasons to have delayed D-Day Fhrer... I mean further".
(The timestamps here are the IGT rolling by at the top of the screen)
In Serious Sam: The First Encounter, you are given to high vault over some of the lowlier (get it?) enemies like they're air to you. The bowling aspect of it I covered with the last submission. Of the other sporting activities that made the route cut, I'd like to highlight the let's-call-it-floor-surfing at 23:27. Some other excerpts: the textbook heedlessness towards the readie-thingies the game is insisting on to derail psyched-up players with at 0:25; the Kamikaze boosts like Eminem with his career after Revival (NB: Revival was just fine : ); and the measured and necessary act of deforestation exacted by The Beeline Express at 4:36. The fact this run has the music on mute forefronts the ominous rumblings of all the skeletal Kleers and the booming cannon shots when these Three Musketeers square it off with the Gorossus of Rhodes in the finale. It's a soundscape like one of the Napoleonic wars; the complete no-bars-hold'd version of the 1812 Overture. Wait so maybe this game IS an allegory of the Russian campaign? And so the big bad is the cheese wiz himself? :o
I guess it would've been remiss to leave out the cannon from a game that has this much surplus in what they eat. There's no basic ammo concerns, any more than there are colorful ball concerns for children at most professionally maintained ball pits. Run time is 0:28:37, and as you may have pieced together, the run was, indeed, pieced together from segments, not run three abreast. That might have required another tree to be felled somewhere...
Availing himself of the "abandoned-ware rule" whereby an incomplete game is fair game for SDA submissions so long as it "represents the most complete version the game is likely to ever have", 'RockoSonicFan' gets another Flash-driven Sonic title out of the way. This time it's Sonic In Angel Island, wherein Sonic... is... in/on Angel Island. The dramatic term "act" is indeed a little dramatic in this context, but by the principle of reasonable economy of game assets, Sonic levels tend to be two-punch combos from the same piece of cloth, and so at least they'll always have each other to keep company. If the game only had one of the dual acts, it wouldn't be allowable anymore, it'd be a freak of nature requiring summary sanitation. Side note: it's rather strange seeing Sonic without camera scrolling, even for a duration of just 0:00:39!
Did you know? Nickelodeons were originally cheap movie theaters. The first one starting business in Pittsburgh, 1905. With a 5 cent admission fee. What's another name for 5 cents? It's "nickel" isn't it? As in "pumpernickel". As in 'farting Nick', one of the tentative attempts at swaddling that German expression in an etymology. Did you know nickels are mostly copper? Cupronickel, it's called, the alloy. The "odeon" of "nickelodeon" is from a big Parisian thtre in neoclassical style, which was in turn derived from the name for ancient Greek theaters that (unlike Roman ones), came roofed for better acoustics. The first of the odeons dates back to roughly...
*Comes up for air and clicks away dozens of Wikipedia tabs before it's too late*
The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odd Squad. You've all seen the Nickelodeon show Fairly OddParents, except for those of you that haven't. Like me. As a quick 'n' gritty summary, the show is the embodi-mation-ment of the phrase "Be careful what you wish for!" This run is for one of its little Flash accompaniments, terminates at the 0:01:52 mark, and now exists on this site. And yes, this is the other pair of the two pair, so it's also by 'RockoSonicFan'.
"'kazn' is like a box of chocolates" is a true statement. This isn't as evident if you didn't see the Tetris-like run that didn't quite make the cut (run for a Tetris-like game, not that the run was of its nature like that game, although I find it sufficiently easy to believe such runs exist). But if you DID see that run, you will be able to see ME, spotlit center stage, when I state that stately statement of mine. Honestly just going from Melty Blood (fighting game) to Mario Kart 64 (not a fighting game, but liable to stir up real-life fights like Black Friday sales) is quite a space-time warp in and of itself.
What kazn, specifically, made his mission to do with this game was to hop up a level in the taxonomic hierarchy, past the individual-lap runs and individual-race runs too, into the phylum of entire cups (phylum off, those extra seconds) and even the [Mushroom] Kingdom of the Whole Dang Ding! We didn't have those entries before but we didn't see any reason not to. So here's some very state-of-the-kart motor sports, dauntlessly incorporating every finicky trick (i.e. shortcuts) to make whatever shenanigans you and your feuding friends ever thought of to aggravate each other in this game seem kinda feeble. Very feeble in fact. Lamesauce!
Mushroom Cup: 0:05:45.76
Special Cup: 0:06:03.43
Star Cup: 0:06:12.73
The Whole Dang Ding: 0:23:16.53
But wait, there's [Dennis] Moore! Another runner to have made an imprint on the same game page is 'yat1', stealing time from the rich/poor and giving it to the poor/rich! My eyes just couldn't focus on what I was seeing in this more recent submission of the Rainbow Road w/ shortcuts Individual Level, and specifically the one-lap version of it. That lap time was 1:05.16 before. That lap time is 0:13:33 now. I thought I was looking at the wrong category or something! You do the maths how much the physical, virtual corner-cutting has snipped off the elapsing time. I can imagine dozens of runners' bloody bodies heroically frozen around the mountainside creating footholds so that The Chosen One was finally able to reach these heights. But maybe not? Maybe it was easy, work smarter, not harder -like? Full table time is now 0:05:29.27.
yat1's comments double as a reminder of what even count as shortcuts / large-skip glitches in this and kazn's four runs.
It's a-me, the name is Tour. James Mario Golf: Advance Tour.
Okay, that was dumb enough for a paragraph break.
Heck, it was dumb enough for two! XD I was invited by 'carterferris07' onto a "golf"* safari outing deep out on the veldt. Golf, as he explained, is the tribal religion of the local inhabitants. My first object of inquiry at the destination was the soundtrack roaming its natural haputtat. Motoi Sakuraba's** appeasing audio accessory is evidently the apex predator of the golf soundtrack ecosystem. It feeds on all the lynxes and tigers like they're to-be-chopped liver to it. Rolling in the deep... I mean in my Jeep, with roof hoisted as means of insulation from the wind, the rain, the lightning, the beastly appendages... wading through the shoals of the protracted intro sequence, I spotted a congregation of natives on their approach to the primary house of worship, the one known to them since time immemorial by the sacred name... the Club House. Inside, when briefed briefly on the coming trials, the sacred words are received with solemn reverence, as they will underpin all actions taken by the participants from this point onwards. At the crux of it all lies one holiest mantra, which I managed to record and decipher as follows: "To become the strongest golfer, you can't afford to waste any time." (That's right, this is officially a speedrun game first and foremost. If you see what I did there. And when I said "underpin". Did you catch that one?)
* This may or may not be the first golf game anyone's ever run for SDA but it's certainly the first that has "golf" in the title.
** This man is responsible for other killer soundtracks too! Think the Tales series, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile... and obviously (yeah yeah, I'm getting to it...) Earnest Evans.
The natives, having advanced with emboldened hearts and exalted spirits forth onto the undulating and mottled sacred mettle-testing grounds, will exhibit the curious habit of swinging their "four irons" like detached helicopter blades to effect an exceedingly ungainly but like for like character-building forwards momentum of their countless little bleached globoids, perhaps a dried fruit or nut of some local flora. The entire act I presume to have purely ceremonial significance, given they could, with the full accedence of physics, simply pick the globoids up... and carry them in their hands. Once set foot on the hors d'oeuvre (the first course, hors durr!), it is imperative, despite being expected to send one's globoid up again and again in lofty, majestic arcs, never to allow one's fancy to follow into the birdie's-eye view, wherefrom the shapes the courses assume are not always appropriate for the sincerity of the ritual.
This somewhat commercialized safari tour sacred not-exactly-mystery in full swing, the globoid is self-defeatingly deposited inside, then withdrawn from the ritualistic round orifice wherein once stood the pin (yes, that pin from that pun, now do you get it, finally?). Across the 0:46:30 span of the ritual I observed, altogether, several dozen iterations of this Sisyphean chore, and the character erects like soybean curds in China. On occasion, a course is given a token try, then turned a cold shoulder, perhaps in a futile attempt to curry favor with the spiteful seirei spirits that keep blocking the balls at the final approach. That's life! Balls will be blocked. Like if this update was to just