A Man Once Dreamt that He Was a Rock

by Zen

I'll confess I've never been as up on the Mega Man phenomenon as I should have been. Growing up I got to play the original, but not enough to get good at it. At home the only gaming device I was allowed was my Game Boy, so I made do with a couple of the Game Boy titles until I could use an emulator.

Technically I've played through and beaten the first seven games in the series, but since I did it with an emulator I cheated like mad and never got very good at them. The first Mega Man on Game Boy, however, remains my bitch to this day; I can maul through it with my eyes closed from start to finish.

Despite my metered exposure, having played almost the entire franchise I can say with some certainly that Mega Man 9 is the best entry by far. I would not have said anything of the sort during my first few hours of gameplay, what with the constant falling and exploding and losing, but after skating through the game once on energy tanks and picking it up again something crazy happened: I declared my lordship over it.

Every obstacle in the entire game is an obstacle only until you make sense of it. There's a rhythm to every area in Mega Man 9, and once you get into it you'll find yourself stopping very rarely. Areas that seemed arduous at first become second-nature, and weapons that seemed useless become favorite tools.

That's something about Mega Man 9 that we haven't seen in a long time: useful weapons. This is the single biggest factor in Mega Man 2's greatness, where the Metal Blade achieved legendary status for its versatility, power, and forgiving use of ammunition. The unfortunate side effect in Mega Man 2 was that it was practically compulsory for you to take on Metal Man first in a game that should be all about leaving it up to the player. Mega Man 9 sidesteps this by having every weapon possess genuine utility. Even the tired rotating shield weapon doubles as Enker's Mirror Shield, and the fire weapon is more useful for its angle of attack than for any extra damage it does or the fact that you can charge it.

A fundamental fact of a good Mega Man game is that the weapons you receive don't affect how much damage you do so much as they affect how you play the game. Another one is that playing the levels in a different order should be a very different experience. Mega Man games are even more nonlinear than the old Metroid games, it's just that that nonlinearity is completely on the table from the beginning. You acquire the tools in the order you want, and rather than deciding whether you can pass through an area, acquring a new tool merely decides how you can pass through that area.

The result, in Mega Man 9, is a playground. You are given obstacles, and you are given a bunch of tools. Anything will work, so it's just up to you to figure out what you want to use. It gets written up in my book along with Final Fantasy Tactics, Super Metroid, and Mario Sunshine as a shining example of nonlinear game and level design. If I could, I would make out with it every day.

The End of Time

by Zen

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in 43:51, Single-Segment
A game as winding and nonlinear as SotN has obvious potential for sequence breaking, but it took many a year before the glitches in this video were properly exploited. This run isn't the most spectacular, but the game gets dissected in some very cool ways.

Chrono Trigger in 3:34, 33 segments
The first run I saw of this game was around five and a half hours long, and very impressive. This beastly run on the Japanese version clocks in about two hours faster, and actually fights Lavos with the bucket way earlier than anyone thought possible.

Contra III Hard Mode in 17:00, Single-Segment
Maybe not the most interesting run, but in terms of sheer execution this is one of the most impressive.

Devil May Cry Dante Must Die! mode 100% in 1:35:34, 15 segments
The Devil May Cry games have been the subjects of some very fine speed runs, but this one is probably my favorite. Not only is it on the highest difficulty setting getting the highest rankings, but it was all done from a scratch save file and got enough orbs to get 100% along the way. This really wasn't intended by the developers, and if you check the comments you'll find out just how tight the timing was to accomplish it.

Mega Man X low% in 34:09, Single-Segment
Some speed runs are the clear product of a youth spent obsessing over a game, and in a way there could be no more poignant love letter to Mega Man X than this run. When I saw the first published run by Mike Uyama, I felt like the routes through the levels were so precise and practiced that you could almost picture him as a child playing through it over and over again. Subsequent competition and some cross-pollination with the TAS community has resulted in a much lower time and an extremely good run.

Mega Man X 100% in 39:41, Single-Segment
Not necessarily more impressive than the above run, but if you ever tried to get the Hadouken in this game it's wild and crazy to see it done in the context of a speed run, and the results are fun to watch, if a tad anticlimactic.

Metroid Prime any% in 1:03, 16 segments
SDA started out as a Quake speed run site way back in the day, and was somehow affiliated with PlanetQuake in ways I don't completely recall. The guy who ran the site was a Metroid buff, and decided to show his appreciation for the series by posting his speed run of Metroid Prime. I think the time was 1:37, and it went up with insanely detailed comments that clearly demonstrated the eye for lost seconds and possible improvements a good speed runner needs to have. That run was the seed for the entire site as it exists today, and this run is 34 minutes faster and impressive as fuck.

Metroid Prime 100% in 1:28, 21 segments
Was the any% run over too quick? Well, that's what 100% runs are for. Now you get to see how much of the game you can skip while still getting everything.

Metroid Prime low% in 1:18, 18 segments
And if you want to see the most insane sequence breaking there is, low% runs are your thing. If you've watched all these and you still aren't satisfied, I recommend watching their PAL equivalents. Several of the speed tricks used in these runs were made impossible in the PAL and Players' Choice versions of the game, but the low% is just as low and all the runs are almost as fast thanks to the ingenuity of everyone involved. This means completely new and more audacious tricks for us to watch.

Pikmin 9 days/50 pikmin, 8 segments
Some people liked to run Pikmin with the fewest Pikmin possible. Some people liked to finish it in as few in-game days as possible. It turned out that it was possible to do both in the same run. If you think that sounds like this speed run is carefully planned, tightly executed, and thoroughly refined, then you're absolutely correct.

Super Mario 64 70-star in 1:01:32, Single-Segment
I can remember the anticipation for this run approaching insanity. People love their Mario 64, and it happens to be a brilliant game to speed run. If you dig around you'll notice three different categories for the game, one of them being a much faster 16-star run. That run is mostly just about executing a particular glitch to cheat through the game, which is impressive in its own right but not nearly as entertaining as this stunningly-executed run on the game's intended path. This run's route planning, speed tricks, and sheer reckless abandon displayed in the final moments are the stuff of legend, and many people on the SDA forums consider this their favorite speed run ever.

Super Mario World 100% in 1:31:45, Single-Segment
SDA has very strict submission rules and a thorough verification process performed by some extremely talented people, so you can rest assured that any runs on the site were performed on a console without cheating. Even so, after watching this video people will head to the forums and insist that this run is a tool-assisted video that slipped through the cracks. This means you need to watch it.

Yoshi's Island 100% individual level runs see table
The first speed runs I saw of this game were fairly by-the-numbers, and I despaired at ever seeing truly clever runs full of speed tricks and daring maneuvers. Fortunately, trihex went absolutely fucking loco on this game's ass one level at a time, and then did it again. I hope he's not done, but there haven't been any new ones up in some time so it's safe to say the definitive runs are up right now. Downloading them all from the table is a bit unwieldy, but absolutely recommended. This is one of the absolute best experiences on SDA right now, in my opinion.

Super Metroid in 0:32, Single-Segment
Despite Super Metroid's primacy in the speed run field, its page was stagnant for a long time. Smokey had a run up that was I think around five segments, and clocked in somewhere around 35 or 36 minutes (depending on whether he used the then-controversial Murder Beam). Not too long ago this fine Japanese fellow completely ravaged that time, and in one segment. A lot of people say this run's overhyped, since it just applied modern speed run standards to an obsolete record, but any world-record run of this game deserves your attention.

Super Metroid 100% in 0:55, 7 segments
This is it: my favorite speed run of all time. It showcases numerous glitches in the game in ways that are intuitive and attractive, it bypasses major areas (and even one boss) while still getting 100%, and careful planning went into the navigation of each room. I own this on DVD. It may be one of the oldest runs on the site, but it's an absolute work of art.

Cosmic Balance

by Zen

A lot of games back in the day started making a big show of having "role-playing elements" worked in. In some cases this just meant there was an inventory that may or may not affect gameplay, but sometimes it translated into actual choices the player got to make. The phenomenon began long before anyone talked about it, probably most originally and elegantly with the first Mega Man. The levels could be tackled in any order you pleased, and the weapons you got along the way would make each level a very different experience from that had by someone playing in a different order.


There are more obvious examples, like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, that have already been talked about enough. In Mega Man, the opportunities given to the player to progress in any way he or she chose were an integral part of the gameplay, and in Metroid and Zelda they give the player an opportunity to experience the same areas from different perspectives as the game progressed. Aspects of these games could present themselves to players in ways that were determined by choices they themselves made. It was primitive, yes, but well-used, and another example of ingenious developers making the most of small games. Because this was an intentional decision made by the game designers, much effort was put into preventing the player from acquiring everything at the outset of the game and playing through the entire thing homogeneously.

In console RPGs this phenomenon became rather more mechanical. Leveling up was mostly just a means of satisfying a player's Progress Quest appetite, and while some gameplay complexity would arise from it, it was really just a way to keep certain powerful items and monsters out of reach until the designers felt they weren't imbalancing. Character progression became a way to put video games on rails, and players found that usually by the time they got that powerful spell or item, they only got it because it wasn't very useful anymore. Over time, the means of extending a game's duration have become the means of limiting the possibilities available to the player. Somewhere along the line this process became moralized.

It's a common bit of stubborn ignorance that people want everything about the world to conform to their own assumptions. Explanations of the world around us have a way of "fulfilling themselves". When Isaac Newton says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the observation becomes a moral proverb: actions have consequences. Soon we find people punishing others to teach them this lesson about the world. We call them natural consequences, but they are really imposed by people more often than by nature. The moral law set forth is that someone has to pay when something goes wrong; all forces must balance out or there can be no rest. "You can't get something for nothing."

There has never been as great an example of this warped and misguided ethical view as the Grand Theft Auto series. I'm not sure anyone has complained before that Grand Theft Auto reinforced traditional moral values to a fault, but I assure you it's the case. The games have toys and joys too numerous to mention, and the devoted player who overcomes their challenges will have a lot of fun with the bonuses he or she unlocks. But the challenges themselves are not fun by any definition of the word; they are punishments, ordeals set forth so that the player's fun might not accidentally grow out of control. The developers, when including a very fast bicycle or a well-armed helicopter, seem to have collectively decided that these things are too good to give to the player for free. The player must pay for the privilege, above and beyond the cost of the game.

The result is that every mission has about a hundred ways to lose and only one way to win. Punishment is doled out liberally, and the bonus missions that unlock great things are the purest distillations of raw agony. Powerful, useful tools and games in GTA are withheld not to develop the game experience or to prevent a trivial completion of the game, but out of spite. And those who complete the challenges will tell themselves that it is worth it. That the satisfaction of accomplishing these meaningless feats of repetition and arbitrary precision make the rewards that much more satisfying. These people will grow up to deprive their children of joys and tell them it "builds character". After all, misery necessitates equal reward. It's a law of nature.

It's not worth it. Each entry in the Grand Theft Auto series is more dehumanizing than the last. As much fun as I've had flying around with a jetpack and a dozen kinds of weapons blowing up half of a fake Las Vegas, if I could return not just GTA: San Andreas but the entire experience I would. It's more fun to watch an expert play than it is to play. It's more fun to download a 100% save file off the Internet than it is to get 100% yourself. The game allows the player to engage in violent sex acts, murder national guardsmen, and commit a terrorist act on a hydroelectric dam, all in the name of profit and power, but none of those aspects of this game is as hurtful or socially base as the "challenges" offered the player.