God, we love speedrunners. Not only are they performing incredible feats of glitchery, skill, and mad code manipulation, but they're also just breaking games and having a great time with it. It's basically a middle finger in the face of the designers, proving that the way the game is "supposed to be played" is not the only way it can be played.
Relatively new YouTube channel Lowest Percent is a great source for some of the weirdest speedruns you can find, including the one where Link stares at rupees for 17 hours, and how to beat the entirety of Super Mario 64 All-Stars with one star.
The channel is run by two people: SmallAnt, a Twitch streamer and speedrunner who holds several world records for Super Mario Odyssey speedruns; and Linkus7, who is also a Twitch streamer and speedrunner, who has a ton of world records for Wind Waker speedruns. Needless to say, they know their stuff.
Their latest video, narrated by the speedrunner AverageTrey, is about the "Max% Pre-Peach" run, which is a speedrun that involves getting as many "things" - blue coins and Shine Sprites - as possible, without unlocking the Delfino statue that leads to Shadow Mario kidnapping Peach. This involves a lot of precise jumping, glitch usage, and clipping into walls that you're not supposed to go into, including something called a "Yoshi Skip" - which is just going behind the orange juice walls without Yoshi there to blast them away.
It turns out that a large part of the speedrun is magical bananas. Lots of magical bananas. Also, barrels that float in mid-air. Probably because they're full of magical bananas.
In case you're wondering, the current Max% Pre-Peach record is 25 Shine Sprites and 40 blue coins, by speedrunner NokiDoki, at 1 hour, six minutes, and four seconds. There is a run by Orange 117 that takes only 58 minutes, but it uses illegitimate strats - having positional data on the screen - so despite being extremely cool, it's not the record-holder.
[source youtube.com]
Comments 12
Wow - I always wonder at what point does a speedrun stop feeling fun and start feeling like a chore, but this accomplishment is nuuuuuts
@GannonBanned looks bananas to me...
@Kienda let’s add some ice cream and syrup and get this split POPPIN
sunshine was my life as a kid, it makes me happy to see how people still find ways to enjoy it years later. always neat hearing about speedrun stories
Ahaha Smallant is amazing
When you have too much free time, you spend it like time's running out!
OoT Max%/Pre-Navi
now this is more interesting than seeing news of botw speedruns. This was fun to watch.
Lowest Percent is great. Saw it pop up a few weeks ago and couldn't believe how good the videos were.
Think of all the game diversity you have to sacrifice to perfect speedruns of specific games. I'm glad others do it, but I don't think i could.
@GannonBanned I think it depends on the person - a lot of people actually do legitimately have fun speedrunning, but it’s not for everyone. Personally I don’t have the patience for it but I’ve gotten tastes of the idea from SMM2 and sometimes I do enjoy the art of planning a path, practicing the maneuvers, and trying to string it together. I don’t think I can do it for anything more than 5 minutes (I’d get way too frustrated with every little mistake), but for those with more patience, it can be enjoyable to practice something to near perfection.
Also, while not always true, a lot of speed runners either have more than an average amount of free time or video games are their job, and that always helps because they can turn to other games as an escape. Speed running does take work, but so do plenty of games that have steep learning curves, and work isn’t mutually exclusive to fun. 😅
@Dr_Corndog I can't believe they're only a couple of months old, their videos are great. I watched their "Link stares at rupees" videos a few nights ago, which is why I wanted to cover them
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