Some time ago I asked myself a question - is there any game which is totally (or, generally speaking, mostly) unsuitable for speedrunning? E.g. there's no glitches, no running possible or smth like that. Do you know such games?
Too obvious answer. Of course I didn't mean PvP games, only single-player (or co-op)
Probably every point n click game where the majority would just be skipping dialogue. There are some that are definitely speedrunnable tho.
I'd say most shmups aren't well suited for speedrunning as well. Usually, other than defeating bosses quickly, there's no real way to speed up the game... You can avoid going slow (by not dying, destroying enemies quickly etc), but other than that you usually have to wait on the game's scrolling speed.
However, one thing that I've learned from blind racing is that people will race/speedrun literally anything... And there's validity in that!
Even though I don't think shmups are well suited for speedrunning, it doesn't make these runs any less impressive. These games are usually pretty hard and you have to 1cc it to lose as little time as possible.
At the end of the day, you'll most likely find at least one person that likes any given game enough to speedrun it... Heck, people even run auto clickers!
As stated before, most bullet-hells/shmups, most VNs. But I'd say any game that's super linear isn't really suited to speedrunning. Then again... those sorts of games are played (like Goldeneye is super duper linear) and people try to find the optimal line and the optimal way of moving through a level as fast as possible. Really, I guess... mostly just games that have a lot of event triggers that require certain things to activate and bar progress through the game until those conditions are met.
Thought of this this other day; Any guitar hero, rock-band, or rhythm/dance game, or any game that has aspects of these. Winx Club: Quest for the Codax for the GBA isn't really built for speedrunning since there are unskippable dance/rhythm parts that just slow the game down. I know because I've been looking frantically for a new game to run and I've tried several dozen over the last week or so, this one included. The dance/rhythm scenes take 3-5 minutes to complete and can't be skipped. Deleted it instantly.
The NES Castlevanias were designed as sort of an antithesis of Mario. Everyone just blows through levels really fast, so lets force the player to take the game slow. Doesn't stop people from speedrunning them of course.
Also autoscrollers
The first thing that comes to mind is Animal Crossing. It has a board and people do run it, but that's definitely not the type of game that was intended to be played with speed in mind.
fnaf 1-2. theyre basically built out of rng, and there's little to no ways you could possibly shorten your time. I know fnaf is cringe, but thats the first thing that popped into my mind
Anyone do speedrunning to target scores? I come from a best score background and see fastest time to a target score as a way to have speedrunning in a new area. I want to speedrun pinball. I spoke to pinball and they did this.
While I do not see this as useful for World records, I do see it as useful for tournaments.
It could be possible to chain multiple games together. If a player failed to reach a target score after set number of lives, the reset and try again. The clock keeps running for them. Even if they pause, the clock would still be running.
[quote=lunchedbox34]I know fnaf is cringe[/quote]
That's debatable in many ways.
This really will change person to person, personally, I don't enjoy platformers that much although I would say auto scrollers would be a pretty bad speedruns besides that I could see why people would want to speedrun certain games that others may not want too or may not be seen as speedrunnable.
Out of the games I play, I would say Racing Extreme is pretty anti-speedrunning. It is a racing game, but there is no drifting, so most of the good times are from good lines on the road. The AI's rubber banding is extremely strong, so getting 1st place at all in 2 of the 5 tracks is difficult, and first place has never been achieved on one track. The rubber banding is so strong, it's actually beneficial to have a low rank as it makes you faster. So at a top level you hope for RNG to give you a low rank for as long as possible. We still went through with it for a few months, but now there's no active players.
Lemmings was created as a puzzle game and I am very certain nobody ever had speedrunning or speed economy in mind for it given the lax time limits in many places. The SMS version is probably the least speedrun-friendly too since you
-have no mouse control and therefore no instant ability to change settings because it's a cursor -have lag to contend with based on numbers on screen/in level/on the same horizontal -can't do what the 16-bit versions allow ie. you can't raise release rate and change lemming action at the same time
Combine that with the necessity of pausing in some places even when just playing casually, and it's pretty crazy. Fascinating to work on though I doubt I will ever be nuts enough to try Taxing or Mayhem full set runs.
