What games are out of most people league for most difficulty, memorization, unforgiveness on errors etc. in your opinion?
3 years ago
Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Hey! I'm pretty new in the speedrun world, I started casually speedrunning circa a year ago and never really got so far as doing 1000+ attempts on a game that is heavily speedrun, but something about the least speedrun games intrigues me. Lately I've begun to think that the most run games are a bit overrated in terms of difficulty (not to say that they're easy, there is a LOT of skill required, and I've tested it myself in games such as Portal, CTR or Celeste achieving satisfying times) but the fact that hundreds of people are capable of getting good times just makes them seem more "easy" to me .But there's -something- about more challenging games/categories such as DOOM Eternal Ultra Nightmare or Cuphead No Damage that makes me really want to watch every single run, and that they both scares the hell out of me AND at the same time makes me kinda want to try. So keeping in mind that the important thing is to like the game we play and without starting any beef, what do you think is THE MOST DIFFICULT GAME TO SPEEDRUN? (Or at least makes the list xD) I'm thinking:

  • Doom Eternal UN because of the unreal amount of deadly things coming towards you at high speed -Automachef, just too much stuff to memorize and a single error in programming something can cost you minutes, especially at the final levels of a run where rng comes in and can break stuff randomly causing you to restart the level and fix everytime -Crash team racing for the amount of precise movements, inputs, shortcuts and really pretty much everything :/

What's your pick bois?

Israel
  1. Define "overrated in terms of difficulty"

  2. Difficulty is subjective. One runner can struggle with learning/running one game, but having lot of ease with a second game; while for another runner it can be the opposite.

  3. Achieving "satisfying times" is subjective. One runner might run a game just for the fun of it, without much consideration for the end result; another runner might want to run a game up to a certain time-range that represents a certain skill level; and another runner might not be satisfied with anything less than the world record.

  4. You are confusing DIFFICULTY with POPULARITY, which have very little in common. If you decide that a certain game is hard for several reasons, does it really matter if 1000 people are running it, or 100, or 10, or even just 1? Who knows, there might be a game on the site that requires more technical skill than top runs of Celeste or Portal, but nobody knows about it other than the runner who requested that game in the first place (and again, "more technical skill" is also a subjective term). You said that hundreds of people are capable of getting good times in the game, and so it makes the game look more "easy" for you. But if a game is popular, and lot of players are trying to achieve fast times, then of course lot of players WILL achieve fast times.

Since you asked, my vote for the hardest game I know will be "Getting Over It". In general, I am and always was bad at fast/precise reactions with the mouse. In this game, it took me about 27 hours of play time before I gave up, and I also never managed to get past the cliffs above the orange. At the end, I got good at the very early part of the game because I had to repeat that many many times, but it's nothing compared to what you can see the speedrunners are doing.

If I will limit myself only to games that I did run so far, and actually finished, and actually enjoyed playing - The hardest game for me is "Robot Wants Kitty". Runs can be very short, but to get top times you gotta be super precise with your movements and shooting, and even one mistake usually means resetting the game.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Gaming_64 and Pear like this
Emilia-Romagna, Italy

You're right, I wrote the post at 4 am so I could've been much more specific. Difficulty and Satisfaction are clearly subjective, what i meant to say is that i personally find more intresting to watch runs that are tipically less run because of the high level of skill required, and not because of less popularity. I was wrong saying that a game is easy because more people can achieve good times, but like in the title i was looking for games so difficult that the number of runs was low because of the games difficulty and unforgiveness in your opinion, that's all there is to it really. I hope i didn't make anyone feel less capable because they don't run an overall less run game :3

Gaming_64 likes this
Emilia-Romagna, Italy

AND Getting Over It speedrun actually looks fascinating, i've never tried the game myself but holy jeff that looks hard :P

Gaming_64 likes this
Texas, USA

My two cents is Harvest Moon 64 - All Photos. You have to know just about everything about the game and it is unforgiving- any one of many mistakes or miscalculations can cost the entire run, because you've usually just saved the game as you realize what went wrong. If you're on autopilot or miscount days and sleep through a festival or photo, it's over. If a typhoon blows away your chickens, it's over. Even if you do everything perfect on your end, you need good RNG to randomly dig a power berry from the farm for the final photo. You have to route on the fly due to NPC locations/appearance RNG and random daily weather. You have to be good at math for dog race betting to get lumber for house extensions. We have generic charts to help, but there's no way to know exactly how much money you'll have or what odds the dogs will have until race day. For casual gamers, this game is chill and relaxing, but it's completely different for speedrunners.

The four best runners did a race for the Really Really Long A Thon this year, and only one of us actually finished. The fastest time is just under six hours for the JP version and 6.5 hours for English.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Gaming_64, ckellyspeedruns and 3 others like this
Kentucky, USA

Most impressive to me

  • Super Monkey Ball 1 - Master% Super Precise levels all over the place in a heavily physics based game, and unlike SMB 2 you can't skip some levels in a world.
  • Blast Corps - All Platinum% - Getting even 10 platinums in this game took me longer to do than 100% lesser games (and I mean casually) - It's less amazing if you haven't played this game itself, but the Platinum scores are literally based on a Time Trial competetion between the beta tester/developor group and are absurdly fast, and seeing someone actually get them all in less than 2 hours is real crazy.
  • Descent (1995)- It's hard for me not to nominate all the DoS FPS like Doom(1993)or Blood, but this one is kind of the king of them all in terms of how insane it is (despite being a subgenre and not a Pure FPS) - You probbably know that these games tend to add speed for each movement, so strafing and moving straight at the same time allows a movement boost - Well add in a third Axis, and you have a speedrun with always on triple movement at the cost of having to move diagnolly and at least slightly up/down at all times (and contact with walls causes damage in this game). It's also insanely mazy - I can speedrun Doom badly in my freetime after watching it in a marthon and checking a few guides but I'd never dream of Descent. also Like Doom, their are some nasty enemy types. (I have Descent and Descent 2 a little mixed up, but suicide bombs, homing missle enemeies, invisble things, and the item thief ship come to mind) Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - (All Goals) - Because of the End Run command and lack of cutscenes, this is a No-brakes kind of speedrun and it's especially impressive that they mostly combine all the goal into a single run of each other. I think it's a good case of a community speedruning a game that's not inherently that hard to 100% casually, but they've run it so much that they've optimized it to really tight levels. X-COM (1994) Superhuman+Ironman - I kind of find the older runs (2016-17) to be more interesting than the full yolo of more modern X-COM runs, but it's one of the bitterest runner vs RNG struggles I've ever seen.

General Category for Rougelike Speedruns - My favorite 3 are - Lufia 2: Ancient Cave / Azure Dreams / and Doom the Roguelike

Lufia 2 is very strange as a rougelike, because it switches between Rouge cave-map movement and traditinal turn-based fights when you actually bump into enemies. It's also unexpected that it's so interesting, because the main story mode of Lufia 2 is an incredibly gentle and low difficulty RPG. However, the Ancient Cave enemies scale in an incredibly nasty way, especially in the ~ 1ish hour of speedrun watching 4 people race and all die is completely normal Ancient Cave experience.

Azure Dreams is more normal as a Roguelike other than the 3D - it's all tile based movement AND combat. It is mostly interesting because it's balanced around the player "grinding" by leaving the tower and coming back multiple time to receive incremental semi-permeant stat buffs instead of actually 0-40 in a single trip. Speedrunning this comes down to low-level shenanigans and avoiding enemies using whatever AI tricks are possible.

Doom RL - Doom RL is a so called "coffee break" rougelike, so it is over in minutes. The Melee build is kind of OP for all lower difficulties, so anyone playing on Normal (Hurt Me Plenty) or below is basically just grinding to get good stair luck. People playing UV or Nightmare in a speedrun of this can basically die at any time if an Arachnotron/Mancubus shows up at the wrong time and they kind of have to make tons of calls on when to be safe throuhout the entire game. I wish more runners played it in the Ascii mode than the graphic mode because it would make it easier to relate to how the game looks when I'm playing it on my own computer lol.

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Israel

[quote=Danone]I was looking for games so difficult that the number of runs was low because of the games difficulty and unforgiveness[/quote]

I see what you mean now, but that raises another interesting question: Are we able to tell why a game on SRC is popular (or not popular), and what are the reasons for that?

Also, you need to set a certain threshold for what you define as unpopular or "low number of runs". Lets say for the sake of discussion... 5 runners or less?

Well, I can think of several reasons for why some games on SRC might be not popular. I will sort them from what I think is the least relevant to the most relevant:

  • As you said, difficulty. Game is so "difficult"/"hard" to play or run, that nobody wants to run it
  • Bad accessibility in terms of speedrunning - Slow or obnoxious resetting process, unskipable cut-scenes, heavy RNG which you have zero control of, bad controls or bad game design in general (even in casual playthrough), lots of crashes or bugs
  • Bad accessibility of game - Not easy to get to play the game; can't play on emulator; need old consoles or special equipment; game is pricey
  • No exposure or publicity, game is obscure

The last point is the major reason for (un)popularity - if very few people have played the game or even heard of it, don't expect the masses to come. We can also discuss about what might make a game more popular than the other, but that's irrelevant right now.

Some extra things:

  • I mainly run web-games right now (so in terms of accessibility, they're "perfect" cause anyone can play them and they're free). Many of the games from the past (especially flash games) were just not meant for speedrunners at all, but there are still some that are popular.

  • There are some games that I personally wanted to run sometime (I have a large "to-run" list), but after trying to play them casually I ditched the idea because they were too difficult for me, or I just knew that I won't have any fun with them. But they are also popular. For example: https://www.speedrun.com/give_up - every obstacle or hazard is on global cycle, so dying doesn't reset the level, and can ruin your entire career https://www.speedrun.com/sik1 - Only one button to press, but there are several places where you need to press it in the PERFECT spot or else you die

  • Some games can be difficult to play casually, but easy to speedrun (with relevant speedrunning tricks or something). It can also be the other way around. When you talk about difficulty, I guess you mean difficulty for speedrunning? Also, everything gets easier the more you practice it.

  • As I said before, a game can have several time-ranges of runs that represent a certain skill level. So when you describe a game as "hard to speedrun", are you talking about getting runs to be below a certain threshold, or getting the world record, or something else?

If we take Celeste as an example, a (very crude) partition of time ranges of Any% can be: 1:30:00 or more - Easy to get after 1 playthrough of the game, you just need to know what you are supposed to do. 1:00:00-1:30:00 - Easy to get after some basic training in each level, and trying to minimize your deaths. No speedrun tricks/routes are even required 30:00-1:00:00 - You need to start incorporating speedrun tricks and routes to your runs, and practice the levels much more seriously less than 30:00 - you need to know and execute almost all known tricks, while doing everything very quickly, with very few mistakes/deaths. "Only" 41 people are in this level.

So yeah... Celeste is not an easy precision-platform game on your first casual playthrough; but after getting game knowledge and experience, speedrunning it CAN be easy, depends on what your goals are.

  • Lots of games on the site have only 1 or 2 runners. That's just how it is, difficulty is irrelevant.
Edited by the author 3 years ago
Gaming_64, GFM and 3 others like this
Kentucky, USA
KarusDaedlyn
He/Him, They/Them
3 years ago

I was very happy I managed to complete a run of MechWarrior 3: Pirate's Moon, and get it added here as a game.

But, it's definitely not easy. For starters, there are instructions on how to even install the game, which may or may not work for everyone's PC. Then, there's the natural difficulty of the series, as it is a simulation game and nearly every key on the keyboard corresponds to various systems of your 'Mech. Then there's knowledge of the in-game systems and understanding how all the mechanics work. (Weapons, heat management, engine size, ammunition, criticals.) It's also up there as one of the hardest campaigns in the series.

The thing is, while this difficulty is manageable for me, I've never managed to complete a Mario game casually. I can barely beat classic DOOM games without save-scumming, much less speedrunning. Difficulty is a hard thing to pin down since all players have certain skills that make certain things easier, or weaknesses which make other things harder.

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Netherlands

DOOM Any%

Edit: I wrote kind of a story after this lol but I guess my mobile decided to not save this at all lmao. I'll type it again.

This run is a what I would consider a difficult to execute run and hard to master. Though difficulty is subjective but I'd say there is a consensus amongst most runners and users that it actually is. Personally I'd say this is mostly caused by it's dependency on precise movement, whether that is for skips or just movement in general. Another factor is that every small mistake could potentially be very punishing. Sometimes being a pixel short or too far when traversing an out of bounds section for example can mean the difference whether or not you will fall to your death and have to reload a checkpoint, losing most of your progress in that level.

Some setups are detailed to the pixel perfect. An example being in a level called 'Lazarus' where the player has line up with a certain pixel range on the ground to be able to press a button through the wall. Another example of a rather precise trick in the run is the so called 'railboost' in which a player can boost off of a rail sometimes reaching very high velocity. The positioning of the player and speed of the inputs in which the player touches the rail determines the velocity and height of a boost the player will actually get.

Either way, lot's of more examples to name. Watch any run to find out how crazy it is.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Gaming_64 and SIow like this
Rhode Island, USA

Going to second all the people who said that the reason most games with few runs have few runs is more likely due to them being obscure. I've routed several categories for 2 games that had 0 runners in said categories at the time that I routed them. Both games are definitely accessible for a new speedrunner as a first speedgame, but they never took off as speedruns because few people know they exist. Most popular games also are accessible as a first speedgame - it takes thousands of hours of practice to get world records in these games, sure; but to just do a few speedruns to a casual goal is definitely accessible.

Now, I'm not sure what THE most difficult speedrun to exist is, but a good contender for most difficult category that a run of exists is N++'s Mimetic (unlock and beat ! tab from a new file). The game itself has plenty of categories that are accessible to beginners. This run is far from it though. To give you an idea of how crazy this run is, most people can't do the content of the run casually without at least 1000 hours of practice in the game; let alone speedrun it. Most of the challenges done in this run can take anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours of attempts each for an experienced player casually. Same with clearing ! tab levels. There's also just a lot of content - a minimum of 660 levels to clear to meet these requirements. The time this was done in is absolutely insane as well - 3 rows were done with challenges as part of this run faster than my pb's for those rows (with just normal clears), with most of the rest of the content being stuff I'm not good enough to speedrun yet. https://www.speedrun.com/nplusplus/run/zg78qe0z

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

I second Oreo when he says that some games with just a few players may require more skill to master than some of the most popular ones.

One game I have watched yesterday that gave me that idea was Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana on Nightmare Mode. There's just one run in that category for PC, but it looks pretty skillful and demanding, since the guy uses a lot of characters moves in quick succession to surpass barriers in the map and skip almost the entire game, not to mention he has to remember a lot of specific npcs to talk to within certain amounts of time and spam Flash Guard and Flash Moves like a boss to overcome the final battle because if you fail very few flash guards, you can die in a moment, since you're not properly leveled.

Pretty impressive run that is not very popular on the site, unfortunately.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Gaming_64 likes this