6 ms·

Reading through the comments, I realized that people even do speedruns in Nethack... impressive.

• pdpi 12y ago
  Why is it surprising? (And I do not at all mean that in a snarky tone. I've been lurking in the nethack community for so long that it seems perfectly natural to me)
  • kbenson 12y ago
    Probably because to the the person familiar enough with NetHack to have played it but never immersed themselves in the community, ascension seems hard. A speedrun is one thing, doing it on a game many can't even win is another thing entirely.
    • pmontra 12y ago
      I add to the point: doing it on a game many can't even make half way through.
      • nkuttler 12y ago
        My first nethack game? I was locked in a room without door and was killed by a falling rock. I don't even know why I ever played another game :-) And yes, there was a big gap until the next game. As a beginner that's all you ever do, die, die, die.
        • klibertp 12y ago
          Similar experience with ADOM, it even has a special location which becomes reachable only after the game killed your 100th hero. Got to this point in a few days back then, I wish there was something good for 1000th death, that was when I started to know what I'm doing :)
      • chongli 12y ago
        To be fair, the second half of the game is so easy it's almost trivial. The hard part of the game is getting half-way.
    • pdpi 12y ago
      Ascension _is_ hard. Or at least it still seems to me, seeing as I've personally never ascended :).
  • jsheard 12y ago
    The speedruns most people are familiar with are the product of someone playing a meticulously planned route over and over again until the execution is almost perfect. With the more popular games it reaches a point where they are barely even playing the game anymore, instead running on auto-pilot and hoping to make the least mistakes and get the most favorable RNG with minor things like enemy AI patterns. Speedrunning a game with roguelike randomness is a completely different beast, requiring actual mastery of the game as it was intended to be played.
    • mklim 12y ago
      > requiring actual mastery of the game as it was intended to be played I agree here, but I just want to emphasize that Any% speedruns (runs where you purposely exploit glitches or flaws with the game engine to trigger the final cutscene as fast as possible) still take incredible amounts of skill. More skill than playing the game as it was intended to be played, in a lot of cases. The current Ocarina of Time route involves exploiting several glitches that require pressing the correct button combination on a specific frame (N64 games run at 20fps), jumping at just the pixel perfect angle to slide through a model's corner/collision tracking, etc. Much more difficult stuff than beating the game straight through. Super Monkey Ball 2 (Gamecube game) speedruns require pulling off maneuvers trickier than anything the levels were explicitly designed for, the difficulty of which is hard to overstate. That game is hard. Speedrunning a game with true RNG everywhere like Nethack is definitely a beast of its own since you can't memorize routes, but even runs with completely static routes are incredibly difficult to pull off.
      • jsheard 12y ago
        Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply that rote speedrunning doesn't require skill. It's just a different kind of skill, and a lot of patience.
• aidenn0 12y ago
  People do blindfolded runs of Mike Tyson's Punch Out! Which is also impressive.
  • jsheard 12y ago
    Blindfolded Zelda: OOT is a thing too, they did it live at AGDQ this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhPA_TpkzkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhPA_TpkzkA
  • bhaak 12y ago
    People do ascend blindfolded characters in NetHack. Such an ascension is aptly named "Zen Ascension". http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Zen#Notable_Ascensions http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Zen#Notable_Ascensions