There's a great new site showcasing speed-runs and I can't tear myself away from it
On your bike
"Hey! We got a world record!" is a phrase I've heard a lot today. I've been browsing Speedrun World Records, and I'm finding it hard to stop. It's a new site dedicated to showcasing some of the more obscure world-record speedruns: you just click the 'new run' button to watch the fastest play through of a random game in a random category. The idea is that you'll discover new games and runners you like, and keep track of them in the future.
I've spent a good number of idle hours clicking through speedruns on YouTube, but I think I prefer the random nature of this site. It's like a Revels bag for speedruns: most of the videos are great, and then there's the odd one where I have absolutely no idea what's going on (or why coffee-flavoured chocolate tastes so bad).
It's got me to enjoy watching games that I know very little about. The first video I got was a rather nonchalant run of the newly-released Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, the remake of a Sega Master System platformer from 1989. I'm amazed that anybody has learned the game's systems so thoroughly in so little time. Here's the video:
Then up popped a 22-second clip, and I'm still not entirely sure what happened in it. It's the world record run for a single segment of free-to-play exploration game The Way of Life. See if you can make more sense of it than me:
The third, and the last I'll mention, was a run of Dead Pixels, the side-scrolling zombie shoot-em-up. It's basically 10 minutes of a man running right past hordes of enemies, but the elation at the end is incredible – the runner has been trying for the world record for over a year.
Anyway, the point is that this site is great. If you've got some time to kill then I'd recommend you hop on and click through for a bit. Just keep an eye on the clock, because before you know it you'll have eaten into the time you've assigned to things you actually need to get done. Like write a news story, for example.