Glitchy Distractions
November 10th, 2012 by Gavok |One of my great weaknesses when writing stuff for this site is that I get distracted by the internet really easily. I’m almost done with my next Crossover Celebration article, but instead of putting the finishing touches on it, I find myself thinking, “You know what I haven’t looked up in a while? Tool-assisted speed run videos.”
You know the kind. The ones that show the quickest possible way a game can be finished. Usually, they were a nice way to do away with your childhood demons. Like, for instance, watching somebody play through Karnov without getting hit once. They’re a great diversion, but there’s a few I’ve recently come across that had my jaw dropping. Somebody playing through by dodging every attack and hitting every enemy just right can be entertaining, but it’s the glitchy ones that steal the show. Tool-assisted speed runs that sometimes aren’t even based on speed. Just the tool-assisting.
For instance, I’ve seen speed runs of someone getting through Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in less than two minutes due to a glitch. There’s also one for Battletoads where the players find a warp zone, create a warp zone from one of the players dying, end up on a screen of nonsense until one of them dies somehow and after hitting continue, they win. One that’s even more ridiculous is a Boy and a Blob.
Yes, he just ran through the credits screen to beat the game.
Fighting games are ripe for exploitation and few are better than this video of Marvel vs. Capcom. I thought I wouldn’t be able to be pulled in by 25 minutes of this game, but almost immediately it grabbed me in and wouldn’t let go. Highlights include Hulk breaking out of Ryu’s Raging Demon with a two-jump Gamma Crush that attacks both opponents in mid-air and yet he still is considered the loser.
But the one that truly brightened my day comes from Family Feud for SNES. A game that I actually had as a kid because why not. This one is absolutely amazing because of a major fault in the program. As long as a correct answer exists in your answer, it works. So for instance, if one of the correct answers was “pans” and you answered “Spanish”, you’d be given the points because you have those four letters in the correct order mixed in there (“Spanish”). Someone decided to have some serious fun with this and I haven’t laughed so hard in quite some time.
Hahaha! Look at the Hall family in-between rounds. They are SO PISSED.
More loveliness can be found here.
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That Marvel vs Capcom video is indeed strangely compelling and mesmerising.
For some reason this made me think of the recent book by Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations, and thought you might enjoy giving it a read if you have the time.