The Art of Making Easy Games Hard | Speedrun Studies

replay value is a term thrown around in video game criticism all the time it refers of course to how much value a player can get from continuing to play past a first completion this can manifest in many different ways from multiplayer online games whose competitive nature and ranking system provide essentially infinite replayability to single-player experiences which can buff their review scores by including alternate endings secret characters post-game content or just straight up being designed around the concept of replaying something and the list could go on generally more replay value is good and less replay value is bad i guess to be honest i've always found the concept kinda cloudy i would probably replay grease a gorgeous and meaningful experience but one which will play out pretty much the same way every time before a game which underwhelmed me but technically has a thousand little baubles to collect the term can be easily twisted in fact there's a way to render replay value entirely obsolete on an unrelated note let's talk about super mario land 2 6 golden coins released in 1992 for the nintendo game boy it was a simple platformer from a simple time which though not without charm and some unusual aspects has mostly faded from memory a footnote of a game sml2 didn't make many lasting contributions to the mario series aside from the creation of wario a controversial decision to be sure it also had a whole level themed around mario's balls to give you a sense of the strangeness and creativity that is dimmed quite a bit in 2d mario in the 21st century there's no way this wasn't intentional right all that said it holds up pretty well for a handheld game that'll turn 30 next year plenty of adults with vague but fond recollections of the game could play it now and have a good time most people could clear it comfortably in an afternoon or if you have a completionist bent a slightly longer afternoon but if you look at super mario land 2 from a specific angle approach it with a specific mindset it will transform from a three and a half hour experience to one that lasts for hundreds and still genuinely has even more to give how [Music] so let's start with the basics and talk about what makes a platformer fun generally people enjoy jumping and moving around an interesting interactive environment which is one of the most obvious things i've ever said it's satisfying to figure out how to control mario or sonic or whomever especially because you get so much better at it as the game goes on the jump heights and timings and running speeds become second nature and by the end of the playthrough you can pilot the character by muscle memory in ways that would have been very difficult at first the movement is key this is mario zone area 1 a fun level here you can see footage of me playing through it and i especially like this section with all the gears it feels nice to string all these jumps together without losing much speed at all but i am not an expert [Music] by the perfect ending maybe that was footage from the world record speedrun by adam ferrari 64 who has played super mario land 2 for a lot longer than three and a half hours paradoxically he has also beaten it in only 26 minutes and 14 seconds i platformed through that section he flew what's hard to appreciate within the context of a single casual playthrough is just how far away from mastery of a game's movement options you are by the time the credits roll you become comfortable with the controls yes you do not have enough time to maximize their potential as an example i bet most players never notice that holding up on the d-pad lets mario jump higher than normal something not seen in most of his other games and i'm certain most people never learned about super jumps but let's not get ahead of ourselves in most cases movement in single-player games has a much higher skill ceiling than the game itself will ever teach you even a simple platformer like sml2 has plenty of unintuitive idiosyncrasies that when mastered unlock a new kind of gameplay entirely space zone area 1 is a unique level due to its low gravity gimmick mario can jump higher but is lighter and slower in the air this floatiness which is just a fun little novelty which fits the theme of the area ends up drastically altering the optimal movement through the level mario is slower in the air and only in the air therefore speedrunners spend as much time running on the ground as possible this simple change transforms the level from using your extra jump height to clear enemies with ease to navigating a grounded obstacle course with razor sharp precision every frame you're in the air you're losing time mastery of a game's movement produces new gameplay experiences and by mastering the movement and paying close attention to the underlying mechanisms speedrunners can develop a unique set of techniques that become essential to how they play the game despite being absent in virtually any casual playthrough i mentioned earlier how mario jumps higher when up is held but it's possible to go higher still for whatever reason releasing the jump button within a short window before mario reaches his typical maximum height results in a super jump if you hold a for 27 frames or longer this game runs at 60fps by the way then mario will jump exactly 69 pixels in the air however any jump duration between 21 and 26 frames will go higher and the closer to 26 it is the bigger the extra boost now this potential 12 increase in jump height may not sound like much at first but it is absolutely essential to completing the game as quickly as possible the number of times adam uses them in his record run is too big to go over each one but here's a particularly important example from the final level in the game in order to keep running without stopping through this gauntlet of fire breathing statues mario has to jump over this pit directly onto the top of the largest enemy this not only requires the player to jump as close as possible to the edge but it needs to be a super jump as well and it can't just be any super jump it needs to be one of the highest possible we're talking about two inputs with a maximum of 1 20th of a second of leeway one right after another if you're a top runner the penalty is almost certainly the loss of the run when you're already more than 90 percent of the way to the end it's an intense moment thrilling if you make it crushing if you don't the discovery and development of super jumps make it all possible it's a technique that's very difficult to discover on a first playthrough because it's never taught to or required of the player yet the game gets so much more interesting once it's learned two other techniques that have a little less writing on them but are still worked into the speedrun constantly are corner boosts and quick drops if mario jumps directly into a corner his sprite is shifted a few pixels instead of resulting in a headbonk check out this footage from the legendary super mario land speedrunner oh dear timing it just right jumping into right facing corners while on the run can result in a tiny push in the direction mario already wants to go each one of these corner boosts is a minute potential time save but opportunities for them are so frequent that over the course of the game performing them consistently can become a big deal quick drops are another esoteric technique that subtly exploits the game's movement engine mario falls faster if he walks off a platform than if he runs so often the optimal movement is to release the run button right before going into a fall and of course repressing it before mario touches the ground these techniques along with various others i didn't mention become second nature to a well-practiced speedrunner resulting in them moving through each level with a much more complex set of skills than it would appear at first glance but i don't want to give the idea that speedrunning is only about pressing buttons at the right time the routing of a run is probably just as important and is much more about planning and theorizing than simple execution in super mario land 2 the player has to complete most of the game's levels in order to collect the golden coins which allow them to confront the final boss however the order in which they play each level is not predetermined everyone is free to explore the overworld and approach whichever areas seem most interesting an unusual feature among 2d mario games the freedom to choose combined with the speedrunning mindset accidentally creates a fun little puzzle finding the fastest route among the many many possibilities there are some fairly clear-cut choices like taking the secret exit and macro zone 1 to substitute a couple tricky levels for an easy one or playing treezone 3 instead of treezone 4 because it's just clearly shorter especially with the application of super jumps some routing decisions though are harder to understand like the fact that defeating each world in a clockwise order is fastest except for turtle zone which needs to be completed before mario zone it turns out that using the carat power-up to fly over the obnoxiously slow water level of turtle zone 1 saves far more time than what is lost by making the slight detour and inconveniently trying to finish mario's own with the carrots still equipped is both impractical and slow which is not the case for finishing pumpkin zone thus the optimal strategy arises as you can see speedrunning can be driven by clever problem solving just as much as by frame perfect inputs but there is one mechanic which combines both elements seamlessly the kill count at the bottom of the screen the game constantly tells you how many enemies you've defeated as a reward that number reaching 100 spawns in a star nowhere is this more important than in wario's castle where the final few rooms contain these bizarre floating head mustache creatures which bounce from wall to wall seriously what is going on with this design they act as mini bosses progress blocked until they're killed jumping on them isn't exactly hard but is slow and awkward but with the superstar they are fish in a barrel so that means that across 6 worlds 23 levels countless corner boosts and quick drops and super jumps the runner has to arrive at the end of the game with exactly 99 kills in their counter every dead minion on the way to wario was not some random casualty but rather yet another part of the precise intentional strategy of going fast and i haven't even gotten into how they route in lag reduction but that fits better into the final concept to go over the endless opportunity for optimization [Music] typical casual playthroughs have a clear finish line you know what to do to cross it and once you do the game is just over although games designed with high replay value in mind may spring up multiple different finish lines there's always a final one a point after which the content of the game as intended by the developers is exhausted speed running however generates those finish lines indefinitely as i discussed in the movement section the skill ceiling is shockingly high for such a simple game even marginal improvements in ability can produce a significantly lower time pushing runners to keep sharpening their skills far beyond just proficiency which ends up increasing their tolerance for strategies with extremely tight execution which gives them more skills to master and so on a vicious cycle the runner can never feel completely done because god has cursed me for my hubris and my work is never finished another realm of seemingly endless improvement is the routing within the levels not just the order in which they're played sml2 was created for the original gameboy a console with only slightly more processing power than the brick it's as heavy as lag it's safe to say is a recurring issue too many sprites on screen and the game will slow to a crawl so on top of everything else the runners have to kill certain enemies as soon as possible and dodge the specific spawn triggers of others or else all their well-honed movement will be eaten up by the dreaded lag frames i am not at all one of the people on the cutting edge of optimization in this game so instead of me trying to drag myself through a difficult explanation listen to this clip of adam debating the value of a new technique while in the middle of setting a new world record i'm telling you i don't even need to test it that's not that route is not worth it unless you get the frame perfect jump because of the lag that you get when you pick up the fire flower i i'm telling you i mentioned it in the lab i told you guys that should give you at least a sense of the kind of research that goes on behind the scenes the care that is put into squeezing another few fractions of a second out this kind of effort is the reason why the record has dropped 13 seconds in the past year despite the previous record looking pretty damn clean there's always another finish line it's art honestly [Music] none of the general concepts i covered are unique to super mario land 2. in fact a big part of why i chose this game is because it isn't the single best example of anything super mario 64 and celeste have far more developed and complex movement virtually any rpg has orders of magnitude more routing possibilities super mario bros is optimized down to its subatomic particles it feels like it's because the game is humble both within its own series and within the speedrunning community that it's all the more striking just how much value can be uncovered by trying to play it faster and faster adam ferrari had performed at least 176 hours of run attempts at the time of the last record and certainly has dozens and dozens more put into practice and theory crafting all this for a game that lasts two hours on average a narrower mind would see this as a waste of time but to me it's evidence of the boundless potential of video games for entertainment super mario land 2 is a short game but you can make it long super mario land 2 is an easy game but you can make it hard and the process of transforming it is a journey and a half and this is not just about speedrunning which isn't for everyone video games are not just canned experiences they are closer to balls of clay able to be stretched and compressed into whatever shape the player deems fit assigning games a replay value based on the raw amount of content or number of split endings is ultimately a paint by number approach that only applies to a small subset of the ways people can play them by diving deeper and deeper into a game they love people can forge their own brand new masterpiece yeah baby world record 26-14 first try we did it that's one for the ages bro [Music] hi uh thanks so much for watching i hope you liked it feel free to like and subscribe it really helps the channel a ton but with that said this is probably my last video centered around speedrunning at least for the near future i've kind of drifted away from the speedrunning community myself not for any particular reason just shifting interest i guess i still have a couple fun ideas for speedrunning videos but none that i'm actually qualified to write if that makes any sense and i have so so many more ideas and ambitions for content more in line with the cave story video that i made late last year so that's the direction i'm headed media analysis more or less i tried to get all my thoughts about and appreciation for speed running into this video as a sort of send off if you subscribe for the speedrunning stuff i hope you stick around and give my new style a chance as well i'm going to work really hard to make it as good and interesting as possible as always i've been skyhoppers see you in the next one

Channel: Skyehoppers

Views: 4,470

Keywords: replay value, mario speedrun, super mario land speedrun, speedrunning, speedrun explained, speedrun analysis, super mario land 2, video essay, speedrun studies, speedrunning difficulty

Id: Ic5_buhZbjE

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021