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Half life was a pretty long game right? Lot of content!

That IS crazy... I think I was closer to 20 hours the first time I played through. Can't remember for certain though... it was at least 10.
 
i remember watching a hl speedrun once, i cant see this one right now because im at work, but i remember that once the player got the gauss gun (i think that was the name, the yellow laser that charged power with the secondary fire button) the player would start jumping to the sky and "swimming" in the sky texture all over the map until the end and stuff like that
 
I watched half of it. The jumps he makes are impossible unless he's altered the gravity or glitched it or something. He is moving faster than normally possible as well. This is not an out of the box configuration someone is just running through, this appears to be a glitched copy of the game which doesn't really count.

Yes, I was right.

For instance the game featured a mod called Bunnymod Pro "to restore the gameplay to the way it was before the anti-bhop patch back in 2001". Also an enhanced HUD aided the speedrunning. The speedgamers used many scripts including "jump spam, duck spam, 180º turn for gauss boost and precise use-key actions". There are 317 segments in the game with 249 of them under five seconds in duration. The team has even published a spreadsheet on Google Docs showing the gameplay segments and timings.

He's using mods and scripts to defeat normal game mechanics and gameplay. That's not beating the game as it is, that's modifying the game. Doesn't count imho.

Also, where is the tram ride? That's part of the game as well and completely bypassed.
 
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i havent seen it, but that part could be pretty much bypassed if you entered somewhere that you werent supposed to enter
 
slag said:
Also, where is the tram ride? That's part of the game as well and completely bypassed.
Click to expand...

Not sure about this particular speed run but a lot of speed runs don't begin at the actual "start" of the game. They usually skip most stuff that is everyone has to go through, like intros and outros.
 
I think any version of the game engine for a speed run is fine, the patches that stopped bunny hopping were patches released years after the original base game, scripts for bunny hopping really just eliminate the skill part but they don't "modify the game".

More than anything it's really just a theoretical minimum time for completing the game given the perfect circumstances, doing actual human speed runs could get close to these times if you had enough practice, there are some ridiculous bunny hoppers from back in the day who used these sorts of techniques to become absolute gods at things like the original quake multiplayer.
 
Usually these speed runs are under 10 minutes, so it does indeed make Half-Life seem very long. They're also using all manner of glitches to get to inaccessible areas and force the game to jump them ahead, which strikes me as a disingenuous way to do a speed run. At least in the Mario speed runs, the warp zones were included by the developer; it wasn't people just glitching through walls and, oh, there's Bowser.
 
The only thing that concerns me is the use of this Bunnymod Pro. I would be more supportive if they used an older version of the game (if available) than a mod.

The rest of the things they use are standard TAS fare. Most tool assisted speedruns of 2D games are played frame by frame so that the timing of inputs can be perfected. Watch speedruns of Super Metroid to see what people can do with frame perfect timing.
 
slag said:
I watched half of it. The jumps he makes are impossible unless he's altered the gravity or glitched it or something. He is moving faster than normally possible as well. This is not an out of the box configuration someone is just running through, this appears to be a glitched copy of the game which doesn't really count.

Yes, I was right.

For instance the game featured a mod called Bunnymod Pro "to restore the gameplay to the way it was before the anti-bhop patch back in 2001". Also an enhanced HUD aided the speedrunning. The speedgamers used many scripts including "jump spam, duck spam, 180º turn for gauss boost and precise use-key actions". There are 317 segments in the game with 249 of them under five seconds in duration. The team has even published a spreadsheet on Google Docs showing the gameplay segments and timings.

He's using mods and scripts to defeat normal game mechanics and gameplay. That's not beating the game as it is, that's modifying the game. Doesn't count imho.

Also, where is the tram ride? That's part of the game as well and completely bypassed.
Click to expand...

it's called a tool assisted speedrun. i guess you've never ever heard of it, since TAS and regular speedruns are judged separately and there are separate records for each game. train ride is skipped because it's a non-gameplay segment which can't be sped up with any amount of bunnyhopping or movement scripts.

the draw of TAS is that it becomes possible to beat the game along an "ideal" path; as you mentioned, there are many five-second segments to this speedrun: imagine all the time that went into discovering and exploiting all of the glitches that they used, as well as perfecting the application of each glitch to a given gameplay segment. TAS isn't bullcrap like you think it is -- it takes at least as much effort and game sense as a regular speedrun.

in fact, a common tool used in assisted runs is slow motion or incrementing the game state in single frames at a time, applying inputs, and incrementing by another frame. it's like the difference between starcraft and civilization: real-time vs. turn-based. the fanboys on both sides will tell you that the other one is terrible but there's plenty of nuance in each.

edit: of course, there are still rules for tool assisted runs. generally, you can only do things that the player can do in-game aka no game mods, memory editing, or other external tricks. tool assist simply enables the player to play the game at the maximum possible potential within the limits of the player's in-game agency. however, in this case, it looks like he used the bunnyhop patch so that his run could be judged consistently against past speedruns of half-life.
 
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