More speedruns
In my last speedruns post, I avoided videos that didn’t just play the original sound effects and music from in-game. I’ll concede the point with this next video, partly because it only shows a few seconds at most of continuous gameplay at a time, so the audio would be choppy and irritating at best, and partly because it’s so brainbendingly awesome.
I give you: “INSANE Commander Keen 5 skills”.
It’s not a full speed run, just little bits from one, and I love it because it shows just how much potential there was in that old engine. I could jump around and shoot things and do the impossible pogo trick, but this guy makes Keen look like a parkour nut.
While making a complete mockery of every kind of baddie in the game. I wish I knew how to pogo backwards.
Hm. This’ll seem a bit boring by comparison now, but I also found a 3-part speedrun of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. This old game was my very first experience with RPGs of any kind, having kept mainly to games like Keen and Radix, and these videos just make me shudder at the thought of how many little things I missed, and how absolutely impossible the idea was of me ever completing it.
I played the game for weeks. I think I got down to level 9 in the abyss at one point. I can only conclude the game was just too complicated for anybody but an RPG buff to really play through, because when he started casting spells on random items that did magical unfamiliar things, and leaping through walls as if they weren’t there, and standing in what looks like a completely unremarkable spot in a room and whipping out a flute and just making crazy shit happen… It just makes me feel a bit inadequate, somehow.