List of all Commander Keen Speedruns

[Flyingmouse]

Something occurred to me a while back...

In a 100% (all levels) run of Keen 5, is it faster to use the Shelly door glitch in Brownian Motion Inducer (where you skip to the secret level by having it push you) and then finish the last three levels from there, as opposed to using the Gravitational Damping Hub's warp?

[Xarthok]

Yes indeed, that's a cool idea. Though that would make Keen 5 have an awful lot of different categories since that for example would be 100% glitched and would also use save/load death skips everywhere applicable.

[spikey]

Question- without me having to YouTube/video view anything, how can someone beat a game in a minute and a half? Or is this just a single level?

[Levellass]

In many cases it involves extreme glitch abuse to skip vast amounts of the game. This is why some speedruns are set at 100% (As opposed to any%) or no glitch.

As an example the fastest speedrun of Keen was a (now absent) video by a guy called Karryterre billed as 'Keen Galaxy in 0:07, cheats enabled, it involved going to the world maps and using the E N D cheat to win the game.

[spikey]

<throws hands up> Is that really interesting to anybody?

Which represent the ones that actually play the game through?

[Nospike]

I like watching 100% TAS runs where you actually get to see people getting the most of a game. Most of these "extremely fast" non-100% runs involve ridiculous glitching. I saw a pokemon yellow run that was done by loading a corrupted savefile that showed some glitch dialogue before winning the game.

[Dr. Kylstein]

I like the glitch ones more. I've already seen the game as it was meant to be played, now I want to see the virtual reality come crashing down as somebody does ten impossible things before breakfast.

[Stealthy71088]

I think I would actually prefer non-glitched runs. It takes a lot of planning and skill to do a run without glitches. If you look at the 100% run of Mario 64 - I think its all 120 stars in roughly four hours - its amazing some of the stuff that the player pulls off, all without abusing one glitch.

[Levellass]

Both are interesting in their own way; glitched runs are interesting since they show just how ingenious you have to be to beat the game. A lot of work can go into them. I saw a Spyro run that involved jumping on the first balloonist's head, avoiding talking to him and skipping the whole first world. How do you figure something like that out? Or Keen 6 where people jump through walls and impossible bullet through ceilings, skill.

On the other hand 'normal' runs require the skill of playing the game well as it was meant to be, and often involve hundreds of tries to get success. If there is a demonstration of skill in a game, this is it.

On the OTHER hand TAS show how good the game CAN be played, it is the game polished to its highest sheen, every millisecond, every pixel counting, fat trimmed to the BONE. (And sometimes, the non TAS runs are faster!)

I am in fact tempted to make a series of Keen cheat speedruns. They'd be faster, but outside of galaxy you'd still need a few tricks to get by.

[Stealthy71088]

I'll cheat run race you, Levellass! Interested?

[Levellass]

Very much so, very much so. I think I'll do Galaxy first, since they're the absolute easiest ones to cheat through, but the Vorticons series would be an actual race I should think. (And I doubt I could win, I lack imagination.)

[Levack]

you can get trough keen 8 faster then the video posted

[Xarthok]

Does it say anywhere that the run is optimal? You're always free to improve it

[Levack]

I do not have a Youtube acount

[Levellass]

Record video, inform PCKF. They'll host it. (I have an account!)