The ardent gamers of ResetEra are no strangers to weird debates, having previously discussed who the hardest boss of all time is and whether The Witcher’s Geralt of Rivia could survive Fromsoftware’s games.
This time, however, they’ve decided to venture beyond the realms of Elden Ring and Bloodborne, where difficulty reigns as the greatest challenge.
The issue of the day is speedrunning, with people being forced to pick one title that they’d blaze through in record time in order to avoid being stuck on a desert island.
Which game would you plump for in order to avoid being marooned?
Posting to begin the ResetEra thread on this topic, user zzz laid out the scenario by saying:: “You're trapped on a desert island. To escape, you must set a top three speedrun record. What are you playing?”
They then set out some additional rules, specifying that the game must have come out at least a year ago and that you’d get one year to master it to enough of an extent to attempt the run.
While many users instantly dismissed their chances of survival, some had no doubt as to their game of choice, with zMiiChy- plumping for Resident Evil 5, Griffith going for 1996’s Quake and Lyriell opting for Donkey Kong Arcade.
However, others pointed out that there are a lot of factors to consider in this decision, with user Joey Ravn explaining: “People who choose short goals (like a single level or course) don't realise how optimised these categories are. The shorter the speedrun is, the more likely it is to have been milked for all its worth. Ideally, you would have to choose something that's obscure, so very few people, if anyone at all, would have run it.”
On the other hand, user Jane didn’t think the chances of success would be high no matter which game you chose, saying: “If you're not already a speedrunner, it would be next to impossible to independently pioneer an entire speedrun strategy and achieve a top three time. These records are the culmination of multiple people running the game over several years. Top 100? Might be more reasonable.”
That said, a few users reckoned they might already have the credentials to arrange passage off of the island, with user Papatulus musing: “I once held a speedrun world record simply by virtue of nobody else ever posting a run of the game online, (it) was later beaten by more than half by someone else who noticed this game with exactly one runner. (It was an) old PC/PS1 game that (was) commercially released and has a Wikipedia article so it's not hyper-obscure.”
Regardless of whether you’ve got any mysterious speedrunning records hidden away in case you need to avoid being marooned, make sure to follow us for coverage of some mods that might help you make it through the likes of Elden Ring in record time or using only one hand.