Shmups VS Speedrunning, Natural Vs. Fan-Made Meta | Ft.

[@whoevencares219]

The only thing i despise the most of speedrunning (even though i love doing them), is that a lot of players outside of that community use it as an ultimate excuse for bad design in games, like "oh you think that level has really bad pacing and is overall poorly designed?, well no need to worry, if you follow this speedrunning glitch and clip out of bounds, you don't have to do it anymore, so the game is good now!", or "oh you don't like that most enemies have superarmor?, well this speedrunner finished the game in like 30 minutes so it's clearly not even an issue, you're just bad at the game".

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Oh that is SUCH A GOOD POINT! I agree completely, I've heard this so many times. Where there is an issue in a game, and the response is, oh well speedrunners skip this with x strat, so it's all good ugh. Yes that defense drives me up the wall ha.

[@Art_Izon]

It's not a good *excuse* for bad design, but it's not the worst solution to it. I kinda like it. Not that I like the bad design - I'd rather games be good, but I'm pretty convinced that's a pipe dream at this point at anything but an indie level with how rare it is and where the focus in game development seems to be (spectacle, graphics, etc). What you describe is basically a group of people who gets a better experience with games by virtue of being better at them and knowing more about them, which to me doesn't seem all that different from what I like about shmups, so...

[@whoevencares219]

@@Art_Izon Obviously games cannot be perfect, but there have been so many releases recently where the game ships with an absolutely obvious flaw, like most enemies having superarmor which forces people to play a super specific way, or bad pacing in certain sections which make the game less replayable and a slog to go through or the game having ridiculously high input-lag, maybe all of these are due to budget or time, but nonetheless they are mistakes that devs could learn to have a much better product down the line, yes the mistakes are annoying, but what annoys me the most is that people who don't even speedrun use that community as an excuse for clear flaws in a game, sure you can get better at dealing with clearly bad design but that doesn't make it good, if i were a developer and i needed to know what i need to improve to make a better experience, and i see people defending clearly bad stuff, i won't know whether to fix it or keep it as it is, that's why i find it so frustrating.

[@Art_Izon]

@@whoevencares219 Sure, I didn't suggest that it was good design. I just like being able to use my ability as a router to get a better game experience than others, which I can then share with those interested. That said, we might also be thinking of different games, I mostly speedrun anime b-games where the worst problems are usually excessive amounts of walking (addressed by OOBs and movement tech), or musou games where the worst problem is waiting for dialogue (which the community mods to address). Also worth noting that input lag isn't addressed by speedrunning anyway, I guess I'm sorry if people are making that argument at you because that sounds really stupid. > if i were a developer and i needed to know what i need to improve to make a better experience From what I've seen, the projects with the greatest degree of mistakes are going to be your AAAs where devs are underpaid and overworked, and inexperienced indie devs. The former are beyond saving and the latter don't seem popular enough to have this problem. Do you have any specific examples? I believe you that this happens but it's difficult to engage without examples.

[@whoevencares219]

@@Art_Izon an example of superarmor would be the latest teenage mutant turtles game, which has an absolute abundance of enemies that have superarmor, your character feels slippery when trying to move fast, a bafflingly nonexistent combo system (you can do them but has 0 reward) all these issues basically forcing players to play in a super specific way or take damage or die. In terms of bad pacing would be for example bayonetta 2 and moonrider which bayo just has a few instances where you either cannot skip a cutscenes and you have to sit there waiting, or both which have almost a whole level that can be removed to drastically improve pacing. And in case of input lag, it may seem like people don't use speedrunning as an excuse, but there are many cases in terms of literally almost every city connection re-release ever where they see a speedrunner consider it "almost playable" and that's enough for people to completely defend it.

[@magicjohnson3121]

I’ve always wanted a high score website equivalent to the speedrun one. It’s annoying not being able to find the high scores of your favourite games (and a video attached too)

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I know, me too, but the best solution for that right now seems to be built in leaderboards. Everything else seems too fragmented where even if you run a site like restartsyndrome, you still are gonna have tons of players who don't submit their scores there.

[@JegoEXP]

Big fan of Aqy and STG Weekly! His show was instrumental in building my passion for arcade and console shooters. Glad they’re back to making new episodes!

[@TheElectricUnderground]

absolutely!!! I'm happy stg weekly are back too :-) I'm gonna have to submit sin and punishment or something later this year.

[@ArcadeHell]

Dang, Aquas is super talented! Listening to him talk about Pink Sweets was fantastic, especially with all the footage you gave us Mark! 💯 Also, Dirt Rally is wicked fun! I got into racing with a wheel for the same game. It's such a challenge to get into and very rewarding. I always think racing games and shmups have a lot of crossover because you're running the same stages over and over trying to improve (I think I heard the comparison by Shmup Junkie first). Except you don't typically get blown the fuck up by enemy barrages in racing games.

[@Steve-Fiction]

Great topic and editing as always. I was really impressed with the editing in the Melee video, that's when I started noticing how much work this kind of video must be. Having fitting footage throughout that three hour discussion, wow.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I am so happy to hear you appreciate that my dude! Because it was an insane amount of work ha.

[@riffmason]

Yoooo shmups vs speedrunning vid, been hoping you'd do something like this for a while!

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Thanks riff!!

[@iraplikeyoubreathe]

Nicely done. This was a good talk. Thanks for the work!

[@Marco-00]

Great episode man, i'd love to see more collabs between you and Aquas!

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Yes absolutely! He ll be in shmup slam playing pink sweets later this month :-)

[@user-nt1yb5kr8x]

I'm so impressed with the mechanical intricacy of Pink Sweets that was brilliantly explained by Aquas. It sounds like a perfect balance of risk/reward in enduring boss attacks plus skill in movement, bomb releases etc. Sounds like a 'perfect/god game" for sure!

[@TheElectricUnderground]

It is a really awesome game! I personally am a bit more drawn to ibara but it sounds like pink sweets score play is top notch

[@NIMPAK1]

Recently I discovered a group of Japanese Pikmin 2 players who would do score runs of some of the main levels but using an arbitrary ruleset determined by the community. It's definitely a weird fusion between the two philosophies. Personally I don't mind fan-made meta, but I see more as something just for fun and not for any serious competition. It's probably also why I prefer speedrun communities for smaller games because the competition for them is less serious. Whenever I see speedrun documentary videos and they show footage of a streamer who's spent sleepless hours trying to grind out prefect rng to save a second, I just see someone that's dead inside instead of the epic cool pro gamer the video paints them as.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Exactly nim! You get it! On a small scale personal level, fan made meta is a ton of fun and I dig it. But when you try to expand it into a global movement and ruleset, it gets messy very quickly because you lack a strong central authority (the dev) and even if you have a group of players who insist on a ruleset, their authority is still arbitrary at the end of the day. If you don't buy into it, it means nothing.

[@dingo535]

Really good episode, Love Aquas and STGweekly both!

[@Jo_hann88]

Great episode would love to see a S&P stg weekly Mark

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Yeah that would be really cool! When I get the chance I'm gonna practice hard mode more and then maybe submit it, that would be awesome

[@Art_Izon]

I've done a lot of speedrunning, though only in smaller communities, mostly because I'm a router more than a runner at the end of the day. Not really interested in grinding a game other people have already solved. Thankfully my routing interest applies to shmups as well, so I win no matter what games get released, as long as they're competently designed. :)

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I think smaller speedrunning communities, as aqaus mentioned, is the much stronger option and here's why. As a speedrunning community gets larger and larger (take super metroid for example) it is going to need to insist and more and more uniform rulesets, like let's say banning input lag reduction because console players have to play on their laggier snes. So you are going to see more and more people basically relying on group consensus or top player concensus to decide on the rules. Vs in a smaller community, if it's you and a few other people, and you want to use input lag reduction because you hate input lag, they are going to be much more receptive to your thoughts because there isn't this lobby of console players or whatever that you are going to need to get approval from to decide. So community rulesets are great at small scale, but are unstable at a larger scale.

[@Art_Izon]

@@TheElectricUnderground That's almost Hobbesian, the idea that a central authority is mandatory to prevent a community from either being intolerable or destroying itself (not to put words in your mouth). Not that it's entirely incorrect in this context. What you describe does happen - there are exceptions, I've had moderate-sized communities change rules based on things I learned about their game that nobody else knew at the time. Since I'm more of a router than a runner, my game knowledge tends to drastically exceed my ability to play. For larger communities, most of the problem is people stuck in their ways who care more about their time staying on top (even if they don't continue to run the game) than people who are concerned with making the game as playable as possible, or better to speedrun. There was recently a large debate in a certain Final Fantasy community about the use of turbo as an accessibility feature that *only current top players* disagreed with (and one of them left because of), I can't reasonably interpret that as anything other than insecurity about the possibility of their times being beaten. Note that since this is an RPG, turbo doesn't impact a whole lot...It's just ego-tripping masquerading as traditionalism, which is only slightly less gross IMO. Either way, it seems to me that the community around most individual shmups isn't large enough, at least in the West, to run into the parts of this problem that aren't handled by the developers. Any game that doesn't have a modern port, and especially any game where the company that made it is defunct, that's essentially community-handled as well out of necessity. Heck, this is even for companies that still exist, regarding games only a decade old. Example: It's possible to reset stages in the X360 port of SDOJ and splice a full score run together based on replaying every stage until you get it perfect. I've asked people about what's done to prevent this and have mostly been told that "nobody cares enough to check for that." So like...it's great if the developers do their due diligence in crafting the meta, but often they don't, and they also won't necessarily be around forever (and online leaderboards aren't always going to be available, not everyone has reliable internet, etc).

[@magicjohnson3121]

Super Mario 64 was made so each play through you would improve with your movement. There’s plenty of games in the Mario series that sold way more but aren’t as popular to speedrun. I think because it was designed in that way.

[@liamconverse8950]

The first speedrun I ever saw was of Morrowind and thats still my favorite because the game was made to be open-ended free so of course there was some crazy way to finish the main quest quickly without exploiting some crazy bug.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

yeah I think speedrunning is at it's best when it is being used to clarify the mechanics of a game, I love it in that reguard. I think the part of speedrunning that gets washy is when it gets formulized into a global competition, because the question of authority is going to be a constant issue. Who gets to make the rules? Why is that person's opinion more valid? Who is to say what is a "glitch" or not. The meta around community in speedrunning is always going to involve some degree of popularity and lobbying as a mechanism to make rules. Versus if you build speedrunning into the game, then the authority of the gameplay returns back to the devs, or whoever is making the port you bought, and I think that's a more natural and easy to work with situation because the question of authority isn't so vague.

[@tubbiele2]

Excellent video, thanks so much. STG radical go!

[@shmuproom1293]

Great stuff,always cool to see aquas,a stg weekly special episode on pink sweets would be awesome,where aquas can share his knowledge!💪as for views for Stg weekly,it is has a cult following,it’s not always about views,stg weekly videos will be watched forever

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I think speedrunning is a ton of fun and can be really informative about a game's mechanics at a small scale, absolutely. This isn't some kind of blanket dislike of speedrunning or anything. More what I am trying to explain in the vid is that at a larger scale, when you have masses of players who are now abiding by fan made meta, that situation gets really unstable because I don't believe any one fan has legit authority over another, and so it's basically just a popularity contest in the end that decides what rules are used and why. There's not even a formal voting system or anything.

[@neoxaquas]

Thanks for the sentiment, and we will have a Pink Sweets STGW on the way

[@markguyton2868]

I like joke speed-runs honestly. Like the speed-run someone did in Mario Odyssey to see how fast he could unlock Mario in his underpants.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I think at a small scale, speedrunning is great and can be really interesting and informative about game design. However, my issue with it is as a competitive pursuit at a large scale, because then you have a pile of fans all trying to make the rules and no one person (in my opinion) has a more legit claim to authority over the rules than another, and so it comes down to a popularity contest basically.

[@markguyton2868]

@@TheElectricUnderground Makes sense.

[@Coreagrus]

I think you're on to something with the discussion of speedrunning vs scoring. I wanna see it continue in the general gaming community, though I doubt anyone will care, sadly. I'm of the opinion that any game that can support a scoring system is better off with one. Scoring can't really be a thing unless it was intended to begin with, whereas speedrunning is always an option with real time regardless if it was considered in a game's design. I prefer scoring, personally, but it depends on the game. Kind of a case-by-case basis. Pont is, if scoring is a thing in a game, then you have a game that can be played for both score and speedrunning, as opposed to just speedrunning. I'd rather have more options. I like Crash Bandicoot 2's speedruns, because a linear platformer lends itself well to speedrunning and the glitches mostly happen to be to the benefit of the gameplay in its case. Namely 'neutral slide-spin' is a really cool movement tech that has a tradeoff and requires knowledge and routing of the levels to make good use of. Then there's Doom 2016, which happens to have an arcade mode as well, with a seemingly fun enough scoring system, which I wanna look more into at some point, but I can already say with certainty that I prefer the arcade mode to any% speedrunning. That run doesn't resemble anything I enjoyed about Doom 2016 or even its basic concept. It's kind of ridiculous. Speedrunning isn't always the most enjoyable or interesting way to play games. Really, what I want is for scoring to, at least, be considered in game design in general nowadays. It has its merits and anyone who says it's archaic, quite frankly, doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. (Sorry Karl, but you wouldn't hear me saying asinine things about speedrunning.) Same thing with lives systems, which also tend to called archaic and happen to come from the arcade era as well, but I guess that's another topic.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Here s a mind bender that a lot of speedruns forget to consider, what if you build in time competition into the scoring system? Then you can get the best of both worlds, scoreplay while going fast and then having to decide the push and pull between the two :-)

[@Coreagrus]

@@TheElectricUnderground I was gonna bring that up in response to replies, but you beat me to it. Yeah, that would be a neat middle ground. Time bonuses are commonplace, but it would be especially cool if scoring in some hypothetical game got optimized to the point where substantial time bonuses end up being the last thing separating players in the top 10 or so.

[@stgcvlt]

Great people here! Amazing talk!

[@TheElectricUnderground]

It was a really fun Convo, more of a hardcore topic so stuff that doesn't usually get discussed

[@magicjohnson3121]

The only times I can get into scoring is when I have some household competition or when the game is built around it (E.g Donkey Kong Jungle Beat) and I find speed running not that fun unless when it’s to get cheats like in Goldeneye.

[@BamdTheBamd]

i don't see the point in enforcing a "no milking" category for esprade. if you dislike milking then just play a different shmup i think it's fair to ban counterstops like in ddp karl jobst has covered donkey kong scoring

[@TheElectricUnderground]

yes but bamd my point was that I saw the error in that initial type of thinking and then changed my mind because it would be too arbitrary to try to ban milking in rade (this would have been a separate category btw, i wasn't saying the normal category should ban milking). And so I concluded that the best solution was what M2 did, and to make an actual in game arrange that reduced milking :-)

[@kyral4978]

Maybe instead of "fan-meta" its "aficionado-meta." It seems like speedrunning is being handled by the people that care enough to run the game at a high level. If something gets discovered that "ruins" a game for them, people who care make a new category. Total anarchy!

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I wish it was that clear and simple, but it gets much more blurry and complicated very quickly. Because why would caring about a game give you authority to make the ruleset? Where does that authority come from? Popularity, skill (as defined by the player himself). This is what has happened with melee for example. Where the top players felt that the game should be modded, and so it was modded. They feel that inputs should be easier, and now they are easier. What is a "major glitch" what is a "minor glitch" who decides which is which. Speedrunning works perfectly fine on an individual level or on a small scale, but the larger you try to expand the competitive aspects of the game the more you are going to need a definitive authority - which i think is best given the developers of the game, rather than some dude who runs a website

[@LowKeyTired-q7d]

Doesn't seem to matter what you do sometimes !!! None of my stuff brings much interest ...

[@wtfdoihavetodohere]

Evercade has Gimick as well. Hopefully it's not as laggy?

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I'm not sure! I'm not familiar with evercade

[@Vvewa]

I sold my ps4 about 4 years ago but recently bought a used one for all the m2 ports.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Yeah m2 basically make the PS4 mandatory ha

[@ruolbu]

I feel like developer made scoring and community made scoring (or what you call natural and fan meta) are arbitrary distinctions. The developers have better tools to implement and track the scoring. They can enshrine one specific way of playing and judging gameplay into the code. Okay maybe a few different. But they can not forsee how people will interact with it. There are many many scoring games that got completely broken, where players were able to overcome even the toughest challenge and started seeking better ways of differentiating skillful play. So, the task of estimating the skill ceiling of your game and designing a scoring system that is perfectly measuring at the highest of possible skill without waste and without clipping is a super difficult if not impossible task. You keep mentioning the shifting meta of speedruns like in Mario 64, and it sounds like you consider that a bad thing. I find that weird. Isn't shifting meta always present? In Deck Builder games, even if you assume a static card pool without new editions, the meta can shift repeatedly because people discover new combinations of card effects. In fighting games people might discover the ability to cancel certain animations under certain uncommon circumstances. In Battle Royal games the meta shifts players learn the layout of the map and one week you have a playerbase that clusters around one region and the next in another region because some popular streamer did a neat trick there that everyone wants to recreate. The meta is what the players currently consider to be the best practice. Heck in real life sports the meta changes constantly, perhaps sometimes slowly, but definitely ever changing. So of course you can have a game that has a very static meta, where all the changes happened early on as the players learned the optimal approach and no one ever discovers or uses bugs and glitches. But is that situations worth differentiating from a game that has changing meta? In general I find the desire to find clean defintions and categories to be useless. Clean does not exist in a complex world. You get specific cases that are simple enough to be clean, but you can never expect anything to be simple. Again with real life sports. We got the two big categories of mens sports and womens sports. But once you get into the details and you have athletes that kinda fall in between those categories - even purely looking at natural occuring cases - you soon realise how impossible it is to get clean borders. As such I really prefer the style of just making categories up as the majority of the active speedrunners find it useful. Sure you get messy messy defintions with minor and major glitches, arbitrary rules and exceptions. But the sooner you embrace the muddy nature of categorisation in general, the sooner you start having fun competition.

[@boghogSTG]

How can you say its impossible when theres a whole genre dominated by such games - shmups? Even when developers fuck up its not because the players hit the score cap overall and have to create a made up meta but rather because devs underestimate the players ability to max out their score counters or just due to oversights like infinite milking. Both can be simply & trivially patched out in this day and age. As long as games try to make a good scoring system seriously, they will do it. Its not magic nor impossible, they just have to look outside of the usual speedrunning/challenge run and modern game bubbles. Hell the guest Aquas himself speedruns many games (top tier times in Ghouls N Ghosts and Gimmick for example) at a high level and then also gets great scores in shmups playing by the devs' rules Speedrunning and such have skewed people's perceptions of how games can work. There is nothing special about speedrunners nor how they play games that devs cant wrap their heads around. It just requires a will.

[@mariowario5945]

Is he going to talk about how shmups are better than speedeunning or something because they have mechanics like that baked in the game design?

[@TheElectricUnderground]

you'll have to tune in to find out ha. Though I have some things to say about what direction I think would be interesting for speedrunning, so lower your force field my friend :-)

[@andyauthor2007]

I want to play Pink Sweets so bad, but like ALL the games I want to play they won't put it on PS4 or Steam.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Oh yeah your gonna have to emulate it probably, I don't see it being ported anytime soon

[@jak_1894]

"Speed running is weird" enough said 😂

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Ha it is, it s pretty cool at a smaller scale (which aquas talked about) but the larger it gets the more the lack of a central authority is going to be a problem. Then ruleset changes become all out campaigns and battles among the players.

[@jak_1894]

Yes I agree Mark, I enjoy your channel it's pretty cool man 😎👍

[@BSG1991]

Its Electric!!!!!

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Hi!

[@RuV9999]

1CC vs Speedrun

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Or even more than a 1cc, since often scoreplay makes survival even harder :-)

[@RuV9999]

@@TheElectricUnderground ah yeah highscore. since score is the one that many shmup footage mentioned a lot.

[@EMMA-GAMES]

Aquas!!!!!!!!!

[@TheElectricUnderground]

Yep !! Making a glorious return to the channel :-)

[@bobsteave1236]

Mark , the whole video where your talking about speedrunning being a sort of Self undermining with new routes and glitches over time being found a lot of this podcast is in the wrong light. It doesn't rip some ones skill and time they put into that experience , and for everyone that was involved in the progression and there "streams or videos" of the game at that time knows it was hype and took tons of skill. Everyone in the speedgaming space is well aware of all the ways a route / run can be altered to the point it ruins the spirit the game and they moderate it to bring out the best of the game/ keep the spirit and gameplay fun for the Fans and players , its not just Oh ... OatsNgoats beat so and so in Super Metroid so that other person that used a route and strats that where used 4 years ago sucks now.. No, the very act of playing and getting good at these games changes and grows the runners and community higher and higher . Every member who hangs out on streams, posts runs to the board and does tech research over time all form a whole greater then the parts type deal. Speedrunning is not just some WR time on a board somewhere and that is all that people see and what matters... its just a starting point / cherry on the top of a thriving social circle and group of people all having fun with a gaming experience that is goal oriented. I am RN_Jesus0 on twitch if you want to DM me for an episode of your podcast. I can comment a ton on the topics laid out here and feel I could make for some good content on the subject of power gaming. I was going to keep typing my book down here in the comments but yeah. might DM you somehow about this.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I think when you are into the whole community aspect of speedrunning, it does have a lot of strengths and can be a fun time, I felt this same way about melee for a long time. And I'm not denying when you have a bunch of players all working on the same project and sort of all agreeing with each other, it can feel like speedrunning can't go wrong. But, my issue with it is that you are ultimately playing someone else's game that is not the developers and you have to follow by that ruleset, otherwise you are not included. And whose ruleset that is, and how they decide on that ruleset, is vague and arbitrary. I'll give you two examples of what i mean. The first was when run-ahead was introduced into retroarch. At the time I was playing Super Metroid and thought it would be cool to get some runs using low lag. If you know my channel you know how much I hate input lag. But the use of lag reduction was banned by SM because they felt the runs needed to be as laggy or laggier than the snes console, that way console players wouldn't be at a disadvantage. A philosophy I don't agree with personally (I think the obsession with original hardware is rooted in nostalgia) but obviously my arguments could not outweigh the rest of the "community" and so I believe it is still banned to this day. Meanwhile if I play SM and speedrun it, none of my runs can ever be submitted because I refuse to play with higher lag just to appease the "community." Another example of this is autofire. As a shmup player, obviously I come from a world where autofire is allowed by shmups because shmups have a much more open policy on controls. In speedrunning however, autofire is typically banned because apparently mashing buttons is an important skill to speedrunners. So there you have another example where I'd either have to alter what I think is the correct choice, using autofire, in favor of the community's opinion (which I find outdated). And all of this for what exactly? So that I can post a time to a website essentially.

[@jonnyeh]

Isn't a 1 CC run also an arbitrarily applied goal?

[@2emo2function]

Yeah but the devs want you to 1cc

[@fallenose683]

No, most of this games saves your score with a "ALL-CLEAR" when you 1cc them. Also some games only display credits when you clear them with 1 credit.

[@TheElectricUnderground]

No because the game actually acknowledges the 1cc in many ways. For example if you don't 1cc the game says "game over." also most shmups report your stage progress on the score screen. Also many shmups have special bosses (TLBs) and special end screens that acknowledge the 1cc. Many shmups also have 1cc loop requirements. No, in no way can you say the 1cc is arbitrary, the game encourages it very directly. Also let's not forget that in the arcade the game literally wants more money from you if you don't 1cc ha.

[@Marco-00]

Actually I think 1cc is a byproduct of scoring, if you die and continue your score goes back to 0 so in order to get a "good" score you need to 1cc.

[@jonnyeh]

@@TheElectricUnderground all very interesting. I’m a noob so learning this is great and could make for a good video topic.

[@mariowario5945]

How many times does he have to do this to try to prove his opinions

[@TheElectricUnderground]

I'm not trying to prove anything my friend. In fact I don't think there is anything to prove. it's just an open discussion on what I think are the strengths and weaknesses of both designs.

[@Marco-00]

@@TheElectricUnderground Mark, didn't you read the sign? -do-not-feed-the-troll-