by So I don’t have any fancy screenshots for this one, but I had to throw my two cents in here along with Lepcis’s, because he brought up some good points. For what it is, Deadcore is a fantastic game certainly deserving of Tier 1. It’s fast, it’s smooth, it has tons of paths to choose from and its five levels are more than enough to keep you entertained, especially if you’re going for some of those top scores (although level 4 can still go to the place of fiery burning). If you couldn’t tell from our Deadcore contest, we had a friendly competition to see if we could beat each other’s times, all the while sharing our pathing to collaborate to find a faster and faster route through the level.
While I’ve loved speedrunning as a concept for many years and have watched no small number of them (what game-lover hasn’t), Deadcore was the first one that I got into hands-on. The experience was great and it really opened my eyes to many facets of speedrunning. One that really stuck out to me was that the thrill of the run didn’t come from the prospect of beating a high score time, but instead from beating your own best time.
Ultimately though, it has awakened me to what makes a “good” speedrunning game. Take for instance Zelda OoT. One of Nintendo’s most beloved titles, this game has been speedran to death. In fact, it’s gotten so ridiculous that last I checked, the fastest time involved messing with variables so that the use of Queen Ghoma’s door instantly won you the game. While from a technical perspective and possibly from a fan’s perspective, this is very entertaining. However, from a gameplay or speedrunning standpoint, it’s not that interesting. After all, where’s the contest? Will the judge of who is a better OoT runner be who can subtly input the variables switches ever-so-slightly faster so that they have a .01 second better time? This isn’t really that interesting to the player or the viewer once the concept has been understood and ultimately fails to capture just what OoT is all about.
In line with what Lepcis was saying about the RNG within Deadcore. The cubes are an RNG that produces inconsistent results. Jump pads (while technically not RNG) are so imprecisely manipulatable that they become an unreliant method of traveling through the game–and yet, if you want to get the fastest time, you must make a run at the level hundreds (if not thousands) of times so that you can “get lucky” and nail all of the ridiculously precise “bugs” of the game to get the perfect time. Slope-dashing and Super/Mega Jumping are interesting ideas, but as they were not really intended to be part of the game (and are so difficult to pull off consistently) that they just turn the game into a set of variable manipulations instead of executing strategies related to the purpose of the game’s initial intent (just like the problem with OoT). Not to mention the fact that a slope-dash into Mega Jump on the pad after the door on Level 1 skips most of the level. If that’s the case, what’s the point in the level existing at all? This was a big reason Lepcis and I outlawed Mega Jumping.
It’s not that Deadcore developers did nothing. They removed rocket-jump-chaining (an even more notorious bug) in order to make the game more competitive. I feel though that within reason, if a game is to truly devote itself to speedrunning, then no bug or feature of the game should completely override or remove other parts of the game unless it does so within the expected and encouraged mechanics of the game. I do not blame speedrunners at all for searching for, using and abusing glitches within games in order to accomplish a faster time–I merely feel that a pure speedrun game would be constantly updated to remove these exploits until eventually what you were left with was a game that you truly had to play and the victor of “best time” would go to those that understood the game and its entirety the best, not just the person who could macro a Mega Jump script.