Castlevania's "Ultimate Glitch" Has Been Discovered

I’ve never tried to speed run any other game, but after months of trying on and off a few years back, my fastest clear was around 16 minutes.

The people that do this stuff are super fast!!!

Is the time it takes to create those extra save files / slots not included in the speedrun's timing? I'm not familiar enough with the speedrun community to know the nuances here.

@RupeeClock I feel this. My personal preference for watching and doing speedruns will always be for glitchless or no major glitches categories. But I love that the speedrun community is able to make a category for every way to play because I totally want to see the crazy, game breaking bugs and glitches and exploits like what's on display here.

@montrayjak the caveat is that every game has its own rules. But, for example, I think the regular speedrun of Castlevania begins on first control of the character. For something like this, something repetitive like beating the game 70+ times would probably not be considered part of the run. The run would only be from first character control after the game has been setup to let you perform the ACE.

Other games might have something similar if the runner is manipulating the RNG. For example, one of the classic pokemon games (I can't remember if it's Crystal or Gold/Silver) involves resetting the game 17 times to manipulate the stats of the starting pokemon. But the timing of the speedrun starts AFTER those 17 resets.

In some other game, though, if part of a trick involves things done on the save screen, that might be included in the speedrun even though navigating the save screen is not generally considered "playing the game." But, like I said first, every game is different and every game will have multiple categories of speedruns which may have different rules between them.

edit: it's Crystal.

I think non-glitch speedrunning is more interesting.
Beating the game as intended.

Glitch speedrunning reminds me of the famous marathoner who took a taxi cab to the finish line.

It's funny, it's interesting...but you didn't actually win the race dear.

@bippity_bop This makes a lot of sense! Every scenario is different. Thanks for the help there.

Every time I hear about the speedrun community I'm impressed with the overall organization. In this case, that everyone can agree on a per-game basis.

I remember speedrunning Contra for the SNES as a kid (with lots of free time and only a few carts), but I never imagined that becoming a thing like it is today.