Inject Ocarina Of Time Remake speedruns straight into my veins

If you have already connected a Completed Games Fast Speedrun Charity Marathonchances are you caught at least part of one Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speed race. Between a core game that people have spent decades mining for jumps and a thriving randomization scene, it’s a true speedrunning classic (in addition to being a regular classic). Now there’s a full remake, and you know what that means: new speedrunning techniques. In other words, The Good Stuff.

When a major new game is released, the speedrunning community enters a period of discovery, a wondrous time of oddities and impossibilities. THE Ocarina of time remake sprinkles its own unique spice into the cauldron: which bins still work? What has changed? How can speedrunners take advantage of what is functionally a new engine for this very old game?

Since the Ocarina of time remake came out last week, speedrunners have only just started pulling at its seams. But what they’ve discovered so far is tantalizing. For example:

And of course, given that OcarinaThe remake shares technology with Breath of the Wild And Tears of the Kingdomplayers have discovered several ways to jump really high. (This is all the more remarkable since the original Ocarina didn’t have a jump button at all.)

One involves grappling physics and some environmental objects (combined with a jump) and seems to have great potential – by which I mean it will make the AGDQ audience say “wheeeee” a lot.

Another sees players cycle through items on a menu – which, again, was not in the original game – to extend jumps almost infinitely.

Ocarina of time heralds of a different era, a time before patches and patches were commonplace for console gaming. Some of its problems have more history than entire games. Will today’s Nintendo allow the glitches and leaps that speedrunners have already discovered to persist and build their own legacies? Time – yes, like in the game! – will tell us.

But one player has already completed the most important speedrun of all, and no one can ever take that away from him.

Recommended

A Zelda game should leave more to the imagination than this

A controversial remake but perhaps not bad