#Varia super metroid randomizer full

Treasure chests in the medieval setting of Hyrule were capable of yielding missiles or futuristic blaster upgrades, while weapon caches in the depths of Planet Zebes could house a magic wand or sword. Key items from both Super Metroid and Zelda had been randomly scattered across both games’ environments-their exact locations unknown to the speedrunners. In addition to requiring the players to travel between the games’ worlds by way of designated passageways, the hack provided an additional twist.

1 During a session titled “Link to the Past + Super Metroid Combo Randomizer,” the pair raced to complete a video game hack that merged the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) titles The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) and Super Metroid (1994) into a single game (see fig.

#Varia super metroid randomizer full

On June 29, 2019, in front of an auditorium packed full of Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ) attendees, speedrunners Andy and Ivan squared off in a competition that may have seemed unusual even to veterans of the annual fundraising event. I contend that VARIA is a crystallization of video game hacker and speedrunner activities, both enabling new practices through its affordances and codifying the expertise of its community members through its interface. I then perform a more deliberate analysis of VARIA using the walkthrough method, scrutinizing the application’s environment of expected use (that is, how users are encouraged to interact with it) and providing a technical walkthrough of its features (that is, a step-by-step account of its functionality). This is followed by a summary of how randomizers function and a chronicling of VARIA’s development, in which I draw comparisons to a number of commercially released game technologies. I begin my analysis with an overview of Super Metroid’s underlying game structures while elaborating upon its connections to broader speedrunning histories. In this paper, I investigate the histories, affordances, and legalities of the browser-based applications that lie at the heart of this practice-video game randomizers-using the Very Adaptive Randomizer of Items and Areas (VARIA) for Super Metroid (1994) as a primary case study. In order to play games in new ways and facilitate competitive races on Twitch, speedrunners and hackers have cultivated a new genre of speedrunning based on remixing classic video games.