You cannot trust the leaderboards for Resident Evil. Within days of release, players had started digging into the game’s code, looking for ways to finish it faster and faster by aggressively cheating. It’s probably not possible to beat it faster than a second, but I’m sure people will try.
It’s deeply funny, however, to realise this “world record” was achieved by a Resident Evil speedrunner named Carcinogen. His channel is full of legitimately impressive achievements, and he’s finished the game (as Chris) in one hour, 29 minutes, and 11 seconds. Holy crap!
(UPDATE: Carcinogen told me he recently bested this time by several minutes. A video is forthcoming.)
Here’s the cheating speedrun in question:
As you play Resident Evil, the game tracks your progress and uploads it at the end. Pretty standard. Sadly, too many others in the world are probably doing whatever they can to jack the leaderboards. Some people aren’t interested in setting records, they’re interested in disruption.
Carginogen is technically one of them, though he’s interested in making a larger point:
The fastest legitimate REmake speedruns clocks in around 90 minutes. That’s 5,400 seconds.
Saying Carcinogen beat REmake in a single second isn’t even true, either. If you watch his playthrough, it obviously takes several minutes for him to trigger the ending, but he’s altered enough values in the background to make the game think it’s happening in a single second.
This isn’t unique to Resident Evil, of course. Every game is ripped apart, explaining why speedruns are recorded on video. If anything weird is up, the video is there to help prove it.
It’s possible Capcom could build a leaderboard system to ensure the times listed were legitimate and fair, but it would require extensive development and community resources the company probably doesn’t want to dish out for an update to a remake to video game released in 1996.
Still, it sucks. If you want to play by the rules, you can’t. The leaderboards are beyond repair.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.
Comments
13 responses to “You Can Technically ‘Beat’ Resident Evil In One Second”
The game should have an ending where you just walk out the front door.
http://youtu.be/UkJehlr1tEw
Carcinogen should have taken the moral high ground and not engaged in any of this sort of stuff. To be honest, it makes him seem as though he needs the attention and needs to ensure he is acknowledged. He should be able to rest comfortably in the fact that he has already achieved a lot. This is just a bit ‘look at me’. Possibly a bit harsh but I just get that sense.
Im getting the same vibe from him too
Leaderboards are almost always broken beyond repair. The only time I’ve ever really made any kind of effort investment to try and reach the top of a leaderboard is Arkham Asylum, and after miserably failing for ages I finally looked at the top scores. They were impossibly high, and the owner of the record hadn’t even earned any of the various combo achievements.
Carcinogen is right in that
. I remember Mirror’s Edge allowed you to download the various ghosts from the leaderboard, which made it a lot of fun.I know there is one guy on youtube who is just a massive pro on the arkham games to the point that he never ever gets hit or losses his combo stacks and plays the games on the highest difficulty on NG+.
Yeah, there are great players out there and it’s amazing to watch. I don’t know if any of them hold the top positions on the leaderboards, though. I haven’t looked for years, but at the time I was pretty confident that the scores officially recorded by the game were not achieved legitimately.
Cone on, indeed, Sven Booth.
Cone on. *raises fist in the shape of a cone in the air*
He’ll be Cone but not forgotten :*(
Nono, this should be like… the pinnacle of speedrunning, right? I mean, if some glitches and cheats are impressive, but others aren’t, where’s the rhyme or reason?
Personally, speed-runners who use ANY kind of glitches or cheats don’t impress me in the slightest. It means nothing to me. If I hear someone finished a game in half an hour that would take me a few dozen hours, it’s only impressive to me if they did it by playing the way the game was meant to be played, just faster and better. Not by exploiting glitches.
I agree. I don’t see the point in using glitches.
Yup, I want to see people playing in ways that I can replicate and then try out new stuff on my own, not jumping onto invisible pixels and jumping outside of a map or screwing around with the game files.
i agree, its like all the world record speed runs of super mario brothers where they use the world skip to jump right last world? big deal, i want you see you complete every single levelf of the game as quickly as possible