What is Speed Gaming Part Three

Since we talked about what is speed gaming in part one, and talked about some of the big names of speedrunning in part two, it’s time to talk about how you can get started and involved. 

To Stream or Not To Stream?

For starters, I highly recommend getting a Twitch.tv account, even if you don’t plan on streaming your speedruns. The community of speedrunning is a fun environment and so many cool people stream on Twitch. 

Once you have an account you can start to follow runners, and that is the best way to learn both how and what you might want to run. You can follow me here and see who all I follow, but I will give a short list of some of my favorite runners:

• Darkwing Duck – classic runner of a lot of NES games, current world record holder for The Legend of Zelda. His runs of that game are crazy.
• Cosmo Wright – runs several games but is most known for his Legend of Zelda:Ocarina of Time world record. Also co-founded SRL. (Speed Runs Live)
• Porfessor Broman – really funny guy that streams most everyday and runs a lot of different games including Borderlands 2.

These are just a few that I recommend. SRL is a great place to find runners you will like. Also if you want to find out who runs a particular game you like, then use Speed Demos Archive to find your game and start with the world record holder, and branch out from there. 

Streaming Equipment

If you decide you want to stream a speedrun yourself, you will need a few things to get started. The first thing is a place to broadcast with Twitch. If you want to stream a non-PC game, you will also need a capture card, which is without doubt the most expensive part of speedrunning. The price of these cards varies depending on the quality as well as the system you want to stream from. The video at the top of this article is a good source when wondering about what capture card you need.

After that refer to this page of SRL to find a simple list of options. You need a timer, which sounds simple, but there are plenty of cool options on their list.  You will need some streaming software, and I recommend FFSplit.  The last bit you will need is some video capture software. If you buy a video capture card, it most likely will come with the software, but if you want to stream a PC game, then SRL and I both recommend AmerRecTV.

If you have any more questions or comments about speedrunning, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments below, or in the comments of Part One or Part Two.