Speed Message Board

Ah, speed-runners who do the impossible. A few days ago, the world record for beating Ocarina of Time was nineteen minutes and twenty seconds according to Zelda Speed Runs. Then, noted speed-runner Cosmo Wright came along and beat the game in a record nineteen minutes and fifteen seconds—and you can watch him do it above.Read more...

Along with today's clarification of the online requirements of the Xbox One, Microsoft also gave us an internet speed target: "For an optimal experience, we recommend a broadband connection of 1.5Mbps." That doesn't seem unreasonable. Let's see how we do! A quick trip to Speedtest.net will tell you how your network is doing, and while only the most ancient wireless connections should fall below the 1.5Mbps speed range, it never hurts to check. Here's me, from good old Charter Internet in Atlanta. How does your connection stack up? It's comments bragging time, y'all.

Did the developers of BioShock Infinite hide a secret song or message in the ambient sounds of their game? Music plays a big part in creating Colombia, but is there more to it than meets the ear?

Criterion may not be the sole developer after all.

Valve recently announced that it will be bringing a few of Steam's most popular games to Linux, the first of those being Left 4 Dead 2. But besides the novelty factor of running the now classic zombie simulator on penguin-emblazoned hardware, there may be another reason to try the new platform out: It'll be faster. Even now, during development, the Valve team has L4D2 running at 315 frames per second on the Linux text platform, as compared to the standard Windows speed of 270.6 FPS.

At that point, of course, the speeds are mostly arbitrary. But as Valve says, this speed shows the potential in customizing a game for the Linux operating system. This work on Linux is also benefiting the Windows teams - in working on the Linux version, Valve was able to speed up the Windows OpenGL version to 303.4 FPS.

#watchthis Demonstrating the memorization and motor skills of some sort of humanoid robot, Hungary's Marcell Endrey spends three and a half minutes getting to know a scrambled 5x5 Rubik's Cube, slips on a blindfold, and solves it in just over four minutes. More »

#speakuponkotaku Now here's something you don't here every day. Most people think the key to Sonic the Hedgehog's success was speed. Commenter Daemon_Gildas thinks it's time he retired his red sneakers for a pair of walking shoes in today's Speak Up on Kotaku. More »

#computers Sometimes a computer at CES is interesting because it's functional and intuitive. Sometimes a computer is interesting because it's the size of an air conditioner, filled with heinously tacky neon lights, and overclocked to hell. Guess which one this is! More »

A portion of an Aussie-Nintendo review… I enjoyed Speed. The game doesn’t have a whole lot of content and feels pretty (really) sloppy, but something had me hooked. Maybe it was the absurd collision detection where cars transform into flaming helium balloon bottle rockets upon impact. Actually yeah, that’s exactly it.

Fast images from a racing game.