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Is The Speed Running Community? Essay

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The speed running community is one of the more entertaining communities in pokemon. Players from around the world try to beat each other 's times to set records in any one of the many games in the series. They put their skills to good work for the world, participating in worldwide competitions to raise money for cancer research and other charities. While different competitors have different strategies and play different games, all of them have a deep knowledge of the inner workings of the game, especially its mathematical aspects. A run of a game from start to finish is almost always reliant on everything going as expected up to that point. Runners plan ahead, making sure to use only the most desirable starting seeds to mitigate randomness, and ensuring that the pokemon they use have certain stats that will guarantee victories against other trainers. More complex than that however, is the research into glitches that are used. To beat the game as quickly as possible, glitches are often used to skip large, or even the entire portion of the game. These glitches almost always appear as a result of unexpected results in the game’s programming, and many can be explained through the way that the game does mathematical calculations. One such glitch with strong mathematical implications is used in Pokemon Emerald speedruns. Due to the way the game calculates stats, it is possible to lower a pokemon’s health below 0, which the game interprets as being a very large number due to how

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