10 Video Games Broken Beyond Belief While Speedrunning
9. Half-Life 2
It's been over a decade since the last Half-Life game came out, and with the series going dormant for such a long period of time, many fans have simply resorted to playing Half-Life 2 over and over and over again, like a tasty bit of comfort food at the end of a long week.
And inevitably, many of those fans have also completed it in a truly insane amount of time. Like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Half-Life 2 normally takes a couple of hours to get through, but a speedrunner has beaten it in 47 minutes and 37 seconds.
Some of the tricks involved include optimising the game's settings (disabling Vertical Sync, selecting easy difficulty, and implementing certain key binds to make movement more fluid), but the best way to get a record time is to utilise glitches like Void Clipping and Prop Clipping. The latter involves clipping inside a prop to access out-of-bounds areas (check out 4:45 in the video below).
It takes a lot of skill to pull something like this off, and it's going to be interesting to see whether this same group of people will be able to put their speedrunning abilities to work on the upcoming Half-Life: Alyx.