The Return To Speedrunning With Hunt: Showdown – And More

While chasing PBs in speedrunning was once an all-encompassing pass time for me, I have been on a hiatus for some time now. After some family matters and free time due to college ended up ending my ability to stream and speedrun. However, now about 5 years later I have found myself in a state of stability in my life and been unable to fight the itch of speedrunning again.

Hunt: Showdown has been a game I have been playing casually lately and quite enjoying it. I even created a video going over my first steps in its murky waters. It was shortly after posting this, that I decided to look to see if there were speedruns of the game, and happy to discover there were on speedrun.com. And with that, I created my first speedruns of the games.

Recent Speedrunning and World Records

Since I had been working relentlessly on killing ole Rotjaw, I decided to first make some attempts in the category of Kill+Banish of that boss. My first few attempts were somewhat lackluster, however, I managed to achieve the kill world record shortly after. This is nothing monumental, as it is a game with a very small amount of runs and a rather niche category. However, after developing some new strategy, I decided to get serious and grind the WR down.

The run below of 1 minute and 34 seconds to kill Rotjaw was a great feeling to get, and it improved the World Record by over 1 and a half minutes.

While I am likely done grinding the kill WR on this boss/category, I intend to improve on the kill+extract category and claim that World Record as my own as well. I have since come up with an even faster kill strategy and just need to get a good extract with it.

Next for Speedrunning and More

I have also been grinding some other categories in Hunt: Showdown (like the video below). I do not want to limit myself to one game and intend to speedrun more in the future. I had primarily streamed/speedrun retro games in the past, and still have a bone to chew with a few games. Although in the past I did so on a CRT and original hardware, I will likely be moving so to emulators going forward. This decision mainly comes from a lack of space in my family’s current home and is just a reality that needs to be faced.

Guides and More Bayou Tales

Aside from working on speedrunning videos, I am hoping to begin making more content for Hunt: Showdown in the form of Guides as well as other videos in the Bayou Tales series. I have a lot of clips, it is more about finding the time to edit and record. My microphone is a bit of garbage, so upgrading that is likely the next financial investment I make before recording too much more. However, a guide to killing Rotjaw (for speedrunning or simply to kill him in general) is still in the works and will proceed with or without a fidelity microphone.

Streaming Speedrunning and Beyond

A nice perk of getting myself set up with OBS (which I admit had some terrible audio issues at first) has been the prospect of getting it set up to begin streaming on Twitch again. While I greatly enjoyed speedrunning in the past, the motivation from my audience was a huge driving force for me. Although it has been a struggle dealing with codecs, particularly audio issues, I believe I am getting close to having things look and sound the way that I want. Some basic setting up my account and getting notifications up and running, and I should be ready to begin streaming a few short sessions a week.

Where To Watch?

If you are looking to see my speedruns, I make sure to post them all on my YouTube account:
https://www.youtube.com/@wolfmerrik

If you are interested in watching my stream, Twitch is where I intend to do so:
https://www.twitch.tv/wolfmerrik

I am currently in the process of adding my new speedruns and old to the video section of this site:
https://www.wolfmerrik.com/video/ as well as a way to sort them all with some meta-data.

I hope to see you in the comments and watching my new streams. As always, thank you for reading.