Halo's "legendary" difficulty setting has never been for the faint of heart. The enemies on the game's highest difficulty are relentless, intelligent and sturdy. Ammo is scarce, and you will die, repeatedly. That is unless you are speedrunner Andrew Halabourda, of course, who mostly just runs straight past all the bad guys as he attempts to finish the game in as little time as possible.
Halabourda broke his own world record last night when he shaved nearly two minutes off his previous record with a Halo legendary campaign completion time of one hour, 36 minutes and 40 seconds, streaming his endeavour for the world to see via Twitch. Halabourda plays on the PC version of the Xbox classic, and utilizes glitches and other tricks to go as fast as possible through each level of a game that otherwise would take anywhere from seven to 10 hours, perhaps even longer on the highest difficulty if a player chose to stand and fight all the enemies in every encounter.
His commentary through it all is always calm and collected, and it's fascinating to watch somebody who quite literally has every portion of the game memorized forward and backward, the entirety of the game down to an exact science. His strategy involves, more often than not, throwing a grenade to clear out an area or room of a few enemies before taking the shortest path possible past them, often times jumping over them and other obstacles. When his own space marine allies block his path, Halabourda may kill them to clear the path for the sake of speed.
As he gets towards the end, Halabourda is pretty hard on himself about his performance, which he feels is a little sloppy.
"This is a mess of a record," he says at around an hour and 30 minutes into the run, just six minutes away from a new world record. About 30 seconds later he continues with "I don't know how I feel about this run anymore."
Despite a few hiccups and six deaths, Halabourda still came out on top for a new world record on a difficulty that is known for providing more than enough challenge for most gamers. Interestingly enough, his Legendary record is only 19 minutes behind the world record run for Halo on Easy. Maybe the real strategy for anybody playing on Legendary should always be just run fast and don't look behind you. It seemed to work well for Halabourda.
