There is a good chance you have not heard of a video game time attack before. I know I hadn't before I managed to stumble across a few videos on my many internet travels that managed to perk my interest in the hobby. A time attack is where a person tries to beat a game in as little time as humanly possible. In this article I will take a look at a few time attacks that caught my interest.

It is pretty clear that these people have an unhealthy knowledge of the games they are playing. They know exactly where the bad guys are going to appear, exactly when they need to jump, and precisely where they need to go and the fastest way to get there.

It is important to note that many of these time attacks were done in parts and not in one session as it appears in the videos. They may have had to play a level 20 times or more before they do it well enough for the video and then they stick it in only after they have mastered that level. This makes it a little less spectacular but they are still great feats never the less. Then again some were done in single sessions but I can't be sure of which ones.



Most everybody who has ever played a video game has probably played this game and if not you should be ashamed. It started it all, it's a fucking classic. Even though it is a rather simplistic game it is still pretty impressive to see a true master get a hold of it. The guy in this video of course has no time to collect any mushrooms or coins and takes advantage of all the secret warps to make the play through a bit quicker. He leaps over the pipe flowers just barely missing them and don't even get me started on the hammer brothers… He tackles them without even breaking a sweat by timing it just right. At the end castle he jumps right through a gap in Bowser's hammers and takes it home.






Super Mario 2 was always the oddball Mario game. Not many of the characters ever made another appearance in a Mario game again not to mention the ability to play as the Princess or Toadstool. Bowser is nowhere to be seen and your main villains are egg shooting dinosaurs and a giant frog… Yes it was an odd chapter in the Mario franchise but like most Nintendo made games it was fun, very fun.






This has got to be the best time attack of them all. Right off the bat he does something I did not even know you could do. He uses two warp whistles in a row to go strait to world 8. On world 8 in the levels with the cannons is just simply amazing. He only touches the ground a few times, the rest of the time he is bouncing from one bullet to the other, very impressive. He not only beats the game in less than 11 minutes but he also collects 99 lives along the way.

To spite playing it quite a lot I never was able to actually beat Maniac Mansion back in the day so watching this was pretty interesting. I also had to take breaks when it got dark since there was no way I was playing this game in the dark.

According to this video there is not even a need for some of the stuff in the mansion. I don't know how much time I spent dicking around with some of the stuff and just going around in circles. This guy does not even go into most of the rooms.

Now I have a long standing and firm belief that all Contra games are in fact impossible for mere humans to beat. The only way I was able to get to the end of this game was to use the old up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start code and even that only gave you 30 lives which for this tuff as nails game was barely enough. I think Konami was in cahoots with Nintendo to up the sales of controllers since after fifteen minutes playing Contra your controller would no doubt go flying into the wall.

The guy in this video does not appear to be using the Konami code but he is most certainly using an emulator and taking the game in sections rather than one solid play through. Now if there is someone out there who actually has beaten this game legit all the way through I bow to you, you are more of a man than most.

One thing games on the NES depended on was an insane difficulty to mask an otherwise short and uninteresting game. While Chip N Dales was hard it was also pretty well thought out and long so it had the best of both worlds even if the difficulty could have been turned down a notch or two. I was never able to get past about the fourth level so after that it was all new to me.

This game is very similar to Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers, probably because it was made by the same company around the same time. Both of the games did not skimp on the difficulty level. I don't know what it was about the difficulty of the games back then. Did I just suck back then or have modern games gotten a lot easier. I am sure it is a combination of both.

Of course the guy in this video has no problem at all plowing through the entire game in just over eight minutes without taking a single hit the whole way through.