All About Today's Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures Speedrun Race

Published: November 4, 2015 2:14 AM /

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Today marks the ten year anniversary of the release of Ed Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures on the PC, Gamecube, Playstation 2, and Xbox. EEnE:TME (what an acronym) was developed by Artificial Mind & Movement, shortened as A2M, and published by Midway Games. A2M has been known as Behaviour Interactive since 2010 due to concerns that the company's abbreviation might be thought of as obscene. Of course, we at TechRaptor are mature and are definitely not caught in an infinite stream of laughter over this.

Those crawling the Wikipedia page alongside me will note that it has a Gameboy Advanced version that came out slightly earlier, but it doesn't tend to get mentioned at the same time due to it being almost an entirely different game. It's similar to A2M's other licensed title, Teen Titans, releasing both on GBA and consoles in 2006. Like Teen Titans, both versions are excellent but distinct games.

In the last year or two, a close community of speedrunners has grown around Ed, Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures and have dedicated precious nights and weekends to playing and improving their times. Primarily they play the PC version, but emulators and console versions are fair game for leaderboards and races (this race in particular). Having tried to play Ed Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures on Dolphin, I found it to be unplayable at low framerates and featuring many game breaking annoyances and bugs. This even after disabling all my glorious 4K downsampling and other graphical enhancements. The PC version is better, though still kind of a pain. One runner, wecn, has gathered a much easier to handle download for it, which I'll talk more about below. If you're considering joining in the race or picking it up on your own time, I definitely recommend it.

So about this race, then. The 10th anniversary race of Ed, Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures is going to go down at 6:30PM EST today between at least six people. These people are: Konasumi, Peanut, SpongedCube, Mildew, Wecn, and Flashyniqua. Currently, the world record holder is Konasumi with a time of 23:07. For a full list, check the Mis-Edventures leaderboards over at Speedrun.com. For those who want to watch all the streams on the same screen, here is a kadgar link to do just that.

The various runners will be trying their best to gear their commentary to those new to both it and speedrunning in general, so the need to know what Any% or clipping are to enjoy the show. As far as entertainment goes, Peanut said what many are thinking by stating to me, "It's a pretty bad and broken game, making for some entertainment factor based on just the 'so bad it's good' aspect." Personally my favorite games to watch speedruns of are in that category, and they tend to be big hits at marathons for those who think alike. It's interesting to watch, and being about half an hour long isn't a huge investment to give it a shot. For new runners with no experience with the game whatsoever, Konasumi and Peanut estimate a time between 60 and 80 minutes. I didn't have the heart to tell them that it took me an entire evening on my first play through. The world knows exactly how bad I am at things and stuff.

In addition to the race itself, the whole affair comes with a giveaway. Yet another runner, EnjoiHunt, will be giving away a sealed PC copy of Ed, Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures during the race (as announced on his Twitter page here). For those interested in entering, check out the entry page here and keep an eye on the race streams for more details.

XP compatible? Finally, I can get rid of Windows 10!
XP compatible? Finally, I can get rid of Windows 10!

Now, for those interested in playing or racing, I mentioned above that the PC version is almost certainly going to be your best bet. If you decide to buy Ed, Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures on PC, which is still somehow easy to find online, you're going to have a bad time. Particularly harmful DRM, incompatibilities, and bugs abound. To make it work, you'll need to apply some patches and elbow grease. To make everyone's lives easier, Wecn has compiled an all-inclusive download for the PC version. I won't be linking it here as the game can still be purchased, but in a completely unrelated topic, there's a lot of links to things on the race's /r/Speedrun post. If you do somehow stumble upon that download, be sure to read the readme file. It's practically mandatory.

Even when using this version, though, it's not the prettiest game in the world. The Mis-Edventures has an internal resolution of 512x512 (according to the video files anyway), no AA, no AF, a frame cap of 30fps, and no options menu at all that I can find. There's an INI file that can be tweaked to change the frame cap, as well as a few other simple things, but this produces physics anomalies and camera problems. If you do change the INI file, you also invalidate any records for the leaderboards, though surely you'll still be allowed to race. All of these things are pretty expected for a 2005 console port (though the console versions could be the ports; it's unclear), so there's no real need for a British rant on FOV sliders in this case. Those looking for some extra graphical options, just force things in your graphics card control panel. Using the nvidia control panel, all standard options worked well enough. Your mileage may vary. Oh, and make sure you meet the minimum system requirements. A whopping 256MB of RAM, a demanding Pentium III 1Ghz processor, and an overkill ATI Radeon 8500 are required for this behemoth of a title.

Before I stop talking and let our readers' sighs of relief wash over me, there's one more thing I would like to include. SpongedCube is a long time runner in the Ed, Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures speedrun community, and while speaking to him yesterday he offered to write up a quick summary of the history of the community so far. For anyone looking for more background on the what, whys, and hows, this is a great resource. You'll find it here on PasteBin. Again, all credit for this goes to SpongedCube, so be sure to check out his channel and see how far the strategies have come since the beginning of the tale.

Have you ever played Ed, Edd & Eddy: The Mis-Edventures? What did you think of it? For those interested in specifics, and for those with questions, let us know in the comments.

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


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I've been talking about games for as long as I can remember, and now I'm writing about them! Follow me on Twitter @XavierMendel for hilarious(ly… More about Xavier