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Selections from the RogerEbert.com reader mail inbox regarding “Crash” and Roger Ebert’s defense of his top movie of 2005 against attacks from some critics:

While I respect your optimism in your recent column, “In Defense of the Year’s ‘Worst Movie,’” I feel very strongly that “Crash” is not only misguided but dangerous, and so I can only say the same for your column. The film’s presentation of racism is so superficial, so painfully clichéd, that it threatens to actually close people’s eyes to the ways in which racism most frequently and most dangerously presents itself. Almost immediately your column falls into the trap of which many critics of this film are so wary.

Think you’re fast at completing games? Or do you just like watching other people zip through a game in record time? Then head over to Speed Demos Archive where you can view and submit videos of people beating some of the most popular games in record time.

According to the site “a speed run is a video of a player striving to complete a video game in as fast a time as they can manage. Sound easy? It’s not! A large number of tricks are usually used, possibly skipping whole areas of a game in the process, and there will always be mistakes.”

The list of speed runs is quite impressive with a little more than 200 games currently on the site. All of the runs can be viewed as a video and often the “runner” will provide notes as to how they accomplished their run.

What I really like about this site is the outstanding selection of games. Never got around to playing the legendary Chrono Trigger? Well now you can watch someone complete the entire game, including all the side quests! Of course the video of this run is 647 MB but many of the runs are broken up into several segments so even modem users can view most of the runs without too much trouble.

Looking through this list some of these runs are truly impressive, such as the run of Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn (1 hour, 11 minutes, 37 seconds — how did he do that?), Super Mario 64 (19 minutes, 47 seconds — that’s crazy), and Blast Corps (41 minutes, 17 seconds — this game gets crazy-hard towards the end and it has 57 levels … how did he do that?).

So what are the longest runs? The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (6 hours, 42 minutes), Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (7 hours, 11 minutes), and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (7 hours, 46 minutes). Whoa, I knew GTA: SA took awhile to finish but when the very fastest run is nearly 8 hours long that’s pretty telling.

And the shortest runs? Super Mario Bros. (5 minutes, 6 seconds), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (3 minutes, 35 seconds), and Marble Madness for the NES (3 minutes, 13 seconds). Wow, and you thought King Kong was a short game?

TWiT 38 - direct from the Zeum and MacWorld Expo.

Audio

Main feed courtesy those cool cats (and TWiTheads) at AOL Radio:

• MP3 feed

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• BitTorrents from our new site

Hosts: Amber MacArthur, John C. Dvorak, Leo Laporte, David Pogue, Patrick Norton, Roger Chang, and Robert Heron

Thanks to the Zeum and the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking for their support. We had such a good time at the Zeum that we’re planning to do more live shows there.

Running time: 01:19:00