The present of videogaming.

Emulators are wonderful things. They allow you to fiddle around with all your old favorites and play the classics of systems you never owned. They also allow for precise save state recovery, careful editing of inputs and their timing, and endless replays of games of chance until they go your way.

Sure, you've seen speed runs where some dude zips through Super Mario Brothers in 10 minutes, but have you seen tool-assisted runthroughs? To make these crazy mothers, an emulator is worked to the fullest advantage of the gamer, who slowly assembles the absolute perfect run through, exploiting every glitch, saving and restarting countless times to make sure each hit is a critical hit and each level is completed as fast as theoretically possible.

These intrepid players consider their work to be both entertainment and art. They're certainly impressive. Check out some of the videos here, in torrent format. I personally recommend the Gradius runthrough. Collision detection and speed boosts are made to do insane tricks in a really neat old school shooter.

And if you read around on the site, you'll find more than one reference to the Matrix, which I guess is understandable.

By the by, Global Frequency sucked balls.

Breaking postscript - I beat metafilter to the punch! There was a post about this site later today. Woot woot!