Summer Games Done Quick 2017

By Shamus Posted Sunday Jul 9, 2017

Filed under: Video Games 65 comments

I really love the Games Done Quick charity marathon. It’s been running for about a week and the final game (Earthbound) is just wrapping up as I write this. This show has been the best one so far, and I thought I’d share a few of my favorite moments.

If you’ve never caught the show:

Some of the best speedrunners in the world come together to complete various games in implausibly short timeframes. Castlevania in 32 minutes. Getting all goals and medals in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 in 16 minutes. All of Half-Life in 35 minutes. Some runs have additional constraints like “no out-of-bounds glitching” or “get all secrets”, just to keep things interesting.

The whole thing is performed in front of a live audience and streamed to the world via Twitch. The event runs around the clock for a week. The show covers a variety of games from the 1990s to modern titles, although the nature of speedrunning means the list skews towards retro titles. A run is more fun to watch once the speedrun community has been able to study a game and discover the best shortcuts and techniques.

Some runs are demonstrations of dexterity and timing, while others are driven by having an encyclopedic knowledge of glitching techniques. Some runs basically just feature someone playing the intended game really well, while other runs will have the player running around outside the level, circumventing entire sections of the game, and exploiting unusual builds to trivialize combat. The former makes for runs that are amazing to watch, even if they don’t result in ridiculously short times. The latter can result in someone beating a game ten or even a hundred times faster than a proper play-through, but the resulting chaos is hard to follow if we don’t have someone handy to describe what the runner is doing and what’s supposed to be happening in the game.

For me the sweet spot seems to fall somewhere between these two extremes. I like a run that makes a game ridiculously short, while at the same time it can be frustrating to watch a run where the player spends all their time out-of-bounds, zipping through featureless grey voids, and pressing the in-game camera up against strange little lumps in the level geometry. I like to see a game beaten quickly, but not so quickly I can’t even tell what’s going on. I also like when runs are short overall, because it gets boring watching the same game for too long. Like, I get that eight hours is a really short time for beating Final Fantasy 7, but that’s still eight freakin’ hours of Final Fantasy 7.

I’ve watched as much as I could this year, but I’ve caught less than a third of it. Here are my favorite bits so far:

#4 Dark Souls in 29:05 by BubblesDelFuego

Click to watch the run.
Click to watch the run.

Bubbles is a fan favorite at GDQ. He runs a lot of different games, to the point where I have no idea how he time for it all. I know enough about Dark Souls to realize the incredible time investment required to be able to play the game at this level. This run has a few glitches (like using a particular weapon animation to escape fall damage after jumping off a cliff) but the meat of the run is just skill and memorizing enemy behavior patterns.

#3 Tetris: The Grand Master

Are they... are they playing on CRT monitors?! Click to watch the run.
Are they... are they playing on CRT monitors?! Click to watch the run.

This part of the show was actively frustrating. The Tetris gameplay was a blast, but there were these long setup times between rounds. I gather the problem was how long it took to get the machines connected up properly. As one of the runners said, “It’s almost as if there should be a home version of this game.” And yeah, it’s apparent we really need a working version of Tetris on the PC that isn’t a half-assed broken mess.

The first Tetris segment required a brutal hour and twenty minutes of setup time leading up to an eight-way race between players that lasted just 12 minutes. Then (after 12 more minutes of setup) there was a game where four people engaged in a 2-player head-to-head mode by having two players share a controller, with one player doing movement and the other rotation. And finally (after another six minutes) one player took on Tetris rev mode.

I really enjoyed this section, although if they do it in a future marathon I’ll probably just wait for the whole thing to appear on YouTube so I can skip the setup phases. This show already has a lot of downtime. I’m not sure what sort of engineering wizardry is required to get these machines (I’m pretty sure this stuff is running on arcade hardware) hooked up to the streaming system and the controllers everyone had in their laps, but this must have been a huge headache for the crew.

Seriously Ubisoft: You need to patch the version of Tetris you crapped out onto Steam a couple of years ago. This game is too culturally important to treat it like some lame movie tie-in that can be thrown together cheaply and abandoned after release.

Moreover, whoever owns the rights to Tetris The Grand Master really needs to get a version out on modern platforms, since this seems to be the preferred entry for high-level play.

#2 Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast in 48:07 by CovertMuffin

Click to watch the run. DO IT!
Click to watch the run. DO IT!

Some runs are fun because they’re amazing demonstrations of skill. Others are fun because the runner is charismatic and charming. This one is both. CovertMuffin seems so happy to be doing the run, he was even thrilled when things went wrong. I deeply envy his ability to enjoy a game even when he fails the same insane jump for the tenth time in a row in front of 150,000 people. I’m also amazed at his ability to perform tricks while also explaining them to the audience. Most runners have the “couch crew” to back them up. Usually two to four other experienced streamers will sit on the nearby couch and offer commentary to explain the action to the dumbfounded audience. You can see Muffin’s crew in the screenshot above, although those guys couldn’t get a word in because Muffin is a multi-tasking badass.

As someone who has to pause a game in order to talk, this looks like sorcery to me.

I really loved Jedi Outcast back in the day, although I doubt I’d be able to sit through the whole thing these days. It really does become a slog in a few spots. This speed run is a nice drag race down memory lane.

#1 Prince of Persia: Sands of Time in 1:25:05 by HennaJoe

Click to watch the run.
Click to watch the run.

Judging by the comments sent with donations, people really enjoy seeing their favorite games broken by clever speed runners. A run is more amazing if you have a frame of reference for just how much time the runner is saving with their shenanigans. The same is true for me when it comes to this game. I dabbled with speedrunning this game years ago, before I even knew speed running was a thing. I never found any of the technical glitches, but I remember finding a few tricks and shortcuts to avoid doing puzzles.

I love this game, and I’m sad Ubisoft ran this series into the ground. I don’t think anyone else is really working on this particular blend of fluid platforming and puzzles. The trend these days is to dumb down the puzzles, add tons of cover shooting, and then pack the entire thing with elaborate cutscenes. Yeah, I get that the Uncharted games are really good. But they aren’t good at the stuff Sands of Time is good atAnd don’t even get me started on Tomb Raider., and I’d love to see this kind of gameplay get a revival.

Sadly, this is one of those areas where it’s still hard for indies to compete. Sure, it’s trivial to make the environments and models these days, but the Prince had literally hundreds of different animations to support all the possible ways his various moves might chain into other moves. I wouldn’t be surprised if his move set was overall more complex than Lara Croft’s was in 2013. That sort of thing takes lots of time to get right. It requires programmers and animators to work together very closely. I’m not saying it’s impossible or anything. I’m just saying you’d need just the right team, and even then you’d require a pretty big budget by indie standards.

Anyway.

HennaJoe was lots of fun and I loved seeing the ridiculous glitches in action. He was so entertaining I’m considering looking him up and watching his streams, and I never watch streamers.

What did I miss? I know I caught less than a third of the streams. What other runs were really good?

 

Footnotes:

[1] And don’t even get me started on Tomb Raider.



From The Archives:
 

65 thoughts on “Summer Games Done Quick 2017

  1. The Sands of Time run was not bad. I used to play that game on the PS2, and vaguely recall struggling through the game (somewhat terrible gamer here). Still surprised by how fast these game runs can go, especially the Star Wars one. It’s quite impressive, considering most of these games take the average player hours to complete.

    1. DeadlyDark says:

      Jedi Outcast was my first PC game and it took three days to complete 1st level for me. Third level, oh wow, I was stuck, didn’t know where to go, so I stopped that game for a month. After that break I returned and found that I needed to jump on a retractable pipe down the ledge. After that, no level was too hard. I found a personal zen. Even snipers on Nar-Shaddaa weren’t annoying after Artus mine level. And I love this game. It isn’t perfect (voice acting and overall plot could be vastly improved, even by standards of this time, look at NOLF, for example), but I love that classic gameplay and fluid movements, hell, even that classic labyrinthian level-design. Lightsaber combat wasn’t surpassed even by today’s games (I guess, only Souls-likes somewhat close, though they go on different direction), shooting is great…

  2. Ilseroth says:

    I’m actually an ex-speedrunner myself, I went to AGDQ2012 and it was a ton of fun, though it was WAY smaller back then. It was held at the basement of a international youth educational convention center, kinda a weird hotel/meeting center.

    Also @Shamus: you’d be surprised at how easily you can talk and speedrun at the same time. Unless it is a particularly grueling run (and even then honestly) it just becomes muscle memory after a few runs, especially if it’s a short easy to memorize route.

    If you’re curious I ran the following (at one point or another): Super Mario 64 (I think everyone takes a shot at this at some point if they are into running games, the glitches are fun and easy, but my time was never close to competitive), Fable 2 (I was the only runner for a long time, got bored and moved on someone came and crushed my time later), Skyrim (Held the record for like, 6 months, got bored and someone asked me to teach him my route, did so, he grinded it hard and beat my record in a week), Dishonored 1 (Really fun run, but they started to find new glitches that I didn’t feel like grinding out to get my time competitive). Gauntlet (NES version, never got the record, fun game though, hard run), Castlevania: SOTN (Richter Mode, I was the only person running, then Mecharichter picked up the run and DESTROYED ME, that man is a machine really amazing stuff, check the run out some time it’s amazing). And most recently Monster Hunter Portable 3rd (Japanese only release, but I really like the monster hunter series and this one had the most fun campaign to run through.)

    Anyways, good to see some speedrunning love here, I really need to get back into it, but I need a solid game to run, been looking around but it can be hard to find the right game for ya.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      How bout the upcoming dead cells?In its current state there are timer doors that have bonuses in them if you reach them quickly,so the game encourages speed running even at its basic.Though,as a (semi) procedurally generated game full memorization is impossible.

      1. Ilseroth says:

        I like the souls series, and metroidvanias, but honestly I wouldn’t know till I’ve played it and I try to refrain from playing early access games. Also, I’m not big on running procedurally generated games. While I get the “oh they give you a different experience every time” I prefer my time be down to my personal skill and not randomness.

        One of the reasons I stopped running Skyrim was that I saved about 2 minutes because someone didn’t show up to a cutscene and the cutscene played anyways, so it skipped all of their lines which saved a ton of time. That bug was not something I could recreate so because of the random glitch in the bethesda game I had a run that was way better for something completely out of my hands. Admittedly people found better ways to route the game to save time, but they could still save that time too if they got lucky and had that random bug occur and that’s lame as hell.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Yeah,the game has changed significantly a few times already.And its not completely procedural,because the rooms are premade with connections in certain places and then just shuffled around.Though the enemy spread is random,as are the items you can get.But you always get a variety on offer to pick from.

          But for an actual speed run,some preparation(hacking)would be needed to get the items upgraded a few times.

          The only real downside to it being early access is that you get only a few of the levels on offer and the rest of the game is locked from you.You should definitely try it once its finished though.

          I like the souls series, and metroidvanias

          I dont get why souls games were never labeled as metroidvanias.The only difference is that you get the third dimension to move around in.

          1. Arakus says:

            The difference is that Souls games don’t have the same idea of getting character upgrades that let you access new areas. Instead you usually unlock new areas using shortcuts or weird secrets. The level design in those games is definitely inspired by metroidvanias though.

  3. LapnLook says:

    Have you seen Woobly’s run of Half-Life 2? While it wasn’t the best I’ve seen from that game, he still did pretty damn well, and I think showcased just how different the game is from a normal playthrough. Almost all of the mechanics of the run apart from just shooting are based on unintended glitches, and they are a surprisingly fun change of pace from the original.

    Ever since I learned how to use the main movement glitch (Accelerated Back Hopping) I couldn’t play Half-Life 2 regularly. It’s almost some sort of racing game for me at this point, that has more in common with Need For Speed than an FPS

    1. Ilseroth says:

      A lot of games have that problem, especially ones with really easy and effective speed tricks; IE: Castlevania SOTN once you learn that backdashing is faster then just walking forward and Skyrim once you learn that you can sprint forever if you have a torch in your offhand (it fails to transition you back to normal running when you run out of stamina) ; just a few examples that just make the game way faster and more convenient. you just don’t know about it in normal play.

    2. Friend of Dragons says:

      The parts that used the back hopping to get tons of speed and air were great, and I loved the parts of the run where that was prominent, but all the chunks where it was just save&load 1000 times to inch forwards through OOB were a little dull to watch.

  4. Mintskittle says:

    I really like the races, and they had a really good Mega Man X2 run.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTl67yL4u80

    skip to about 15:45 for the start of the race.

  5. Rob says:

    Did they have a TASBot block this year? I know there are a lot of people in the speedrun community who look down on tool-assisted speedruns, but they are always entertaining crowd-pleasers.

    My all-time favorite TAS (which I don’t believe has been shown off at AGDQ) is this one. Ignore the post date of April 1st; that’s 100% legitimate Pokemon Yellow gameplay. All of it is in-game, even the video at the end.

    1. vdeogmer says:

      No TASBot this time :(

  6. Tohron says:

    The Super Metroid Low % race was really tense, as you might expect since the goal was running the game with the absolute minimum amount of upgrades:
    https://www.twitch.tv/videos/157295442?t=11h42m0s
    (couldn’t find it on Youtube, so here’s the Twitch link with the starting time)

    1. Durican says:

      The Super Metroid run was my favourite, because

      HUGE SPOILERS THAT WILL RUIN THE EXPERIENCE IF YOU INTEND TO WATCH IT:
      When a run starts going wrong it raises the possibility of failure, and a run is all the more exciting for not knowing if they’re going to succeed. When 3 out of the 4 runners died on Phantoon, leaving only 1 person left to complete the run I was on the edge of my seat for the whole ride

  7. Viktor says:

    The Halo run and the Mario 64 run were both really fun. I really liked the Sm64 runner, he seemed like a good kid.

    The Notch donation during the Mario Series race was just sad. That dude has wrecked his rep and I really wish he could look at himself honestly enough that he could fix that.

    1. evileeyore says:

      ‘The Notch donation during the Mario Series race was just sad. That dude has wrecked his rep and I really wish he could look at himself honestly enough that he could fix that.”

      Eh? In what manner has he “wrecked his rep”?

      1. Shamus says:

        Viktor is a fan of the culture war and he forgets to check that shit at the door when he shows up on my site. (Hint. Hint.)

        You can’t offer a full answer to this question without breaking the no-politics rule, but the short version is that Viktor and Notch are clearly on opposite sides.

        1. CJK says:

          Although it treads awfully close, I don’t think it’s correct to frame this is a political issue. It’s about treating people with decency. All the same, I’ll understand if you choose to nuke this comment in moderation.

          Notch has said a number of controversial things, several of them using abusive language (in one recent tweet, the LEAST controversial bit read “[a certain kind of person] deserve to be shot”). He generally backpedals or claims it was a joke afterwards, but it’s fair to say that the repeated events have indeed “wrecked his rep” in some circles.

          [EDIT: Removed link to content that actually is definitely political]

          1. Shamus says:

            Sure, it might be fair to say he “wrecked his rep”, but why say it? Does it need to be brought up in this context where people aren’t allowed to talk about it? Does it have anything to do with Doctors without Borders or the speedrunning community? I’m sure Notch fans would characterize things very differently. “So-and-so said worse things to him! He was just reflecting their own snark back at them! It’s all taken out of context!” etc. (Or whatever.) Am I supposed to allow Viktor to throw shade at Notch and then punish people that try to rebut him? Should I wade into the depths of Twitter drama and conduct my own investigation so I can decide who is telling the truth?

            The no politics rule is designed specifically to avoid these kinds of debates. I HATE the culture wars, I hate how nasty people are to each other, and the last thing in the world I want is to play referee in the middle. I’d rather close down the site and take a desk job than do that.

            1. Syal says:

              I would say whether Viktor’s comment is political or not depends on the crowd reaction to the Notch donation. If Notch donated $10,000 and the crowd reaction was “ugh, it’s Notch” then it would be less political and more factual.

              But finding out would require watching a Mario speedrun, so, not worth the effort probably?

              1. rer says:

                it was really funny because they announced a 10k dollars donation and people applauded and cheered but after a moment the announcer goes “…from notch” and dead silence invaded the room, independently of my political beliefs that was hilarious

                1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  The dead silence was because no one knew how to respond(hence why the “Oooh” and the nervous laughter).Because his name is too political to mention anywhere.

        2. evileeyore says:

          Ah. I don’t Twitter… even though I am culture “warrior” (probably not on Viktor’s side of the conflict though if a bit of rough language can ruin a rep in his eyes)… and I’ve been mostly out of the game since GAWKER burned down (which was all I really cared about anyway).

  8. AzaghalsMask says:

    I’ve been watching GDQs for many years now, and they always deliver. This time around I really liked this two speedruns:

    Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons : I vaguely remember Chris talking about this game (hint: the run contains SPOILERS!) The runner is really enthusiastic, and the run incorporeates a few neat tricks.

    Zelda: A Link to the Past : This is a swordless run, which forces the runner to come up with many ingenious tricks to beat the game without Link’s most important tool. Great synergy with the couch commentators.

    1. Christopher says:

      I’ll sign off on both of these. Watching the ALttP run now, and that stuff is funny.

    2. Nixitur says:

      Patty on the couch is always a delight, so Swordless LttP was great.

  9. TmanEd says:

    A Link to the Past was a really fun run with a charismatic runner, couch, and announcer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else having as much fun as they did at this event, and it’s definitely worth a watch. Freedom planet was also a great run, with a machine of a runner just beating the hell out of the game (figuratively) with a great hype-man/commentator to explain what was going on.

  10. No One says:

    Was there an Awful Block this year?

    1. Kizer says:

      I was wondering the same thing, and the interwebs told me that the Awful Block is traditionally part of AGDQ, not SGDQ, so there was no official Awful block in this year’s marathon. We’ll have to wait until January for terrible games.

  11. Grimwear says:

    I haven’t watched any SDGQ 2017 since I always wait for them to be put on youtube but I did just finish watching some runs from AGDQ 2017 and dang bl00d_thunder’s Doom (2016) run was a blast to watch. Lots of glitching out of bounds but still able to see the levels for the most part as well as a huge amount of damage boosts. It was crazy. Additionally, the way they naturally manage to abuse the BFG on bosses? Mind blown. Non stop action thrill ride all in under an hour.

    Also I’m holding out hope for a Legacy of the Void speedrun. I know at previous AGDQ/SGDQs we had Raelcun do a speedrun of both Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm and dang were they fun. Seeing any rts speedruns is a rarity and seeing them done well is just fascinating.

    1. Tohron says:

      Yeah, there have been a couple single-segment LotV runs on youtube, but I’d like to see it in AGDQ.

      Also, incidentally there’s a guy doing speedruns of the Coop missions now (with a partner):
      https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmm1hWz2jdEM9t9A2FsuMJM5eMm1LRDml

  12. mewse says:

    Regarding: “the Prince had literally hundreds of different animations (…) That sort of thing takes lots of time to get right. It requires programmers and animators to work together very closely.”

    This is almost certainly true.

    My understanding is that Prince of Persia: Sands of Time required amazing collaboration between one particular programmer and several artists to get the movement right. And it was fantastic.

    And it was also the last time it happened in a AAA game for more than a decade. On the back of the PoP dev experience, they came up with a new way to author animations which removed the expensive-programmer part of the equation; this new system (which they called “Animation Graphs”) kind of took over the industry, letting artists author player control without the influence of programmers. Animation Graphs quickly found their way into all the major engines (Unity’s Animation system is precisely an Animation Graph. Unreal 4 and CryTech also both used Animation Graphs as their standard animation system for ages, though both have started moving in other directions in the last few years).

    As somebody who used to be that programmer who was working closely with the animators to author player control (not on PoP games), nothing made me more sad than the rise of animation graphs. There are definite budget reasons to prefer them, but they never feel as nice to control as something bespoke, crafted by different people who have different priorities (the animators typically want beautiful animation, the programmers typically want low latency between input and actions). That tension produces better results than when the whole thing is primarily driven just by one side.

    1. Pete_Volmen says:

      Wow, I never realized this, but that makes a lot of sense.
      Is it possible to start with animation graphs but then allow for a layer of polish? How does this fit with inverse kinematics and the like?

    2. Echo Tango says:

      Alternate / way-simpler solution:
      Cut down the graphical fidelity to something like Mario 64 or Zelda 64, so you don’t need to do all these elaborate animations and transitions between animations / partial-animations. It’d make it a lot easier for the indies to compete with a game similar to Sands of Time. :)

      1. Geebs says:

        PoP is a long, long way away from photorealism.

        That aside – no, I don’t think it would work. PoP’s animation system is a vital part of the game and the feel would be completely lost without it, IMO.

  13. Spammy says:

    I only caught a few runs, but the Portal 2 Solo Co-op run was pretty entertaining to watch. Apparently this guy had a partner at one time to practice speedrunning Portal 2’s co-op campaign with, but after his partner had to stop he just started running both bots at once and using a keybind to switch between which one he was controlling. That one was a lot of fun for watching the game as it was not intended to be played and for listening to all of GlaDOS’ comments about how one person on the team isn’t pulling their weight.

  14. Decius says:

    Shout out to the TASblock. I’ve been busy this year and didn’t see what they did thig GDQ, but they have figured out how to do some crazy insane things with the NES hardware using only controller input; a couple of them have since been done by humans exploiting buffer overflow with controllers on original hardware.

    1. Da Mage says:

      I don’t think there was a TASBlock this time.

  15. wswordsmen says:

    The coop Portal 2 run was the best, and funniest, because it was only one person doing it. Made all the jokes about 1 team member does all the work so much better than normal.

  16. Da Mage says:

    The Oblivion speedrun is always fun. The any% is so broken that it only takes 3mins to complete, but even the no-out-of-bounds run (which they did this year) is only about 30mins.

  17. Sleeping Dragon says:

    I’m generally not a fan of speedruns, I tend to have Let’s Plays running in the background and prefer it when people actually go through the game at a steady but not very fast pace (so that I have many hours of content) and comment extensively on what they do and what is happening (or are otherwise verbally entertaining).

    That said, seeing as I’ve finished Dark Souls earlier this year, and it took me like between 70 and 80 hours hours, I might just watch that speedrun to see how ridiculous it is.

    On a vaguely related, if anyone knows and could recommend some streamer(s) or youtuber(s) who are doing entertaining video LPs of strategy games that would be appreciated. Things like Paradox titles, X(-)coms or Total War series would be ideal, though I do realise those lend themselves better to text LPs. Just for the love of all that is good in the world not someone who goes on an hour long political rant every time they sit down to the game.

    1. Syal says:

      ARavingLoon has a 90 video playlist of Paradox games, plus most of the X-Coms, Ogre Battles and others, with hours-long videos on average. He also shows up for other people’s channels like Voiceof Dog’s Advance Wars playthroughs.

      …varying degrees of entertaining, lack of political rants but no promises on complete lack of politics (I’m not sitting through all of that).

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        Oh sure, I meant that they don’t basically turn it into “talking politics while playing the game in the background thing”, I’m definitely going to check this one out.

    2. Philadelphus says:

      For sheer entertainment value for Paradox games, one source I can highly recommend is the channel Long Game Short, where a guy takes Let’s Plays of Paradox games by other famous YouTubers and edits them down from tens of hours to half-hour or less videos containing a rapid-fire barrage of all the funniest bits. He’s good about linking to the original videos too so you can watch the full series if you want.

      I personally quite enjoy playing Paradox games but generally find them boring to merely watch, but his edits of them with all the boring bits cut out are quite hilarious.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        I might check him out but I’m actually looking for something that would come in volumes rather than abbreviate the games so I don’t think it’s a perfect match for my needs.

    3. Droid says:

      The Finnish Youtuber Zemalf has a very good voice to listen to for a long time (ymmv, obviously) and he already did playthroughs of XCOM (both of the new ones) on highest difficulty and on Ironman, at least one of them without losing a soldier! He also has Total War videos, but as more of a sidenote than as main content. Other memorable LPs from him were Legend of Grimrock (modern revival of the dungeon crawlers of the 90s), The Witcher and Fallout as well as Dark Souls.

      He is quite slow-paced though, which surely is what made him get through one of the XCOMs without a soldier death, but that also means there are times when he’s kind of boring to listen to because he’s trying to puzzle something out.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        This actually sounds like a really attractive option for me, once I get used to the accent, as I mentioned I like to have these in the background so him taking his time to figure stuff out isn’t really an issue.

  18. default_ex says:

    That FFVII run this year was the most entertaining long duration speed run I have ever seen, aside from maybe the one in the 3H hall where Spike and company acted/sung out parts of FFIX. They offered some incredibly good interpretation of the story while performing the run, some of which I don’t think many people caught onto even though the game spells it out for you. Began watching it thinking it would be a great run to kill time while building a massive automated tree farm in Minecraft and wearing myself down to sleep. Wound up forcing myself to stay up (something I rarely do when I’m tired) just to watch the end of it. Left me wanting to see a normal run by them with their story commentary.

    1. Nawyria says:

      Could you point me towards a video of the FFIX stuff? It’s one of the games of my childhood and what you write seems interesting enough to watch.

      1. Syal says:

        I’m assuming it’s this one from 2013.

  19. Rane2k says:

    The Titanfall 2 run was also rather good.

    I didn´´t really have that game on my radar, but this run makes me want to buy it.

  20. Jokerman says:

    Ha, Bubbles is straight up entertaining, i don’t care what game he is running, he is funny and explains very well what and how he is doing what he does, gives great insight.

  21. bigben1985 says:

    My favorite run in recent times was Bonesw577’s run of Jak and Dexter last SGDQ. He’s still crazy fast but also terribly sleep deprived and the whole thing is incredibly hilarious.

    1. Grimwear says:

      It’s unfortunate since that run caused him to be banned from submitting a game for a year.

      1. Shamus says:

        Ok, I’ll bite. Why was he banned?

        1. Shamus says:

          Nevermind, I found it myself. For the curious:

          He apparently did a lot of stuff that really annoyed the staff. It didn’t help that apparently he wasn’t playing very fast, which I guess causes problems for their schedule. He was swearing and wouldn’t stop despite being asked not to. (It’s part of the guidelines when you join the event. They want to keep it lighthearted and don’t want a stream of F-bombs.) He talked about Owen Wilson and told people to message him on Twitter. The told people to message Air Canada. He wouldn’t stop talking about celebrities despite being asked several times to stop. (Being a nonprofit event, they REALLY want to avoid controversy, and messing with corporations and famous people on Twitter can eaily blow up into headline-generating bad press.)

          Context: All of this is based on reading other people’s comments regarding the event. I have not watched the entire stream myself and I’m just going by internet-hearsay.

          Personally, I’d ban someone for life for that. If I asked someone multiple times to stop talking politics here and they just kept going, I don’t really see why I’d ever un-ban them. (Ignoring the fact that my bans are easy to circumvent anyway.) I mean, if someone clearly doesn’t respect your venue, then having them on is just going to lead to chaos. Once they get in front of that camera, you’re pretty much at their mercy.

          Even if you think the rules are stupid, prudish, or unreasonable, your options are to abide by them or refuse to participate. Don’t show up and break the rules on purpose.

          EDIT: He commented on the ban. He seems to understand why and wasn’t particularly upset about it.

          https://pastebin.com/siiD2UD1

          Also, looks like the ban was pretty mild. He could still attend, still be on the couch crew, but he couldn’t run a game himself.

          1. Grimwear says:

            Ya I think during the entire 3ish hour run he swore 3 times. They were accidental and he apologized after he said them. The run took place at 6 am and he hadn’t slept which is no excuse but explains his wacky behaviour. Accidental swears are relatively common and easily forgiven. It was more the jokes about Owen Wilson and tweeting him that got him in trouble. It was a perfect storm where it got brought up, they got told to drop it, but then one of the people on his couch just would not stop doing his Owen Wilson impression which then caused the runner to spiral once again. Coupled with him telling people to tweet at Owen Wilson and Air Canada, it’s no surprise he got banned for a year.

            It’s just unfortunate since I BELIEVE (don’t quote me on this) that Bonesw77 has been around from when GDQ was smaller and more laid back. In the last couple years when the event got larger they have started cracking down a lot more. I just finished watching AGDQ 2017 and their keynote Metroid run was a disaster. You had a rowdy crowd (not ideal but it’s their main run where the kill/save the animals bid war was responsible for 800k of the 2 million total raised), runners who were taking the race extremely seriously, an upset couch person who told the crowd to go stand in front of a shuttle bus and get hit (he was subsequently escorted out and banned), and then just a terrible mood. Luckily for anyone interested their final and next run, Undertale showed what an ideal run should be with some audience participation, and a runner who adores the game and talking about it.

            1. Shamus says:

              Thanks for the context!

              Yes, this does sound like an unfortunate situation where there’s no real villain, just a few well-meaning people and a few bad decisions. Alas.

  22. Christopher says:

    Sure you didn’t mix the Dark Souls 1 and 3 playthroughs, Shamus? I saw ThorW do the dropping while using weapon art-glitch to fall massive distances, but I didn’t see it in Bubbles’ game. Might have missed it though, I was watching with one eye during the early bits.

    It was so funny to me how Bubbles managed to Glitch his Great Club into gaining some of the moves of a Rapier, which hits twice and fast, compared to the Great Club’s usual moveset. It was fun just seeing that used on bosses. And because he is a speedrunner, he did a thing I forgot was a thing. During the Golem fight, a giant on the floor above can hurl bombs on the arena. But I have never had that happen to me or seen it in anyone’s game, because nobody goes through the boss fog door when there is still another path to explore first. Everyone just kills him beforehand. So this was my first time actually seeing him pelt the bombs.

    Sonic Generations is both kind of a cool game and looks real cool when the speedrunner is just going for it. That stream was another highlight for me.

    The Brothers speedrun was cool, too. The glitches were funny and the commentator was nice, and he took his time to let the sad scenes play out and explain why he loved it so much that he learned to speedrun it.

    I watched a bit of Majora’s Mask, Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie and Sonic Colours, and all of Nier Automata, Brothers: A tale of two sons and Sonic Generations. I also watched the archive for Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3. My favorite commentator was Bubbles. The Dark Souls 3 guy(ThorW) tried, but he was kinda sarcastic with his commentary, and the crowd didn’t get excited. I don’t think that style of comedy does too well on the GDQ stage compared to the joyous, excited nerd that knows everything about the game-type.

  23. Hal says:

    Earthbound, huh? I wonder how they speedrun that. It seems like the sort of game where that shouldn’t be possible.

    1. Decius says:

      It shouldn’t. It is.

  24. aunshi189 says:

    CRT monitors are preferred for high level console play as they have no input lag.

    It does look very anachronistic seeing them anywhere these days.

  25. Viktor says:

    Okay, Shamus, watch the Clustertruck run. The devs have made a game with some very interesting elements you might want to discuss.

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