SecretAsianMan

It's a new year which means another Games Done Quick marathon. Awesome Games Done Quick is coming up this weekend, Jan 8-15. For anyone not aware, AGDQ is a marathon gaming event where some of the best speedrunners in the world gather together to raise money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation by beating games as fast as possible. Many of the runs have donation incentives or bid wars such as the ever present Save/Kill the Animals for Super Metroid. There are also a large number of prize drawings during certain blocks of games. Schedule Twitch Stream Donation Page Donation Tracker Official YouTube Channel My personal playlist of fun runs

AGDQ is over having collected over $2 million, bringing the total across all GDQs to over $10 million. I'll be spending the next few days/weeks watching the runs and compiling a playlist of the more interesting ones which I'll link to on the first post.

If you like Super Metroid runs, you should check out this run. It's a rom hack that rotates the entire game 90 degrees except for Samus. It really changes up the routing, making difficult areas trivial and vice versa.

I already tend to think of Nintendo's consoles as single player machines, or at the least same screen multi. If they want their online subscription service to complete with the likes of Xbox Live and PSN they're going to have to either offer an unbeatable lineup of games or some other incentive for people to want it. They have a far better and bigger back catalog of games than either Xbox or Playstation that they could easily do that. This one month only free game thing is just baffling to me.

There supposedly is some depth to the saber mechanics, such as combos and hidden moves, but I never found them particularly useful in the single player. I think what I did the most was use the heavy stance overhead swing as an opening attack to crash through their defense then switch to the normal or fast stance and hack away. For anyone not using a lightsaber I just stayed with the fast stance since one or two saber swings is enough.

I also also agree. I kind of like the third one as a wacky dinosaur adventure. I went into it with zero expectations after the second one and came out feeling like it was dumb but fun, which is what I wanted. It's been a long time since I've seen Lost World but the gymnastics scene and a T-Rex running around San Diego are all I remember.

If you've ever wondered what Mario Bros. reskinned with Donkey Kong sprites would look like, wonder no more And the best of the worst

My daughter is teething and refuses to sleep until well past midnight. I don't think she's in pain really because she's not crying, just being generally fussy. As tired as I am I feel worse for her mother since she's the only one who can get her to sleep and has to watch her while I'm at work. I try to watch her as much as I can to give my wife a break but sometimes she just wants mommy. Also Gorm, I meant to reply to you but life got in the way. Sorry to hear about the troubles you're having. Hopefully you're a bit better now but if you need someone to talk to you can message me on Steam. Maybe we can even break out an old chestnut like Monaco if the sun, moon, and stars somehow align. Man I'm old.

I was excited to catch the start of the awful games block since it kicked off with my favorite runner PJ but part of the way into the run we had a power outage and I ended up missing everything

I caught up on two of the runs I wanted to see, Mario Paint and Battle Clash. Mario Paint was pretty sedate, nothing exciting like I was hoping. Battle Clash had an interesting start though. An incentive was met to do mirror mode, which meant that for the first three stages he played by looking at the screen in a mirror with the Super Scope pointed backward over his shoulder. This means that he can't aim the scope properly and has establish a reference point at the start of each fight to know where he's shooting. It also meant he couldn't use bombs as they're triggered with a button on the front of the grip that is now behind him. The rest of the run was fairly unremarkable.

I've also just finished Solitairica. To expand on it a little more, there's also a "class" system and some rogue-like elements. The enemies you encounter will have random traits assigned to them that give them additional skills and weaknesses. If you die (or beat the boss) you are rewarded with wildstone, a special type of currency that is used to unlock special cards for your deck or more item slots. Wildstone is not purchasable with real money so getting enough to max out each class is a grind. The only in-app purchase is one that unlocks the classes (either individually or a bundle of all). Classes in this game are decks that specialize in two of the four mana types (meaning all the cards you draw from your deck will give only the specialty mana) and each one has spells that are exclusive to that deck with the exception of the first free deck. I went ahead and purchased the bundle for all the classes (each one individual is $1 while the bundle is $4) and have maxed each one. There are some interesting spell and item combinations you can do but for the most part the game is a slow grind as you whittle away at the stack. For the most part I found little reason to divert from what I found to be winning strategies, even when they don't align with the class specialties.

Choke+Push was maybe one of my favorite things to do in that game. Nothing like lifting up some poor hapless Stormtrooper then tossing him at his buddies. I very highly recommend you rebind the force powers to more useful and accessible keys. One of my biggest annoyances with older PC games is the default bindings that are based on keyboard function rather than gameplay function. It's easy to fix but the logic being asking me to use F3 when the V key is sitting there doing nothing always boggled my mind.

Yeah the official channel is good about getting stuff up quickly, albeit in a somewhat raw format. They usually come back a few weeks later and upload cleaner versions which include a link in the description to the run's starting time. I've started putting together my playlist of runs I think are good and will post the link after the event is over. One bit of warning regarding the uploaded runs. Try to watch them from the official channel (link in the top post). They discourage third parties uploading videos to prevent monetization of videos from a free charity event without the runner's permission.

I remember rebinding the keys to be able to access my frequently used force powers easier. Mostly push and lightning with the occasional choke.

Thermal detonators you can toss around with force push/pull. If I remember correctly force speed lets you dodge sniper shots Matrix style. I think sometimes it would auto-dodge but I was never able to get that to work consistently.

I only managed to catch a few partial runs so far. I've seen Ocarina of Time enough that I wasn't that excited about it, but this time was more interesting than I expected. Borderlands 2 was pretty hilarious with how they exploited the game's mechanics to turn one player into an aimbot and the other into the Flash. I missed the glitch exhibition, I'll have to go back and watch that. The Mega Man race was ok, nothing I haven't really seen before. I watched a bit of MSG2 and DMC but neither of those games really interest me.

I wouldn't say that's true. Speedrunning is about completing a game as fast as possible, often within certain categories such as getting 100% or not using glitches. It relies on a combination of knowledge and skill to move quickly through the game rather than just not see it at all, though there are certainly times where things are skipped. I do agree that it's not the best way to learn about a new game though. I'm also going to use this as an excuse to promote Awesome Games Done Quick, a speedrunning marathon that supports the Prevent Cancer Foundation and is going on right now. See this thread for more info

You can kind of get an idea of how much a run will be glitched by the estimated time. If a long game has a short estimate, you can probably guess it'll be glitch heavy. For example, Fallout: New Vegas Any% has an estimate of 30 minutes. With a time like that you can expect liberal use of exploits. In general I agree that glitchfest runs aren't as entertaining. You need a lot of familiarity with the game to really appreciate what's being skipped. And while it's not an entirely fair thing to say, I feel like glitched runs require less skill. Part of what I really enjoy in speedrunning is the incredible level of ability on display. I don't mean to imply that runners who use glitches aren't skilled, but that skill is hard to see when you don't play a big chunk of the game.

I'm not sure you'll be able to do that. While the event is open to the public, registration is closed and there is no on-site registration. I don't think you can just walk in.

Agreed. I was hoping that Mario Maker would become a GDQ staple. As much as I like seeing classic games run, because of their age and the fact that they've been torn apart so thoroughly by the community there isn't much in the way of "new" stuff to see. Mario Maker has so much potential for this event, especially in the hands of such high level players. Same for me. Like I do every GDQ, I will eventually put together a curated playlist of runs once they're archived on YouTube. I'll be sure to link it here.

Some runs I'm looking forward to Mario Paint Gnat Attack Level 3 by DoDeChehedron - This just sounds amusing Battle Clash Any% by SCXCR - Battle Clash is an SNES game that requires the use of the Super Scope so I'm really interested to see this done Doom (2016) Any% by Blood_Thunder - Always interested in seeing recent titles get demolished Gremlins 2 Any% by Endy - I have fond memories of this game as a kid Batman Forever Any% Co-op by PJ and Klaige - The only run being done by my favorite runner PJ Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire Any% by glasnonck - Another game I remember fondly Donkey Kong Country Trilogy Relay by various runners - A DKC relay race. Relay races at these events tend to be pretty exciting TASBot - It's TASBot. Super Metroid 100% by various runners - Wouldn't be a GDQ without a Super Metroid race. I like the 100% races because you get to see stuff that you normally wouldn't in a speedrun

While I have not played it myself, Overcooked has an option that allows two players to use one controller by splitting the controls down the middle. Seems like it could be equal parts awkward and hilarious.

This is also what I liked about Patrick Klepek when he was there.

I've been getting into this game lately and I'd like to expand out to some multiplayer but am unwilling to wade into the cesspool that is public servers. Would anyone be interested in a Thumbs 7 Days server? I'd be willing to rent one if at least a couple people were interested. As a general overview of the game, it's an open world zombie survival game. It has all the things you'd expect from that description; crafting, skill systems, base building, combat, survival systems, looting, multiple biomes, etc. One of the more unique things is the namesake seventh day. Every seven nights in game a blood moon rises and a large zombie horde comes after the players. Surviving this usually means taking refuge in a well fortified base with plenty of weaponry. They get increasingly difficult as time goes on, adding in special zombies and bigger numbers. It's currently in Alpha and shows in a few places. The UI is largely unintuitive and the combat is slow and cumbersome, yet despite all that I'm strangely engrossed by the game.

I would agree with that. I know a lot of people felt that Lara Croft was a better game but honestly I had more fun with Hitman.