Awesome Games Done Quick 2015

[Lu]

I was really looking forward to seeing the Arkham City run, but the awkwardness made me turn it off... Bummed me out a bit. 

 

The Half Life 2 Episode 2, The Portal 2 and Aperture Tag run though! So good! 

[Cleinhun]

Yeah, that HL2 ep2 was crazy. I watched a speedrun of that game years ago and it was cool to see how much more thoroughly it's been broken since then.

[SecretAsianMan]

I only watched part of the Arkham City run for a few reasons.  One: it was late.  Two: watching runs of games I own makes me want to play said games again and I've already beaten AC like 4 times.  Three: I've seen AC runs at previous marathons.  I'm bummed to hear this run wasn't a good watch because AC speedruns are actually really good in general.  The game is so large and spread out that it's amazing how much optimization they do in order to minimize the traversal.  In particular, I picked up several tricks regarding the fighting mechanics and can now breeze through fights in that game.  It's part of the reason I found Shadow of Mordor too easy.  Watching AC speedruns made me too good at the combat mechanics.

[Korax]

There was a Portal race, which was okay, but right after that was a "two players, one controller" in-bounds Portal run with one guy on mouse and another on keyboard that was incredible. It took them 19 minutes to beat the game.

[Architecture]

Super Mario Sunshine is up right now.

[Badfinger]

If anyone is browsing the thread right now, there's going to be another TASbot block within minutes, and then the Super Metroid race. The donation incentive for Kill/Save is like $170k, which is wildly more than the whole AGDQ altogether from 2012.

[tegan]

That was some real unfortunate shit that turned Super Metroid from a race into a regular run.

 

At least that Pokémon Green bit was pretty great.

[SecretAsianMan]

Kill/save the animals alone has raised over $200,000 and it's not even done yet.  This is crazy/great.

[SecretAsianMan]

Holy crap, save the animals just won because of a $10,000 last second donation.

[TheLastBaron]

OoT 100% seems excessive, MST would have been a better choice imo

[Lu]

I caught a few hours of it and it was pretty amazing. Full of sequence breaks, skips and generally just super good play. The amount of work that must've gone into planning and learning that is pretty amazing.

 

What does MST stand for?

[Trip Hazard]

The Dark Forces 2 run is amazing, and the commentators really know their stuff. A good watch.

 

One thing that bugs me is this huge window showing the person playing the game and whoever else is commentating. Okay, I'm glad that's there, but it could be cropped a bit to cut out the people in the background, who just sit there starting blankly. Then we can get a better view of the game.

 

Also, all this talk of glitching and exploiting tricks in the code and stuff has made me wonder if there's a bloopers reel, where unintentional glitches pop-up and interfere in a run. Is that a thing?

[Korax]

Things do occasionally go wrong. There were a number if times during runs I watched that someone talked about the game locking up if a glitch wasn't performed correctly. During the Donkey Kong Country 2 4-player race a racer's game crashed and he had to bow out. Normally those sorts of things would just end up in an abandoned run, and they would reset and try again, but during marathons runners usually use safer (and probably slower) strats so they don't screw up the scheduling.

[SecretAsianMan]

After the marathons are over, highlight/outtake compilations are usually put together.  Because of the number of glitches and exploits that speedrunning usually requires, the chances of softlocking or crashing the game are fairly high.  Most of the time this doesn't happen because the runners are skilled enough to avoid them, but it has happened on occasion.  During a lot of runs you'll hear them say they're using marathon safe strats like Korax said.  You'll also hear them refer to marathon luck a lot and will often hear the phrase "That's never happened before".  And of course sometimes real life decides to interfere, such as when the fire alarm goes off.

[gavku]

Dark Souls 2 run with Pendelton Ward just chilling in the crowd....

 

 

 

[TheLastBaron]

I caught a few hours of it and it was pretty amazing. Full of sequence breaks, skips and generally just super good play. The amount of work that must've gone into planning and learning that is pretty amazing.

What does MST stand for?

Medallions Stones Trials, so you still play through most of the game since you have to get all the stones and medallions and do the Ganon's tower trials, but the run is ~2.5 hours shorter than the 100%

[Sno]

The whole event was really great this year, huge shame about how the Super Metroid race went though.

Did anybody else catch that Ninja Gaiden NES-series relay race? That was pretty wild. The glitch-heavy LTTP run was pretty seriously entertaining too. Those in addition to things other people have said, like the Tetris exhibition, the TASbot stuff, and the Dark Souls 2 runs. Also, though perhaps made more entertaining through my personal love of the game, there was a JK:DF2 run that was kind of amazing to watch.

Would actually appreciate if people listed out some of their own personal highlights, since i'm sure i missed a lot of stuff given that it basically ran for a solid 24/7.

[SecretAsianMan]

The ending to the Super Metroid race/solo run was unique this year in that save the animals won thanks to a pretty spectacular last second anonymous $10,000 donation.

 

A live marriage proposal occurred during Mischief Makers.  You don't need to watch the whole run if that game doesn't interest you but the proposal itself was pretty sweet.

 

The BattleBlock Theatre run is one of my personal highlights.  The run itself doesn't contain any really notable gameplay, it's just incredibly entertaining because of runner/couch commentary, and the fact that 2 of the developers were in on a call.  I Wanna be the Boshy is also pretty entertaining because of runner commentary.

 

I haven't watched most of it but the Dark Forces II run was pretty talked about.

 

I was rather impressed by the Rogue Legacy run.  I think he completed it in 3 generations, which is apparently the optimal number for a speedrun.

 

While I don't personally care for Shovel Knight, the run was pretty good and also had developers there on a call.

 

Alex Navarro from GiantBomb played the terrible Big Rigs game.  I haven't seen it but the Awful games block is usually pretty entertaining.

 

The Vanquish run met the incentive for playing with one hand.  I think he held hands with someone the entire time.

 

The Ocarina of Time blindfolded child dungeon run was very impressive, but also kind of tedious at times.  There's a lot of restarting because he loses his position and has to restart from a known spot in order to progress.

 

I missed a bunch of the marathon myself and plan to catch up on the archives.  I'll post again if I find anything else of note.

[Problem Machine]

Within a Deep Forest with dev commentary was pretty great, especially since it's a not super-well-known game that I like a lot. I'd recommend anyone who hasn't played it give it a shot, it's not very long and is consistently good, with a fantastic soundtrack.

[RubixsQube]

Wait did anyone else see this:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GRK-f3KntU#t=3239

 

The warpless SMB3 run is neat, but at the end, once the game has been finished, there's a three to four minute bonus that's fucking insane. 

[juv3nal]

The kingdom hearts run was pretty amazing just for the amount of skill involved in the fighting. Having never played the game at a high level, it's ridiculous some of the stuff they pull off in situations where any dropped* combo hit means getting hit and getting hit once = death.

 

*technically, they often intentionally drop the last hit of a "combo" because doing the finisher would knock the enemy out of range for a followup hit, but you get what i mean.

[SecretAsianMan]

The marriage proposal in case anyone doesn't feel like watching the entire Mischief Makers run looking for it (there's a bit of an emotional lead-up to it, skip to 1:15 for the actual proposal)

 

http://youtu.be/4FFFDjwYjfQ

 

Also most (if not all) of the videos can (eventually) be found either here or here.  I prefer the first link because they usually include a time code for the actual start of the run in the description but the second link seems to be a little faster with the uploads.

[SecretAsianMan]

The Vanquish run met the incentive for playing with one hand.  I think he held hands with someone the entire time.

 

A bit of clarification on this run.  I didn't see the beginning of it and I assumed that playing one handed was an incentive, but it turns out that the runner (halfcoordinated) actually has a disability called hemiparesis which causes weakness in one side of his body so he plays one handed by necessity.  The incentive that was met was him holding a soda in the other hand.  Later the bromance incentive was met and he held another person's hand.

[Korax]

Video archives are up on the Games Done Quick YouTube channel:

 

Those are raw, unedited chunks of video. They're slowly cutting separate videos for each run, but if you're willing to do a bit of searching and skipping, the whole event's on that playlist.

[Laco]

That Jedi Knight run is really cool. I don't think I've seen a speedrun of that game before. It's got such weird, sprawling and intricate level design, and memorising it all combined with the reflexes necessary to navigate at high force-enhanced speed is really impressive.

 

Like they mention in the commentary, later games in the series slow the world down when you use force speed, to make you feel like a badass without making the game any harder. This one just speeds you up and you have to deal with it. That makes it a perfect game for exploits and for showing off speedrunning skill in many ways.

 

I love the way the game is so committed to its systems that the second last boss can be killed not by direct damage, but by being launched into a wall by an explosion and killed by the impact.