The best revolutionary speedruns of the Summer Games Done Quick 2020

If you’ve read our coverage of the games in the past few years, you may have picked up on our love of speedrunning – mastering and exploiting beloved games to complete them faster. While a ton of video and streaming channels focus on this hobby, we continue to look to the biannual Games Done Quick marathon series for the most entertaining (and even educational) speedruns every year.

This week, Summer Games Done Quick turned 10 and celebrated that milestone by raising $ 2.3 million for Doctors Without Borders, all without leaving home. The series already has a few years of remote speedrunning technology experience under its belt, so the lack of physical location had only a slight effect on the visibility of the marathon. Thankfully, the whole event was captured for VOD fun on YouTube, so if you want to catch up on the fun, we’ve got you covered with the following built-in options and explanations of why they’re fun to watch.

Super Mario 64: Speedrun.com continues to list the N64 classic as a fan favorite, so we were excited to see how a pre-programmed, frame-by-frame-adjusted run could break the game. For an added challenge, the programmers in question focused on a later version of SM64, which meant they couldn’t rely on its famous “long jump backwards” bug for more speed.

Instead, they’ve found an entirely new, completely bonkers feat in which Mario jumps perfectly between two walls to gain ridiculous speeds. And thanks to their TASBot approach, they guided the jumps in a way a human player could probably never duplicate. The result allows this game to be reduced to 7 minutes and 38 seconds.

Pump It Up!: One of the advantages of managing SGDQ 2020 from the players’ homes is that no one has had to ship their bulky equipment. This is certainly the case with the madness of Pump It Up!, a DDR-like a dance game whose songs span a range of “two player” buttons for a single player. The player of this race, a professional dance player named HappyF333tz, demonstrated some of the craziest rhythm playing skills I have ever seen, and the hour-long race is an absolute spectacle.

If you’re short on time, quickly skip ahead to the one hour mark in the YouTube integration above to jump to the “Incentive Bonus” song that F333tz completes at the end, once it’s already clearly sold out. . He almost failed this 220 bpm blur of a track several times, but still manages to finish it, after reminding viewers that only six people in the world have beaten this song with the above settings.

Half-life: Alyx: The honor of GDQ’s very first VR game goes to Valve 2020’s masterpiece, and it came with a serious blow thanks to this revolutionary speedrun for the ages. The meat is all in the physicality of the Buffet Time runner, which you can see in the corner of the screen. It harnesses the VR gaming’s head-tracking focus by kneeling, dodging, and crawling constantly. By getting closer to the ground, resetting its in-game position, and standing up, Buffet Time reaches serious heights in order to walk above levels in a way players were never meant to. (It’s not his only “strat,” mind you, but you’ll have to look all over to see his other wizards.)

Homey D. Clown: At the very start of the 10-minute run of this horrific game, one of the reviewers comes up with a pretty straightforward summary of what to expect: “This game farts you aggressively.” Indeed, the highlight (or, arguably, the weak point) of the marathon’s “awful block” is a point-and-click MS-DOS conversion of a recurring sketch from the ’90s comedy series Fox. In living color. You’ll appreciate how brief this speedrun is as soon as the music and sound effects kick in, which are easily some of the worst ever done on a hard drive.

Virtual Boy Wario Land: In another premiere for the marathon series, we see an original Virtual Boy game – albeit rendered in “2D” mode (just the left eye view) and with the obnoxious red overlay converted to pure black and white. Even without those Nintendo console botched 3D gadgets, we’re left with a compelling side-scrolling speedrun, especially since the Land of Wario The series emphasizes special and weird abilities like high speed rushes.

The Witcher 3: The phrase “any percentage” in a speedrun usually indicates that we are entering revolutionary territory, and that racer’s exploits are absolutely dizzying to watch. The race begins with a funny floating horse ride, but soon after, speedrunner Kaadzik says goodbye to Pegasus emulation and hello to a time warp issue that makes the game run at “Yakety Sax’s speed. “.

Eternal doom: While the Doom 2016 reboot was known for broken skyboxes and geometry, its sequel fixed some (but not all) of them. Either way, this “no major problem” speedrun from this year’s triumphant return series forces its rider to focus on good movement and fight timing, and it’s one of the most successful speedruns. most technically competent of all eight days this summer. (In particular, the infamous enemy Marauder doesn’t stand a chance against these strats.)

Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening: “We haven’t even scratched how insanely busted this game is,” said one commentator at the end of this problem-filled exploration of the Game Boy classic. This is remarkable, as the number of feats and glitches shown in this year’s speedrun was quite remarkable. (This isn’t the 2019 remake, to be clear, which has its own litany of achievements.) The bonus points go to the home game nature of this speedrun, which means speedrunner Mghtymth enjoyed the couch cameos of his mother and dog.

Hypnospatial outlaw: One of the weirdest and most memorable games of 2019, Hypnospatial outlaw is also easily exploitable for speedruns as it revolves around browsing an alternate version of the Internet. If you’ve never played the game, this race will have the simultaneous effect of spoiling its biggest twists and turns, but also inspires you to play the game yourself and find out all the weird side stories that runner Lizstar has passed on for. establish a new world. save (without even realizing it).

TrackMania Nations Forever: In another ‘less glitches, more skill’ race, speedrunner Wirtual exercises his lightning-fast reflexes in this beloved physics-filled PC racing game.

Dusk: This nostalgic 2018 FPS is already a pleasure to watch in a speedrun ability, as it was intentionally designed with bugs and exploits left in the code for the benefit of speedrunners (and older and speedrun compatible versions). are accessible via the game. official version of Steam via the drop-down menus “beta”). The fun only intensifies when its lead designer and producer join them as commentators, mostly in the form of bogus complaints about how the speedrun is breaking their game.

The speedrun integrations above are just a taste of the crazy eight days that you can find in the full SGDQ 2020 archive, which includes a number of speedrun “races”, a motherboard of classic games. and niche, and long series of popular RPGs like Final Fantasy VII remake, Pokemon Shield, and more.