One of the tentpole endurance events this Summer, more exciting than the Olympics, Euro 2016 and Wimbledon combined, is the biannual return of the Summer Games Done Quick week-long marathon event put on by the speedrunning community to raise money for charity. This year's SGDQ begins on Sunday the 3rd of July, and in preparation I once again took to the wiki to caulk and plaster over any gaps we might have for the sake of the event's Twitch stream. Twitch has some strict and, dare I say, Byzantine requirements for our wiki pages for them to qualify for their database integration, and I wanted to make sure that the stream's "currently playing game" algorithm went as smoothly as possible for the event coordinators. It's my little part in helping the event go ahead with a bang, in lieu of actually donating much of anything after this recent Summer Steam sale cleaned me out.

Poring over the schedule for abnormalities and obscurities over the past few weeks has naturally fueled my hype for the event, and specifically certain games that they intend to show off. While I always enjoy the races and runs of crowd favorites like the Metroids and the Mega Mans (and I guess the Sonics to a much lesser extent), it's the weird and wonderful new "experiments" that the speedrunners try out every year that pique my particular interest. That can mean the always-entertaining TASBot segments, but also new games that I've yet to see in a speedrunning capacity. I haven't been following the event so close that I can guarantee these all haven't been done before, but the following are a few scheduled games this year that I'm keen to watch for the novelty factor. Linked also are the wiki pages that I helped prepare, because a lot of these are hopelessly obscure and presumably added to keep the event fresh. I mean, how many more times are we going to be surprised at the same shinespark sequence break or Ocarina of Time warp skip?

Ten Speedrunning Obscurities in SGDQ 2016

The Rapid Angel: This is one of those Japan-only PS1 games that was ported intact, no localization or anything, by MonkeyPaw for international PSN stores. (They also did Money Puzzle Exchanger, that old favorite of Ryan's and Jeff's.) It looks rudimentary as heck - a first effort of a fledgling studio - but I imagine there's something to it if it was selected for a speedrun. Then again, the whole group of games that follow - which include a lot of risible licensed platformers like Ed, Edd, 'n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures and Barbie Game Girl - seem suspiciously like the "Awful Games Done Quick" block that GDQ events usually have.

The Curse of Issyos: This is a freeware game by Spanish Indie dev Locomalito, who you might know from last SGDQ's Maldita Castilla - a pseudo-NES homage to Ghouls N' Ghosts. Issyos seems to fit the Castlevania/Zelda II mold from what I played, or perhaps The Battle of Olympus given the setting, with regular light RPG upgrades and some hidden bonuses as you slice your way through some Ancient Greek mythological creatures.

Celeste: This is going down the freeware Indie rabbit hole some, as a game made specifically for the fantasy console "Pico-8", which seems to be a self-imposed challenge by and for Indie developers to make games for a fake console with the screen size of a digital watch or scientific calculator. It was created by Matt Thorson, best known for the Jumper series and more recently for TowerFall Ascension, and features some challenging vertical platforming in a series of compact stages. Like many Indie games on this year's list, it seems built for speedrunning.

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight: Now this is a series I'd never heard of before starting on this list, but apparently the Momodora games are highly regarded by those who have encountered them. They seem like a Guacamelee!/Dust: An Elysian Tail type of SpaceWhipper, where the combat has seen special attention by the developers and is much more like a fighter game with its combo- and flow-heavy systems than the usual perfunctory combat of most games in the genre. It also looks and sounds great. Reverie is actually the fourth game in the series and a pretty recent release, and I might be sold on it after watching the stream. (It's presently on sale for 20% off on Steam too, but like any Steam Indie game that will appear in a GDQ, I'd advise folk to wait to see if it appears in the official Humble Indie Bundle for the event. You never know...)

Boson X: Boson X was released a little while ago, but as a Frequency/Amplitude style endless "tube runner" it's odd that we don't see it in speedrun contests more often. The goal of the game is to navigate each tube, turning it around so that your avatar is always walking on a stable surface, and running over a particular type of flashing surface to fill up a meter in order to complete the stage. I've yet to try it myself, but it seems fairly manic.

Runny Egg: Talking of strange endless runners, Runny Egg was one of those oft-ridiculed WiiWare-exclusive releases that most of us ignore just as a general rule, but apparently it has some legs to it (as it were). As a jogging ovum, you're a fragile target that has to avoid every obstacle on the screen as per usual endless runners, but the game tracks every type of death - by poaching, roasting or sunny side up - as a separate collectible series, and there's also recipes and all sorts of cute digressions. I don't envy the websites that track these digital shovelware releases on Nintendo platforms, but at least they get the occasional gem out of it.

Streemerz: I love the backstory for this one. It's part of a NES block, but isn't actually an NES game, at least not technically - Streemerz is a remake of one of the execrable "games" of the notorious NES compilation cart Action 52 as part of an Action 52-based Game Jam, that repurposed the original's hookshot-based gameplay as a (deliberately) poorly-localized Bionic Commando parody. The goal is to use the hookshot, which always flies out at a 45 degree angle, to maneuver your way up a vertical shaft to escape the enemy's base after setting the self destruct. The game gets diabolically difficult very fast, as you're required to hook several times in a row with exact precision to avoid getting killed by "Master Y's balls" and evil clowns. After trying it for a few minutes for screenshots, I'm looking forward to seeing an expert have at it.

Pause Ahead: Pause Ahead is another one of those moody Indie puzzle-platformers with a central gimmick, in this case a very specific trick to do with pausing the game (as per the title). It was created by Askiisoft, the Tower of Heaven guy(s), so that should give you some idea of what its story is like and how difficult the game eventually becomes. By pausing the game mid-jump, your character continues to move in whatever direction he was heading in at that exact moment, allowing him to essentially hover great distances and pass harmlessly through enemies and hazards. Actually accurately aiming this time-stopped flight is half of the challenge. It's also a freeware browser game, so if you like what you see during the event, you can try it for yourself.

Twinkle Tale: A Sega Mega Drive top-down shoot 'em up starring a magical girl anime heroine and a manual weapon-switching system right out of Radiant Silvergun. It's also one of the best looking games for the system, so it's probably no surprise to hear that it's also one of a handful of Mega Drive games that never left Japan. It's actually a little weird - each 16-bit console has one of these highly-acclaimed cute anime witch shooters that collectors go nuts for, whether it's Twinkle Tale for Genesis, Magical Chase for TurboGrafx-16 or Cotton 100%/Magical Pop'n for SNES. Either way, this speedrun will be a good opportunity to see one of the Mega Drive's forgotten gems in action.

Ultraman Ball: I don't even know what to tell you with this one. It's an Ultraman licensed game (Japan only, of course) in which the enlarging kaiju fighting hero instead uses his shapeshifting powers to turn into a ball instead. The game seems like a fairly standard compact Game Boy Color platformer with a cute, Kirby-like aesthetic, but for the fact that you're controlling one of Japan's prime tokusatsu TV heroes as he rolls through half-pipes and collects candy. It leads the Kirby block on the penultimate day of the event, and it's maybe worth sticking around to see.

My Personal Picks

For fun, I thought I'd leave you with the ten SGDQ 2016 speedruns I'm looking forward to most. While I'm psyched to see the ten games above either because they're either so weird or so new to the event, there are plenty of recurring speedruns that are never dull to watch.

Demon's Souls: People are super serious about the Souls games, and how best to speedrun them, that these streams are always worth watching for the huge amount of time-saving tips and skips its large and dedicated community has found. I don't think I've seen a speedrun for the series originator Demon's Souls before though - it's usually the first two Dark Souls games. Demon's Souls's structure is both more open and less conducive to seamless runs, as you're always warping to and from the Nexus to restock and pick a new venue. I'd like to see what the official speedrun is like for this - whether they go world by world with as few Nexus visits as possible or if there's some convoluted and specific order that works best for timed runs.

Early SNES Block: As someone who has been on a quixotic wiki quest regarding Nintendo's 16-bit system for a few years now, I'm naturally a little biased towards any SNES block a GDQ event might present. This year, though, they're showing off some genuinely brilliant and overlooked SNES games to run through, including the challenging Hagane, the creative Claymates, the high-velocity Sparkster and the acrobatic Skyblazer. I'm deeply curious how someone might speedrun Quintet's ActRaiser too - there's a whole lot of waiting around for towns to be built and demon lairs to be destroyed during the game's "sim" parts, so if there's a way to speed that up I'd like to see it.

Burning Rangers: There aren't many Saturn games that have stood the test of time or engendered a lot of fans in the console's brief tenure, but Burning Rangers - with its fantastic firefighter superhero premise and theme song - is one of the Saturn's few stand-outs. I don't think I've ever watched more than a few minutes of the game's firefighting sentai madness though, so I'm looking forward to seeing it played in full (albeit really quickly) when it shows up.

Tetris: The Grand Master Exhibition: Now a fixture of any GDQ event, the Tetris The Grand Master displays always beggar belief. Even if it's the same old tetromino stacking, it's done with such an impressive level of skill and fast thinking that I'm always left speechless by this block. Certainly puts my own meager Tetris skills into question. And I thought I was hot shit for getting the space shuttle to launch in the Game Boy original...

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall: The key to speedrunning any sufficiently big game, such as one of the RPGs in the expansive The Elder Scrolls series, is by carefully exploring and exploiting the game's bugs for warps and the like. The bigger and more unwieldy the game, the more gaps and loopholes there are in the game's programming of which to take advantage. Nothing better exemplifies a game that got far too ambitious for its own good than the second Elder Scrolls game, Daggerfall, which boasted a land mass roughly equivalent to the UK's and was mostly procedurally generated. It's a game where clipping through a wall and falling through the world was given its own name - The Void - and factored into one's exploration ahead of time like a regular pitfall or spike trap. A speedrunner would not have to try very hard to break the game wide open, but I'm curious to see how they might use that cornucopia of glitches to their advantage. I also just want to see more people play Daggerfall. Shit's fun.

Magrunner: Dark Pulse: I have a soft spot for this Portal-wannabe after playing it for a feature a little while ago, because it has such a great slow burn of a sci-fi Lovecraftian plot that builds up to pure insanity (like most Lovecraftian plots, come to think of it). The first-person traversal puzzles are fun, and I'd like to see someone breeze past them by exploiting the magnet mechanics in weird ways, but I also just want to see the reactions of those who have yet to play it or watch an LP. It goes some places...

Bubble Ghost: I revisited what I imagine will be the Game Boy version of Infogrames's Bubble Ghost (it's in the Game Boy block near the end of the event, the one that Ultraman Ball is also in) recently for a retrospective focusing on the games Hitoshi Sakimoto worked on as a composer. It's also one of my favorite Game Boy games too - a puzzle game full of devious tricks and traps that is perfectly suited for the compact portable. I hope this speedrun introduces more people to it, and I'd really like to see the late game as someone who has never good enough at the game to complete it.

Super Mario Maker: So there's a few reasons why the Super Mario Maker is a "can't miss" event for any GDQ. The first is that the levels selected, usually from PangaeaPanga's library of insane courses, are so difficult that it's incredible anyone can make their way through them let alone do so quickly. The second is that there's always a blind element to these races - a few stages that the runners have never seen before, and have to adjust on the fly using their prodigious Mario skills. Such stages are still filled with vindictive traps that would make Dan Ryckert flinch, and the best part is that Rising YouTube Star and Ziff-Davis employee Patrick Klepek then tries to play through them all himself for his morning show.

Pepsiman: One of those games that has to be seen to be believed, the Japanese PS1 endless runner Pepsiman is filled with nonsense details befitting an advergame from the 90s where advertising was still in its "confuse the hell out of the viewers with a surreal commercial and they won't forget the product's name" phase. Bookended by FMV of a genial if slovenly American extolling the virtues of carbonated soda, the blue-and-white running hero Pepsiman ends up in all sorts of adventures attempting to deliver ice cold Pepsi to vending machines around the world as quickly as possible.

Final Fantasy Adventure: There's a few of the usual culprits towards the very end of the event, Super Mario RPG and Super Metroid among them, but I'm eager to see someone make their way through Final Fantsy Adventure, also known as Seiken Densetsu 1 or (by hardly anyone) as Secret of Mana 0. The first game in the Mana franchise is full of twists and turns and unexpected danger, and is one of the original Game Boy's great RPG classics. Bolstering its action-RPG exploration with elements borrowed from Nintendo's Zelda series doesn't hurt either. It'd be great to relive that game again, even if a figurative fast-forward button is held down the whole time.