Bonjour, mes amis, and welcome to another Wiki Project breakdown. With this Wiki Project, I was working off a list of games that would be featured in 2015's Awesome Games Done Quick stream marathon: a week-long odyssey that sees a lot of great games beaten very quickly to raise money for the Prevent Cancer Fund, which is actually still ongoing as of this article (the event I mean. Cancer's always around, but hopefully not for much longer). Because they use Twitch to host the stream, and because Twitch derives its "now playing" game data gathering doohickey from our wiki, I figured I ought to ensure that we have all the featured games.
Happy to report that there weren't any absentee pages whatsoever this time, with a few non-applicable exceptions I'll go over briefly, and so like the previous Wiki Project for GameCenter CX it was mostly a matter of cleaning up some 2nd person (the bane of any GB wiki editor), adding a few missing details and sprinkling in a few header images.
Still, there's a lot to go over here. I'll talk about what AGDQ streams I was able to catch, as well as the necessary wiki work that went into the connected pages. The list will be mostly representative this time, as the games are often played in "blocks" of related titles.
Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze
As a new game, there was very little to do with the Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze page. I've found that the pages with the most errors, both of the typographical and stylistic sort, are the older pages created back when we had even less of a sense of what a wiki page ought to contain than we do now. Subsequently, a new big name game like Tropical Freeze sees a lot of great work right off the bat. Despite showing up for the start of the stream, I actually skipped Tropical Freeze (the first official speedrun on the schedule) because I've been meaning to play it myself. I tend to find it discouraging when my first experience with a game is to watch it be played way better than I'll ever manage.
Miscellaneous Block One
What follows is a bunch of non-related games which serves as an aperitif for what is to come. Wario Land 4 and Transistor are two more speedruns that I skipped because they're also on the backlog. We saw Banjo-Kazooie, a platformer I wish would drop in price on XBLA already, that saw a fun call-in from N64-era Rare's gregarious composer Grant Kirkhope. Two cart racers, Mario Kart Wii and Diddy Kong Racing, the latter of which was more fun to watch because it was a race between multiple speedrunners (and also because it's the best cart racer of all time). Most infamously, though, is the annual appearance of the TASbot block: a pre-programmed speedrunning robot that can perform such split-second timing that it is able to manipulate a game's coding in such a way to magically recreate the Twitch chat in Pokemon Red/Blue, complete with emotes, creating the theoretical inverse of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Some NASA-level shit, if you ask me.
Genesis Block
World of Illusion, Rocket Knight Adventures, its SNES sequel Sparkster (which I recently discovered is entirely different from the Genesis sequel also called Sparkster. We have pages for both, but until recently both contained information on both the SNES and Genesis games instead of just one or the other. Kind of a mess!), Ristar, Dynamite Headdy and Gunstar Heroes. A real bluffer's guide for what you should aim for if you wanted some Genesis platformer fare and were already covered hedgehog-wise. No problems with the pages, besides the aforementioned Sparkster snafu, but for some reason I have a real issue grabbing good header images in a high enough resolution that works. At least a few of the above games are on Steam, which makes getting screenshots way easier.
F-Zero Block
Besides a few more miscellaneous games, including Super Monkey Ball which gets one-upped later in the week with Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, we move onto the crowd-favorite F-Zero streams. Watching someone who can actually react quickly enough to play these games perfectly is somewhat outstanding, and though I've yet to try it myself, F-Zero GX seems completely insane even if you were playing it "casually", as the speedrunners tend to call playing a game like a normal person. F-Zero X got the Death Race incentive bid (optional stream events that people have to put their donations towards to unlock, which is a great money-raiser when it becomes a bidding war), which is the one thing I remember from F-Zero X. That mode reminds me a lot of Street Racer's Arena mode; a cart racer probably best left in obscurity.
FPS Block
We move to the PC now for a bunch of FPS games. Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II is a fond favorite of mine, and it's hard to claim it as a FPS in this context because the runner played almost the whole thing in third person to help him rush past absolutely everything. Quite an impressive run, filled with weird skips and amazing crackerjack timing with the runner's liberal application of Force Speed, though I say that as someone who spent a considerably longer time to beat it. The rest of the games in this block are the usual Quake/Build engine shooters, some of which is on the current AGDQ Humble Bundle, created especially for this event and is also busy raising a considerable amount for the PCF. Notable Brad nemesis Volgarr the Viking, the enhanced Steam version of Shantae: Risky's Revenge and the well-regarded Escape Goat 2 are on there too, so it's a fine bundle to snatch up (AND you'll be donating to a good cause!).
Sonic Block Part One
Yep, that's "part one" as in "there's more than one Sonic Block". Sigh. Still, if you were pressed to think of a franchise ideal for speedruns, it'd be Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic's inexplicably large fanbase also means that his game's pages are usually pretty extensively filled out too, which is a freebie.
PC Platformer Block
Some interesting games here. Starting with a showstopper was Battleblock Theater, a long speedrun I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy because the game itself is kind of dull and repetitive, but the inclusion of the game's chief designer Dan Paladin and the very funny NewGrounds animator Stamper (who served as the game's foppish narrator) over Skype made the whole thing very watchable. A recommended stream, for sure, and likely one you may have skipped if you're as apathetic about The Behemoth's output as I am. A few more Indie platformers carved out a sizeable block, ending with Broforce which began an interstitial mini-block of run and guns which in turn led to...
NES Block
Before starting these random smaller projects, I've mostly been working on the NES and SNES pages, so I was very much in my element when checking up on the many NES/FC and SNES/SFC games presented in AGDQ this year. Contra's an old favorite that didn't need any work, but it was followed by Power Blade, Snake Rattle 'n Roll, Little Samson, Battletoads, River City Ransom, Gimmick! and DuckTales 2. Gimmick! and Little Samson especially are super rare carts that most people don't know about, so it was serendipitous that Gimmick! was one of the pages I had already worked on for the GCCX project.
Castlevania Block
We also got a brief stop to kill vampires and the night with a trio of Castlevania classics. Super Castlevania IV was a four-way race that got pretty tense as the game ramped up in difficulty, and Castlevania III wasn't exactly a walk in the park either. More like a walk on the ceiling, as it was a three-way race concerning the acrobatic Grant DaNasty.
"Serious" Platformer Block
After foiling Dracula's fell schemes once again, we lead to Donkey Kong Country 2 and some equally tough platformers to follow. We're talking the caliber of games where simply beating the game at a normal pace would be impressive enough. As well as the Bramble Barrel Nightmare that is DKC 2, we also have the ninja hopper N, the masocore NES homebrew Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril (which made for a particularly memorable episode of Game Grumps), some Commander Keen episodes that flew by in a flash, some Rayman Legends fun (which always felt like a game purpose-built for speedrunning) and the inscrutable and impossible fan-game I Wanna Be The Boshy (good stream, the runner was quite the commentator).
Zelda and Mario Block
More stream favorites, with a handful of classic Zeldas and some Marios (including notorious masocore fan-hack Kaizo Mario World, which doesn't have a wiki page for obvious reasons). You start to understand why I didn't have too much trouble with this Wiki Project, as so many of the featured games are well-known, for presumably three reasons: A) They're good games, and I imagine that helps a lot if you intend to dedicate months of your life to replaying it over and over, B) They're great crowdpleasers, which is important for a big charity event like this if you want to get people invested, and C) It's super cool when a runner finds a way to break apart a well-known title, exploring glitches and skips you never knew were in there despite having played through the game several times.
Horror Block
After Fire Emblem, which involved a heated bidding war between the two GameCube releases Radiant Dawn and Path of Radiance (Radiant Dawn won), we got a brief smattering (or should that be "splattering"?) of horror speedruns, including the original Silent Hill and the event's sole TurboGrafx-16 game Splatterhouse, played via the Wii's Virtual Console. Also included was Splatterhouse's weird little brother Wanpaku Graffiti, a Famicom-only Scream-like parody take on the original featuring adorable little chibi incarnations of the characters.
CRPG Block
Alas, our attempt to get Air Force Gator, Dan Ryckert's alligatoridae aviator, to be Morrowind's protagonist was foiled by some very determined French fans who opted for the far less amusing "Bob_Lennon". Though we raised almost three grand, they just wanted it more, I suppose. We did still manage to win the bidding war to keep the protagonist as an Argonian; The Elder Scrolls' sentient reptilian species and a key requirement to make the Air Force Gator joke work. This block also saw a speedy Rogue Legacy run, a luck-dependent race for Scoops-favorite The Binding of Isaac, the new hotness (and still in beta) Crypt of the NecroDancer and the hard-to-make-out procedurally generated shooter Risk of Rain.
Arcade Block
My favorite block so far besides the wonderful Awful Games mainstay was this new one, the Arcade Block. A trio of super violent brawlers, we saw the musically-giftedViolent Storm from Konami, the gruesome and possibly unfinished Battletoads Arcade from Rare and the extremely busy Alien vs. Predator from Capcom. The runners all used a specially configured Supergun to run their Arcade boards. Sounds expensive, so I can't imagine this will be a feature that will grow in future GDQs, but man was it fun to watch some of those quarter-munchers get thoroughly comeuppanced.
Sonic Block Part Two
Another Sonic Block, though with the relatively obscure but (comparatively) well-received Sonic Advance games. GBA does not output in a very large resolution, so I hope the header images for those pages look all right.
Misc Block Two
What follows between the last Sonic Block and the subsequent Mega Man Block are a few games worthy of note but otherwise unrelated. The first is Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, which is a 300-stage marathon (not including warps, of which there were several) run by a very impressively focused runner. It's a long one, but Super Monkey Ball always makes for amazingly skilled runs and this is the be-all and end-all of Monkey Ball monkeyshines. Mischief Makers wasn't a particularly notable run (though I like that the game got props at all) but for the fact that as soon as the run ended, the runner gave a touching speech about how he was able to move on from a difficult period in his life thanks to the speedrunning community, and then capped it off with a marriage proposal to his girlfriend live on air. It was super cute. Talking of cute, this was followed by a very close race of Kirby Super Star, an almost instantaneous playthrough of Super Famicom curio Umihara Kawase (watch the GCCX ep of that if you haven't) and then my GOTY 2014 runner-up Shovel Knight. Two Yacht Club Games developers were on a Skype call throughout Shovel Knight's playthrough, happy to see their game get speedran (speedrunned?) at last and tossing in the occasional anecdote. From the way they were talking, it sounded like they felt that having a speedrun community was the final rite of passage necessary before Shovel Knight truly felt like a lost NES classic.
Tetris: The Grand Master Exhibition
This actually happened before Shovel Knight, but I'm going to need a whole other section to explicate on what happened here. Tetris: The Grand Master is an Arcade-only series by Arika and Capcom (Arika's best known for their other collaborations with Capcom, such as the Street Fighter EX series and underwater salvage sims Everblue and Endless Ocean) intended for people who thought the NES/GB Tetris was too easy. Apparently, in Japan, the community was split between the fast-paced Arcade variants of Tetris and the comparatively sedate home versions. Tetris Grand Master is, as a result, something of a shock to the system to anyone who thinks, mistakenly, that they're anything near competent at the game. After a few insane races between multiple runners to beat each game's standard Grand Master mode, there was an exhibition to show off a bizarre challenge mode where the player had to create a diagonal line of empty spaces all the way up the board and then a mind-boggling playthrough of the game's nigh-impossible "Shirase" (Premonition of Death) mode and another where the runner had to play a full-speed invisible mode as the credits rolled to achieve the highest grade. Of all the streams in this show, this 90 minute long exhibition of the three Grand Master games is absolutely un-friggin'-missable. I still cannot comprehend how the human mind is able to react this quickly.
Mega Man Block
Sad to say I completely missed out on the Mega Man Block. Hey, a guy has to sleep sometime. A lot of unusual picks this year though, forgoing the usual Mega Man 2 and 3. Instead we saw the maligned Mega Man 5, the obscure(ish) SNES Mega Man 7, standard speedrun favorite Mega Man X and then a skip ahead to Mega Man X3, the first game in which Zero was playable. We also saw Mega Man Unlimited and Rocman X, two weird (and legally dubious) fan-game/bootleg off-shoots, presumably thrown in to show off something new to diehard Mega Fans. No pages for those, of course.
Awful Games Done Quick Block
Ah, the best part of any GDQ is the Awful Games Block. Rather than celebrating a bunch of fantastic games by thoroughly destroying them, the speedrunners turn on a group of games that actually deserve the punishment. Leading the pack is Totally Rad, a totally rad NES platformer/shooter that was one of many games horribly disfigured by bizarre region changes moving from Famicom to NES (the original Famicom game was called Magic John, which is a heck of a title also). @alex Navarro showed up to battle his ancient enemy Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, demonstrating the infinite reverse glitch. Floating Runner is a fittingly floaty platformer from the early PS1 era that makes Croc: Legend of the Gobbos look like Crash Bandicoot. Blasto is another PS1 game, a terrible third-person shooter made somewhat melancholy by the voice of Phil Hartman in his final ever voice acting role. Trio the Punch is an Arcade brawler (the Japan-only PS2 port was the version actually played) from Karnov's lead developer that needs to be seen to be believed. Some awful platformers followed, including the Genesis Taz-Mania (very different from the SNES version, once again requiring a bit of wiki work separating the two), crappy Pokemon bootleg Pocket Monsters II, another tubular 'tude-heavy game Radical Rex and the incomprehensible licensed St. Bernard-'em-up Beethoven's 2nd (a.k.a. Beethoven: The Ultimate Canine Caper). The highlight of the whole block was Town With No Name, an abysmally animated and voice-acted CD Western with dumb jokes that don't so much land than ricochet wildly across the room, made famous by LP-mockers Retsupurae (Slowbeef actually donated during this game's run with a friendly message). Early Build Engine game TekWar seemed more Shat Out than Shatner, Sneak King made a brief appearance before malevolently disappearing into the shadows, Swamp Thing made an impression with its absurdly poor (and thus easily exploitable) programming, AVGN target Super Pitfall then handily outdoes it with even more outrageous glitching, King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch is briefly conquered and then we end with a one-two punch of the belt-hungry Karnov and the awful NES port of the otherwise well-regarded C64 game Last Ninja 2. I'd recommend watching the entire block if you can; it's a wonderland of kusoge.
Ninja Block
The Last Ninja gives way to the Ninja Block, featuring a lot of popular ninjitsu favorites. There's the Ninja-Gaiden-that-wasn't Shadow of the Ninja, Genesis icon Shinobi III and then a three game relay race with the NES Ninja Gaidens. Despite spanning across three games each with separate runners representing two teams (regrettably named for Twitch memes), the race was insanely close.
Punch-Out!! Block
Fairly straightforward stuff this year, nothing like the blindfold shenanigans in 2014. Both Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! and its no joke Wii reboot Punch Out!! Wii were beaten black and blue, with sly digs given to the alternative language streams whenever the stereotypical boxer that represented their region was knocked out.
Misc Block Three
Castlevania makes one last hurrah with a tense three-way SOTN race, featuring some sequence breaks I'm going to have to remember for later. An even tenser Richter Mode three-way race then followed. Animal Crossing, the last game anyone expected to see get a speedrun, was up next with a rather dull but intermittently educational playthrough that demonstrated how the game was able to run entirely from the RAM after having its disc removed, how you could glitch yourself in a beta testing zone and how to duplicate as many valuable items as you'll ever need to keep Tom Nook and his special kneecapping bat off your case. Jeff Gerstmann favorite Yoshi's Island was up next in another race, which was followed by a memorable blind run of a handful of its stages and an even more memorable accordion medley. Finally, there was a kind of meh Batman: Arkham City run. The runner frequently skipped entire levels with Animated Series Batman, but the commentary wasn't exactly stellar.
Valve Block
Another block I was asleep for. Valve games are common enough, with Half Life: Opposing Force, Half Life 2: Episode 2 and both Portals getting pounded. Phrasing.
After that is a handful more games, leading to the presently playing (as of posting) Metroid Prime. We're still a day away from the end of the stream, but I wanted to get this up now to make it to the Community Spotlight: I'll be adding future streams as I watch them.
Presently though, it's been a great show, and I haven't minded helping out my own way with these minor wiki tweaks. There's a few games coming up, specifically the Metroids, Zeldas, Marios and Perfect Dark, that were absolutely lousy with 2nd person. If anything, I probably spent more time fixing those than filling in the few skeleton pages for the Awful Games Block. Absolutely come join us in the ExplosiveRuns chat if you have the time, and failing that track down the official Giant Bomb thread on the event to see what the community regards as the best runs. I'd say you should check out Battleblock Theater, Tetris Grand Master, Big Rigs Racing (and all of the Awful Block), Jedi Knight, the whole Arcade Block, the whole TASBot block, I Wanna be the Boshy (if you didn't see it last year), Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, the Ninja Gaiden relay race, the Super Castlevania and SOTN races, and Shovel Knight.
Thanks for reading, and thanks on behalf of PCF for donating if you've already done so. If nothing else, get that Humble Bundle.
(I'll be back to add more commentary once the event has concluded this weekend. I should probably add a few images too, huh. Welcome to word walls!)
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