Please refer back to the first part of this Wiki Project rundown for additional information. In a nutshell, I've just been sprucing up the wiki pages for games featuring in this year's SGDQ, due to begin tomorrow. I extracted ten games of note based on how unusual I expect the run to be (without seeing any prior speedrun footage) or how much work their page required, but the original intent was twenty. As such, I've extended it to a separate article here. I guess I didn't really need to explain all that, huh? Well, that's me. Mr. Explainy. (As before, all times are in GMT.)

Hello Kitty: Roller Rescue

[06/30 - 6:30am. 37 minute estimate.]

You may be asking yourself... well, possibly a whole lot of things. But specifically, why would anyone speedrun a Hello Kitty game? That wasn't Sanrio World Smash Ball?) Well, she has rollerskates so that probably means that, regardless of whomever she's rescuing, she can presumably get to them fairly quickly. Hello Kitty: Roller Rescue is the vanguard for the Silly Games Done Quick block this year, which replaces the usual Awful Games Done Quick block. I couldn't say whether or not Hello Kitty is silly or awful or both (y'know, let's go with both) but I'm curious to see how someone might speedrun through it. Well, the archive anyway. I'm not waking up at 6:30am for any man or beast or beloved yet monstrous combination of the two. Give my regards to KeroKeroKeroppi when you see him in Roller Derby Hell.

Samurai Pizza Cats

[06/30 - 7:10am. 15 minute estimate.]

Continuing the Japanese cat theme for Silly Games Done Quick is a mostly forgotten Famicom adaptation of the Samurai Pizza Cats cartoon, known in Japan as Kyatto Ninden Teyandee. The history of the show is a little weird: while a minor footnote in its home nation as part of the endless parade of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles clones happening on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, its incredibly goofy US dub which has very little to do with the original Japanese dialogue allowed it to take on a much more prosperous second life overseas. It's perhaps not everyone's favorite early 90s cartoon, but it certainly stood out among shows like... I dunno, The Adventures of T-Rex. The game, alas, has very little of this manic dub's influence, based as it is on the original Japanese incarnation of the show (though it too received an English translation that wholesale replaced the script with a more comedic take more in spirit with the US dub). Could be fun for SPC fans.

Panic Restaurant

[06/30 - 7:35am. 16 minute estimate.]

I'm not sure what it is with chef protagonists, but between BurgerTime's Peter Pepper, Panic Restaurant's Chef Cookie, Halo: Combat Evolved's Master Chef and Out to Lunch's Pierre le Chef we suddenly saw a lot of them running around and trying to defeat the unholy sentient food monsters that they were usually partially responsible for releasing. Panic Restaurant seemed more like a traditional side-scroller from what I played of it, but like Pizza Pop! last year I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop and something completely bizarre happen in its later levels. It does have an incredible opening movie with a Waluigi-style rival cook named "OHDOVE" as well as some absolutely horrifying box art. I can't promise you an utterly insane NES oddity made even nuttier with a glitch-exploiting speedrun, but the building blocks are certainly there.

Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 2: Karakuri Land

[06/30 - 7:55am. 15 minute estimate.]

As in, the sequel to Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. The Kid Niki games began and ended with the first game in the US and Europe, but in Japan the series kept going for two more entries. Oddly enough, the main character Kid Niki/Yanchamaru got a facelift with each new game. In the first game he looked like a mildly bemused mannequin, the second (this one, Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 2: Karakuri Land) depicted him as some kind of goblin with an overbite and the third game gave him a bean-headed head and a wicked ninja ponytail. I suppose Mario went through various sprite differences in his three (well, four) NES adventures too, but it wasn't quite as pronounced. If you wanted to see a speedrun of a classic Famicom "Nintendo Difficult" ninja platformer that Arino Kacho hasn't already played on GameCenter CX, this seems like a good one.

Stretch Panic

[06/30 - 10:05am. 35 minute estimate.]

All right, this is the last Silly Games Done Quick entry, or I'm just going to end up covering the whole thing. Stretch Panic is Treasure's inaugural PS2 game and is very much continuing the spirit of their prior nonsense simulators Dynamite Headdy and Mischief Makers. It's a pretty short boss-rush type game too so I'd suggest sticking around to see how quickly the runner can take down the thirteen bosses with nothing but a pinchy scarf and a few demons with giant boobs to practice on. Because I'm weird, Stretch Panic (known here as FreakOut) was actually the first Treasure game I ever played, and it acted as a gateway to some of their earlier (and, it should be said, far more difficult) games for the N64 and Genesis. I'll always have it to thank for introducing me to Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier.

The Oregon Trail

[06/30 - 11:45. 15 minute estimate.]

I'm just really curious about this one. I'd guess that there was some foolproof means of getting across the entire North American continent without falling prey to a thousand different maladies, ranging from pooping diseases to getting massacred by Quetzalcoatl after disturbing the Snake God's final resting place in the Rocky Mountains, but maybe there really isn't and the speedrunner's banking on the RNG being kind to them. The Oregon Trail's RNG has been feasting on schoolchildren for four decades and growing stronger all the time, do they really expect anyone to defeat it? It'll chomp their head off. Just like Quetzalcoatl.

The Wheel of Time

[06/30 - 2:25pm. 20 minute estimate.]

I'm adding this one out of personal morbid curiosity. You see, while I don't have a whole lot of familiarity with Robert Jordan's one-man attempt to deforest an entire continent a.k.a. The Wheel of Time anthology, this was the last game based on an original IP (well, the first video game adaptation of that material anyway) produced by Legend Entertainment. Legend are a favorite developer of mine, producing a number of excellent and maybe slightly less excellent adventure games in the mid-90s around the time when the genre was starting to wane. After being bought out by GT Interactive, publisher of a lot of big, loud first-person shooters, they immediately took Legend off the interesting and well-written adventure games based on literary properties they were known for and put them on producing even more big, loud first-person shooters. Wheel of Time represents the moment in which the two incarnations of Legend Entertainment were balanced between the thoughtful literary-based adventures of their salad days and the first-person shooters they'd be working on for the rest of their life. The Wheel of Time feels like one of those games I want to see for a sense of closure, if nothing else. Watching it get speedrun to pieces is just a bonus.

Doom 64

[06/31 - 4:30am. 40 minute estimate.]

The curious thing about Doom's N64 port is that it's not a port at all. Id Software and Midway built the whole thing from scratch on the N64's hardware, giving all the usual Pinkies and Imps a graphical facelift and adding new enemies and an upgradeable laser weapon to replace the plasma gun/BFG. It also has an original story set after Doom II. At the same time, it's a little shorter and quite a few elements had to be scrapped to fit onto the N64 cart, including multiplayer. Odd to imagine, considering Duke Nukem 64 and Hexen 64 - which used similar tech to Doom II on the PC - were straight (if considerably inferior) ports. If you're not familiar with this particular entry in the Doom series, what better way to see as much of it as possible than by watching someone run through it as fast as they can? Either that or a new Breaking Brad. Hmm...

Super Turrican

[06/31 - 12:10am. 20 minute estimate.]

I thought it was interesting Super Turrican showed up on the schedule, given its relative unknown status outside of Europe. The product of German engineering, Turrican is a Contra-style run-and-gun with a bit more of an exploratory bent. It's generally kind of average but for its incredible soundtrack which I'm sure survived the trip to the Super Nintendo's sound chip largely intact. If you haven't checked my output for a while, the two things I'm blogging most consistently about right now are SNES games (as per an ongoing Wiki Project that isn't this one) and Atari ST games (as per a weekly retrospective on the platform) and this sort of fits in with both. So yes, I added this to the list of games to check out when SGDQ begins so that I could plug two of my other concurrent series. There's a strange sort of respect to be earned through audacity, I think.

Ikaruga

[07/01 - 7:20am. 21 minute 29 second estimate. Well, not even an estimate.]

As the show begins to wrap on the final full day of the streams, there's time for one more TASBot segment. The TASBot segments are a recurring feature in each GDQ event in which a carefully programmed speedrunning robot completes games via the optimal route. There's very little room for error and the little guy appears to freak out as it plays every game given to it perfectly. They've done some amazing work with the TASBot in the past, but I'm really curious to watch it be tested with a bullet hell shooter like Ikaruga. What's amusing to me is that the estimate provided by the schedule knows down to the second how long this stream will last, and even how long it will take to set-up. A joke, I'm sure, but they've probably clocked the TASBot enough times to get a good idea of how quickly it can pass through a shoot 'em up. I'm just picturing them measuring its output with a whole bunch of computers like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.

Well, there's no easy way out after referencing Rocky IV, but here goes: I'm fully expecting to enjoy the following week of speedruns, at least the ones I'll be awake to see, and I imagine I'll be chatting with some of you duders in ExplosiveRuns when SGDQ 2015 starts tomorrow. I hope this list (and the last one) have hyped you up sufficiently for donating to a good cause and watching a bunch of nerds beat games really fast.

Also, be sure to check the official GB discussion thread here for more details on the event including which naming incentives the GB collective decides to donate towards. I'm going to push "Jenks" for someone, anyone (maybe Frog? He's British and hates Satanic cultists too).

Just a quick note about TASBot: It's a bit disingenious to call it a "speedrunning robot". It's more of a custom controller that plays back specific button inputs that have been carefully honed by a human, generally with the intent of creating the "perfect" speedrun. Or as we saw last year, other times it's done with the intent of exploiting a buffer overflow bug and reprogramming the game.

Anyway, anyone curious about tool-assisted speedruns (the TAS in TASbot) should check out their site: http://www.tasvideos.org

@pkmnfrk: At least I was closer with the description I went with than the one on my first draft, which was simply "eldritch warlock magic". They're always fun to watch even if they are a little too Arthur C. Clarke for me to comprehend, evidently.

@mento: That would have been acceptable too!

A few more details for the curious, since I was rushed for time:

TASes are created using emulators on desktop machines, generally with modifications to allow the creator to slow down or even advance through the game frame-by-frame. This, combined with liberal use of save-states allows them to do literally anything that is possible with a game, and do it exactly the same every time.

Furthermore, most video games are basically state-machines. Eg, if you feed them the exact same frames at exactly the same time, you will get exactly the same output. This means that they can generally manipulate the random number generator into giving them exactly the numbers they need, either by avoiding or intentionally causing actions that use up random numbers.

This allows them to, for example get that 1/255 drop 3 times in a row or get enemies to spawn in favourable patterns.

Now, one may be wondering how legit these runs are to the speed running community, since they don't get to use save states or anything like that. And the answer is that they're not comparable at all. TASes are created to show the skill in breaking the game and optimizing the route, not to show the skill of the player. As such, you will never see a world record TAS, as that would be entirely missing the point!

Anyway, that's more than I ever thought I would ever write on this particular subject!