Summer means Summer Speedruns and... well, very little else. It's the least exciting and most humid part of the year, and I'm happy for any small distraction from the flesh melting and tedium to keep me busy until the mercifully temperate and game-packed Autumn season gradually falls upon us like so many golden-brown leaves. Which is an odd way to introduce an article about working on the Wiki pages in preparation for a charity speedrun event, I'll grant you, but then the heat always does odd things to my temperament.
The Event
Summer Games Done Quick 2015, the schedule for which can be found here, is a week-long charity event from July 26th to August 2nd in which various members of the Twitch speedrunning community meet in some hotel lounge for several days straight of playing video games with great celerity. Each speedrun ranges from a short ten-twenty minute affair to a three or four hour marathon; so, pretty much the same as any given Quick Look. Viewers are encouraged to donate money to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, no relation to Outer Heaven) in the name of Games Done Quick, either out of largesse or to be entered into a raffle for prizes or for the chance to influence a future speedrun: like selecting between two possible games to run, or to ensure an RPG character has a certain name. The Giant Bomb community always tries to push one of these "incentive" bids, so I'd recommended waiting to see what we're up to before you start donating. (Hopefully we don't get into a bidding war with the French again. People will tell you those guys surrender easily, but they don't.) Either way, be sure to join the community in the ExplosiveRuns chat when it begins on the Sunday after next.
Like last year's "Awesome Games Wiki'd Quick", the goal of this mini-project was to simply ensure that all the games pages relevant to the endurance event are looking their best for when they'll all, by the fey powers of Twitch, become associated to our database. I forget if Twitch actually links back to our Wiki or simply uses it for data purposes (I'm fairly sure the latter but I'm pretending it isn't, just so this project is a little more necessary than "hardly at all"), but it'll help if we have all the right pages in working order all the same.
The Project
For the most part, even though there's some 200+ games featured in the event, this Wiki Project wasn't a huge timesink. The GDQ streams tend to play a lot of games that are very popular - both because they draw the largest speedrun communities and also draw in as wide an audience as possible for the fundraising - and so the same games tend to show up year after year with all the new tricks and exploitable glitches that their respective communities have discovered in the downtime between events. It's doubly useful for this project, as it means I'll have already fixed up the majority of these pages for the aforementioned Awesome Games Wiki'd Quick Wiki Project. However, there's still a few outliers and oddities with pages that needed some elbow grease, and I'm going to cover ten of them below, and another ten closer to when the event starts.
I was tempted to call these "the twenty most potentially interesting speedruns", but on top of the fact that using such a superlative would drag us into unfortunate "listicle" territory it's also apparent that we already have a decent idea which will be "the most interesting speedruns": it's going to be TASBot utterly breaking games, it'll be watching the inhuman reaction speeds of the Tetris Grand Master exhibitions and it'll be the exceptionally close and tense multi-runner races that games like Super Metroid, Strider and Castlevania enjoy every event. Still, I'm looking forward to watching the following, as a fan of obscure and unusual video games.
(I've added the [planned] times for each game's respective speedrun and their estimated time for completion. All times are in GMT, so just subtract the 5-8 hours where applicable. Part Two will come later this month, a few days before the event is set to begin.)
Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric
[07/26 - 9:10PM. 50 minute estimate.]
While the Sonic the Hedgehog series is hardly a shrinking violet, and continues to be a very prominent part of every Games Done Quick stream due to the games' natural inclination towards going fast, the newest Sonic game promises to be a curious run to watch simply because it'll demonstrate just how thoroughly broken Sonic Boom is. The Knuckles endless leaping glitch is well-known at this point, but I look forward to seeing the myriad ways the game's programming will fall apart if you stare at it hard enough. On the plus side, it's possible that every unfortunate ten-year-old who was saddled with this 'tude-heavy trainwreck on Christmas 2014 is now on the fast track to become impassioned video game programmers and quality assurance testers, after spending five minutes tearing it to pieces from the inside out.
As one of the most reviled games to hit the Wii U, a console that badly needs some third-party support that isn't whatever sewage run-off former embittered rival Sega plops on its doorstep in a flaming paper bag "for old time's sake", it'll be interesting to watch the kind of reception the run will get. A lot of nervous laughter once it gets rolled out, is my guess.
TRAG: Mission of Mercy
[07/27 - 12:50PM. 56 minute estimate.]
I have no idea what TRAG: Mission of Mercy even is. I looked it up and found that it was called something else in Europe (Hard Edge) and I still have no idea what it is. From looking at it, it appears to be a Resident Evil clone with Lost Vikings-style character switching puzzles - a combination that is also present in the PS2 game Project Eden, which I'm more familiar with - but it's definitely not a game I'd heard about before starting this project.
The page for it was a mess too. For one thing, both it and Hard Edge had separate pages despite having no other differences (Hard Edge is also the Japanese name, so SunSoft only knows why they changed it for the US. License issues?). It was also devoid of text, so I threw something on there. I look forward to seeing more of it, albeit as it quickly whizzes by, during the speedrun.
Disney Extreme Skate Adventure
[07/27 - 2:15PM. 22 minute estimate.]
People are getting stoked, and rightly so, for the imminent return of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise. Said amount of stoke is dependent entirely on how much of the game they've actually seen or read about, but there's no harm in being cautiously optimistic, even after the hash job that was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD. It's worth remembering that it had its rivals in its day, though. No, not Skate, which was attempting something very different with their analog stick-enabled tricks - I believe the mission statement was "make the player work for every ollie and grab, because skating is supposed to be 10% fun and 90% knee injuries that won't ever heal properly". No, it wasn't Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX either, because that was bicycles and not skateboards. Two wheels, not four. Thrasher Presents: Skate and Destroy? Get the heck out of here.
No, it was this game. Probably. Disney Extreme Skate Adventure. The one where Sheriff Woody decides to shred a mean nosegrind-to-boneslide. Or maybe a Snake-in-My-Boot 360; I don't know if they actually tried to theme the trick names or not. I'm looking forward to it, purely because I want to see Simba hop sick ollies over the stampede that kills his father. That canyon was practically a half-pipe, right?
Disney's The Little Mermaid
[07/27 - 2:40PM. 10 minute estimate.]
I guess there's some kind of Disney block going on? I wasn't even aware Capcom turned Disney's The Little Mermaid into a game, like they had for many other big Disney names like DuckTales and Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers. They even invented their own sequel story to the game, long before Disney would follow suit with that Direct-to-DVD movie with the dumb kid.
I'm always up to see a classic NES game get beat speedily, especially if it happens to be one that I wasn't even aware existed. I guess 1991 puts it somewhere close to the end of the NES's lifespan, which partly explains why I haven't heard of it (the other reason being is that I'm not some NES savant). Oddly enough, when working on the page, I discovered that there was an entirely separate Little Mermaid game for Sega consoles that plays, aptly enough, like the Ecco the Dolphin games.
Maldita Castilla
[07/27 - 6:55PM. 35 minute estimate.]
Maldita Castilla ("Cursed Castle", but there's a subtle pun for Spanish speakers) is a 2012 Spanish Indie take on the Ghosts N' Goblins series, two games from which precede Maldita in the schedule. I'm just curious about this one, though not to the extent that I'll go chase it down myself: it's apparently filled with monsters specifically from Spanish mythology. In a sense, it's taking the same approach as the Indonesian horror game DreadOut which, while it had its share of technical and pacing problems, enhanced its horror beats with the inclusion of some really creepy weird shit that you didn't regularly see in other survival horror games, sourced as they were from Indonesian boogeymen. At least Indonesia has that brutal martial art Silat to keep them safe. What hope do we Euros have against the forces of evil?
I don't expect Maldita Castilla to lean too hard on creeping the player out; the goal appears to be to recreate Capcom's classic series of brutal action-platformers with a Hispanic twist. Even so, it's one of those culturally unique games that might be worth a look. Or it's completely broken and the speedrunner will just obliterate it. Either way, if it made it onto the speedrun schedule, it's probably going to be fun to watch.
Spica Adventure
[07/27 - 11:50PM. 8 minute estimate.]
Taito dropped Spica Adventure, an obscure platformer with some neat Mr. Driller style visuals, on the increasingly underpopulated Arcade in 2005. It must've been a sight nestled between all the DDR machines. What's perplexing is that Taito never bothered to release it outside of Japan, or on any home system. It's not like Spica Adventure has any Arcade hooks, like magnetic cards or a giant controller shaped like someone's backside. It features a girl with an umbrella, who finds numerous interesting places to p... this sentence isn't going anywhere good. Let's just say it's a versatile platformer that spoils the player for choice when it comes to traversing its stages in any direction, and greatly emphasizes speed to avoid various maladies that show up if the player spends too long on any one stage.
It's perfect for speedrunning though how the speedrunner managed to find it is anyone's guess. They are extremely resourceful people if watching them work has taught us anything.
Digimon World
[07/28 - 11:05AM. 1 hour, 35 minute estimate.]
With so many of these games I'm generally more curious about the game itself than how it will be run. I've yet to see many of these in action and while I suspect that watching a speedrun isn't the best way to get slowly acquainted with a game I'm probably going to end up watching as much of these streams as possible. Might as well be happy that I'll get to see some obscurities along the way.
Digimon Evolve represents the other side of that coin. Games that I'm very sure about, if not necessarily intimately familiar with, which I'll be watching purely to see how the speedrunner gets through it. Digimon World is the first in a series of Pokemon knock-offs that would become something of a minor phenomenon itself. Like Pokemon, it began as a combination pet-raising simulator/RPG, and would later take off with various anime series and other franchising opportunities. Even with that generous estimate, I have to wonder how a slow game about raising a baby monster and teaching it to poop in the correct poop receptacle is going to be completed in so short a time limit. I suspect there must be some devious plan afoot to roll up one of the game's incredibly tough and incredibly hard to find monsters through some abstruse process - like the powerful magic-using Ghost monsters of Monster Rancher 2. Without following up on the exact path involved, I'm content to let this speedrun surprise me. Maybe it won't be a 95 minute slog of monster-raising tedium.
Kirby: Tilt N Tumble
[07/29 - 2:00PM. 18 minute estimate.]
Oddly enough, I was going to discuss a couple of games that were going to be featured on the always-fun "Awful Games Done Quick" (though this year they're calling it "Silly Games Done Quick") block: The Blues Brothers and Zen: Intergalactic Ninja. It appears however that both of them left the schedule at some point after I last checked it, possibly due to scheduling conflicts. Instead, we'll move onto Kirby: Tilt N' Tumble: a GBC Kirby game that used an accelerometer built into the game cartridge (which means that, should you play on the GBA SP, all the gyroscopic actions will occur upside down), similar to what Warioware Twisted would later do.
With this one, I'm curious about: A) How the speedrunner will beat the game quickly when so much of it relies on careful manipulation of the physical cartridge, and B) How they expect to stream the video out of a GameCube (which is what the game will be played on, via the Game Boy Player) that's being spun around the room. It's almost certainly going to lead to a lot of inadvertent physical comedy, and possibly someone getting beaned in the head with a cuboid game system.
ToeJam & Earl
[07/29 - 4:15PM. 30 minute estimate.]
ToeJam & Earl is a favorite of the Genesis set, and I'm sure its inclusion in Summer Games Done Quick is at least partially inspired by that successful Kickstarter for its sequel that ended recently. What's less obvious is how anyone expects to speedrun a game with such a potent randomized element. The bane of any speedrun, the RNG lords over innumerable enemy attack patterns, item drops and, in the case of a roguelike similar to ToeJam & Earl, power-up allocation, enemy placement, enemy population and geography. I don't remember the algorithms being too complex, but it doesn't seem likely that the speedrunner will be able to rely on getting the right presents. Presumably there's some fast track to the elevator that'll still apply regardless of the level permutation. Even so, speedrunning a roguelike sounds like a nutty idea, especially for a big live event like this, so I'll enjoy seeing how it turns out. It's possible that estimate is a very rough approximation, or is set to be a lot longer than an ideal run would otherwise take.
I also bring up this funkiest of games because the page had one of the worst cases of "You-itis" I've seen in a while, easily the worst of this project. Over 130 cases of a 2nd-person pronoun ("you", "your"): a practice which has long been verboten on our wiki. Clearly someone didn't do their research ahead of time and left a huge mess for some schmuck (Hi!) to clean up. It's odd to imagine that it's cases like these, where you'd think a game as beloved as ToeJam & Earl would be one of the better filled-out pages, that take up the most time to correct. Adding a brand new page from scratch is a brisk affair in comparison.
Sonic the Hedgehog: Triple Trouble
[07/29 - 8:35PM. 25 minute estimate.]
I'll leave you all the same way I joined you, with a Sonic game. The only reason I can think of for including this obscure Game Gear iteration is that it's one of the few Sonic games that hasn't yet been covered by one of these events. Why else would you dig so deep for a Sonic game? Then again, it'd be fair to assume that the Game Gear does have a sizable speedrunning community; they did have to beat those games within an hour before the batteries gave out, after all.
But really, people focus on the modern Sonic games and how abjectly horrible they are, but it's like he has this whole hidden non-canonical mythology with his Game Gear and Master System games. Even though I've never been a particularly big Sonic fan, I feel like I have enough of a handle on his 2D adventures. But what even is this game? What is that cowboy fox? Why does he have a Chaos Emerald?
The Bit at the End
I think this is ironically long enough for a blog that's concerned with getting through things as quickly as possible. Look for another ten curiosities closer to the event, and I hope to see many of you in the ExplosiveRuns chat on July 26th and after.
Meanwhile, it's time to return to adding generic Mahjong Super Famicom games to the wiki for the next few weeks. Feels good to be back. (And yes, I'm getting around to Metal Gear Solid 4 at some point this week, to ensure I'm caught up with Solid Scanlon. I have a lot on my plate right now, which I'm putting off by building a giant sky tower in Terraria. I'm the Sovereign of Scheduling.)
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