#hi op here this was the FUNNIEST thing i woke up to this morning
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“marn, i missed sgdq 2022! which runs should i watch?”
hello and welcome back to another rec list curated by me and my very subjective opinions. a couple weeks ago was summer games done quick, an annual speedrunning marathon raising money for doctors without borders and also a great way to get into watching speedrunning. a lot of their content is tailored towards being both clearly explained and fun to watch for an audience outside the speedrun community, so you can jump in with basically no knowledge besides “this person is gonna play a game really fast”. here are my personal highlights that i think you should check out!
kirby and the forgotten land: it’s always great to see a game that’s just been released in the past few months hit gdq!! this was my first time watching a forgotten land run and my takeaways were that: a) this game is beautiful and b) the runner was having a GREAT time sharing it with everyone.
spyro the dragon: spyro is one of those early games that has a lot of weird cool movement tech that is still being discovered to this day, and the fact that it shows up at gdq every couple years with some completely new strats to showcase is awesome, imo.
phasmophobia: if you are staring at this link wondering “how the hell do you speedrun the co-op ghost hunting game that relies entirely on randomization and luck”, just trust me and click it. the ghosts did NOT want to cooperate with these runners at ALL.
pokemon emerald randomizer (evolution chaos co-op): i am not usually a person who has the patience to sit for all 3 hours of a pokemon run, and i figured i would just tune into this one for like half an hour while i got some other stuff done, but i was immediately enraptured. it’s a modded randomizer where your pokemon evolves into something random Every Time it levels up, with 4 runners passing the controller around on every evolution. the game was not kind to these runners. it’s one of the funniest things i’ve ever seen at gdq.
donkey kong country: tropical freeze: spikevegeta’s tropical freeze run from gdqx a few years back is still The speedrun i love showing to people, but this one is an INCREDIBLY clean run that is just a joy to watch. spike is also a GREAT runner/commentator who you’ll notice pops up on a lot of gdq commentary couches, he loves to explain not only what’s going on in the game but little anecdotes and fun facts about the community around the game/speedrun.
banjo-tooie: i love duck and hagginator’s banjo-kazooie race from 2019 and have watched it multiple times since it happened and i am happy to see duck back at gdq running banjo-tooie. :) the community around the b-k games seems really nice and if i had to pick a game to get into running myself this might be in my top 5 choices.
mi scusi: you should watch everything from this early morning silly block, i shotgunned basically all the vods for it and loved them all, but this one was the standout. a speedrunner who woke up way too early in the morning plays a spectacularly broken, floppy physics game that was a student project that is about [checks notes] a guy dealing with the mafia, stealing the world cup, and going to space. if you like this one, watch the rest of the silly block, esp turnip boy commits tax evasion and jimmie johnson’s anything with an engine.
stepmania/noitg doubles showcase: what if dance dance revolution was evil and the only way to defeat it was a 45 minute synchronized dance routine
happy’s humble burger farm: stressed runner makes burgers as fast as he can while janky jumpscare horror game tries to give him the worst rng imaginable. i watched this one kind of on a whim because i like teddyras (the runner) a lot and his commentary is like. laugh-out-loud funny. if you have an hour or less to kill and want to watch one of these vods, this is the one. if you like this, you should check out teddyras’s run of gone golfing, a similar janky horror game set at a minigolf course (sort of).
control: this is an all bosses run and something about hearing the extremely sparse 6 am crowd politely golf clap after every boss fight just took me out. also this game has SO many cool out-of-bounds skips and sequence breaks that are SO fun to watch.
mario 64: m64 is basically a staple game at gdq at this point and because it’s basically the grandfather of speedrunning they often try to dress it up with new challenges like the runner being blindfolded, or the game being randomized, or it being a race. this is not that. this is a guy playing regular vanilla mario 64 very nearly on world record pace, pulling off tricks that have never been successfully completed on the gdq stage before, and casually showing the audience completely new movement tech and clips that have been discovered while the commentators lose their fucking minds in the background. also he never died a single time in this run.
mario maker 2 relay race: two teams of 3 highly skilled mario runners go head to head in a blind relay race of 9 extremely fucking difficult mario maker levels. it’s SO cool to watch them figure out routing and strats in real time, and the level designers shoutcasting the race have some really great insight into the design of the levels themselves.
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