Highlights From Awesome Games Done Quick 2016

January 16, 2016

The best part about starting a new year, at least for the past few, has been the running of Awesome Games Done Quick, the week-long marathon put together by the videogame speedrunning community. At past events, this has seen things such as an epic 8-hour run of Final Fantasy VI, Some amazing Tetris: The Grandmaster skills, and the craziness that can happen when you build a speedrunning robot. The 2016 even didn’t have any true standout events, but there were a number of solid runs and the overall event raised over US$1.2 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

The even opened with TonesBalones running through the solo campaign of T. This is just a good fun run that shows off the game and helped set a good mood for the entire event.

Unfortunately, a number of early runs had audio problems when uploaded to Youtube, so I’m not able to link them here. Thankfully this run of Resident Evil HD Remaster by CarcinogenSDA wasn’t affected.

The Disney block— which saw runs of a huge number of classic games based on Disney properties— was one of the more entertaining aspects of this year’s AGDQ, and it culminated in an impressive and lengthy run of Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix. The run is notable for using the game’s “proud mode”, a harder difficulty setting than the normal game. It’s also notable for a number of songs being sung as the game progressed.

The indie games block always produces some entertaining runs, and every so often someone involved in the development of the game will chime in via Skype. That’s exactly what happened with GVirus’ run of Axiom Verge, a Metroid-inspired platform adventure. This run also shows how a good speedrun can be undone by a difficult section, but GVirus handled the pressure really well.

Super Metroid is a staple of AGDQ events, and usually one of the final games run, with an option to save or kill the hidden animals during the ending of the game being one of the many donation incentive bid wars through the event. This year, there were two runs of the game, both of which were amazing. The first one featured Sweetnumb and Oatsngoats playing together, sharing a single controller between them. It was definitely one of the most impressive runs of the event, and has to be watched to be believed.

The PC gaming block generally throws a mixture of new and old titles, and often some obscure titles as well. Along with Half-Life 2 and Portal 2, this year saw runs from titles as diverse as Wolfenstein: The Old BloodTag: The Power of Paint (the game that inspired the gel sections of Portal 2) and old classic Prince of Persia. CapnClever’s run of Jordan Mechner’s venerable puzzle-platform title showed off some fantastic tricks and techniques in a game that has held up incredibly well over the years.

The Mario block consisted, of course, of Mario games. It began not with an official Mario title, but with the kind of ROM hack who’s popularity inspired Nintendo to create Super Mario MakerKaizo Mario Bros. 3 is a follow up to the legendary Kaizo Mario romhack of Super Mario World, being based on Super Mario Bros. 3 instead. It’s a difficult game that runner Mitchflowerpower makes look super easy.

The highlight of the Mario block, and one of the highlights of the event, was a competitive run of Super Mario Maker itself. How do you run a game where most of the levels are designed by players? By taking some of the best runners of the Mario series and getting them to create some inspired levels that you then get two teams of runners to play. To make things interesting, the runner teams have never seen the levels before. The result was brilliant fun from all involved.

Mirror’s Edge is a game that’s always seemed like it was built from the ground up for speedrunning, so it’s no surprise that it often makes appearances at AGDQ and SGDQ events. This year, SasukeAnimator’s run was watched by DICE themselves, who, while they weren’t on Skype, did donate during the run. The run itself showes off some of the game’s more interesting techniques and glitches, and may make you feel a little queasy. It’ll be worth it, though.

Not everything at AGDQ is about running a game quickly. Sometimes it’s about showing off impressive skills as well. That was the case with Staiain’s Stepmania showcase. The game itself is an open-source recreation of Konami’s classic Beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution arcade titles, and while it’s intended to be played with a dance mat, it supports keyboard play as well. Here, Staiain demonstrates just how crazy the game can get when played this way, pulling off songs that wouldn’t be possible to actually dance to. It’s an impressive show of reflexes and keyboard skills.

One of the most underrated titles in the Nintendo 64 library is Rare’s Blast Corps, and it was great to see it get a run at AGDQ. The game is fairly unique, and playing it requires skills that aren’t always applicable to other games. What makes this run stand out, however, is that Martin Wakeley, the game’s lead producer is on the line to talk about the game as Graviton plays it. If you’re a fan of 1990s Rare, a fan of Blast Corps or just want some insight into game development in general, then this run is well worth watching.

The Diablo games may not necessarily seem like obvious candidates for speedrunning due to how random they are, but both the original Diablo and Diablo II: Lords of Destruction were run in a single block by Funkmastermp and MrLlamaSC respectively. The games have held up pretty well over the years (especially Diablo II which still receives occasional updates from Blizzard). There’s also some cool insights into the underlying design of the games from the runners, and overall these are very enjoyable to watch, especially the longer Diablo II run.

Mega Man is one of the perennial favourites of speedrunners, and the series is always well-represented at AGDQ. This year saw two entire separate blocks of the series, one for the 16-bit titles such as Mega Man X and Mega Man ZX, and the other for the original 8-bit classics (and their modern sequels, Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10). The highlight for fans of the old series was Duckfist’s run of Mega Man 2, perhaps the most highly regarded game in the series.

Another perennial speedrunning favourite is the Legend of Zelda series. This year saw runs of the original NES game, A Link To The PastOcarina of Time Master Quest, and also this lengthy but fantastic run of Majora’s Mask. This is a game that generally doesn’t get as much love from speedrunners as the rest of the series (it’s not quite as crazy with glitches as Ocarina), but that just makes this all the more special.

The TASBot is a robot (well, a Raspberry Pi, really) designed to convert the kind of tool-assisted speedruns that can be created using emulation tools to optimise a run to a point beyond what a human could do and play them back on actual hardware. It may seem a pointless endeavour, but often these kinds of runs can open up new ways of playing a game that can reduce the time it takes to beat. Ultimately, though, seeing TASBot do its thing is just incredible on its own. First up was this hilarious run of Brain Age.

That was followed by a really amazing run of Super Mario Bros. 3 that, well, I don’t want to spoil it, but it may not end quite how you expect. There’s some cool technical stuff happening here regarding the ability of TASBot to overflow the game’s input buffer and cause it to make the game run code supplied solely by sending controller inputs at a very high speed. It’s hard to explain, but amazing to watch.

This was followed by more TASBot input buffer overflow shenanigans, this time to turn Super Mario World into, erm, Super Mario Maker. Yep, this happened:

The grand finale of AGDQ is traditionally a lengthy speedrun of a 16-bit era RPG, usually a Final Fantasy game. This time around it was Final Fantasy IV run by Nocashnocash. This was a great way to finish up the marathon, especially because the run didn’t need to take advantage of any major glitches and was just all around pretty fun.

Overall this AGDQ was a fun week of entertainment with a serious charity-raising motive. It was great to see a lot of new faces mixed in with many of the big names in various running communities, and overall it’s good to see the speedrunning community continuing to pull off these amazing events. That they were able to raise over US$1.2 million for the Prevent Cancer foundation says a lot about the growth of these events over the years.