Set Side B

World Record: All ? Panels in Mario Kart World

There was an All ? Panels in Mario Kart World run at AGDQ this year, and it was great, but that’s not what this is. No, this world record was recorded (geez that phrasing annoys me) in the practice room at the event. (28 minutes, don’t bother following both link BTW they go to the same place, I just didn’t want to link the parenthetical)

So what is this? As I think everyone knows by now, Mario Kart World is an open world game, and has an expansive free run mode. There’s a few things to do in free run: search out and complete P Switch Missions, collect Peach Medallions, and find and activate ? Panels.

The Panels look and act like the ? Panels in the SNES game: just roll over one to activate it. It doesn’t earn you an item like they did way back then, but the game does remember you did it, and it earns you a new decal for your vehicles.

There are 150 panels in MKW’s sprawling environment, and some of them are in some really tricky places! Please enjoy Helix13_ collecting them all in less than half an hour, showing off the game’s vehicle-parkour movement system as it runs, and demonstrating all kinds of tricks, like using the Rewind feature to get back from activating out-of-the-way panels. Or taking advantage of the fact that MKW will give you credit for a panel that you’re about to hit if you pause and change regions. And you get to enjoy MKW’s great soundtrack along the way, consisting of dozens of great songs from throughout Mario’s history.

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Sundry Sunday: Lore Sjöberg Rates 1st Gen Pokemon + AGDQ 2026 Begins Today

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

About 3½ years ago, when I started doing this blog and Sundry Sundays, I would post a greater variety of thing here.

One thing I delighted in posting were video game-related ratings from web comedy master Lore Sjöberg, whose name I will always treasure from his work on earlyweb humor magazine The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which is sadly offline now.

About a year ago Lore started making web humor again, for a short while anyway, and one of the things he did was four more installments of The Ratings, one of the most popular features of old Brunching, once so popular that he collected many of them into a book. He even did a few video ratings during the time he 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃 for Wired Magazine. I once linked to his ratings of Legend of Zelda weapons, which is still as funny as when he recorded it 17 years ago.

Well, about a year ago, during the brief revival of teh raitngs at badgods.com, he rated a few 1st Generation Pokemon, and what do you know, he’s still got it. An example:

HITMONCHAN

I’m deeply disappointed Niantic didn’t continue with the Hitmonchan/Hitmonlee naming scheme. That could have given us Hitmonsegal, Hitmonyeoh, and Hitmonvandamme.

If you enjoy it, or have ever enjoyed Lore’s work through the years, you can currently find him on Bluesky. Now that there’s not a thriving ecosystem of blogs to link to his work, he’s kind of hard to find now. Help the algorithm realize he’s a treasure, and go have a look!

The Ratings: First Generation Pokemon (badgods.com)

ALSO, I just found out, AGDQ 2026, the week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins today at Noon Eastern Time! Right off the bat it starts with Super Mario Sunshine and Jet Set Radio, and around 11:30 that night will be running the new Katamari game, Once Upon A Katamari! And from there there’s more great runs to watch, with the typically-hilarious Awful Block this year taking place midnight to sunrise Thursday morning. Here’s the full schedule.

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SGDQ 2025 Coming Soon

July 6th is the first day this year of the week-long SGDQ speedrunning marathon! I try to mention it, and its companion marathon AGDQ in January, some time in advance each year. I’m not always successful, but I managed to get the reminder out this time, with around a week and a half to spare. Here is its schedule.

This year SGDQ benefits Doctors Without Borders. Of course it’s a terrible time for the economy this year so giving hurts a bit more, but wouldn’t it be nice to support an organization that’s trying to do actual good in the world, instead of just observing the manifest awfulness that surrounds us?

I’ll give you just a few selected highlights this time. The first first run is an hour-long all-Emeralds run of Sonic 2. Some others are a kaizo showcase of Mega Man Maker levels, a bonus incentive run of Gamecube Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (which is played using the Bongo Drum controller), Blue Prince, We Love Katamari REROLL, Castlevania Rondo of Blood, a Tetris 99 Battle Royale showcase, An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, a Spelunky triathalon, a 100% run of Metroid Zero Mission, a Super Mario Maker 2 relay race, and at the very end Deltarune chapters 1 and 2. Everyone loves Spamton!

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Sunday Sunday: Cat Bypass Speed WR (Good Ending)

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Witness this person as he uses all the tricks at his disposal to make his cat let him by in the hallway in record time (1 ¼ minutes):

He’s been speedrunning annoying his cat for some time! Here he bugs his cat until he goes inside (any%, 1 minute):

How many pets his cat can handle (1 ¼ minutes):

And annoying his cat until he gives up the chair (video has 2.3M views somehow, 1 minute):

It’s not the usual Sunday silliness, no it’s a different kind of Sunday silliness, but hey it’s April Fools Day! Wait, you’re saying it isn’t April Fool’s Day any more? It’s even May now? Crap.

rodneylives

“Beating” Super Mario Bros By (Virtually) Swapping Cartridges

This seems like it’s going a bit too far to me. That’s the very phrase, “going too far,” that video creator 100th Coin uses, when he finishes Super Mario Bros. by swapping cartridges in mid-play.

And it’s not even really swapping cartridges. This is a TAS, a tool-assisted speedrun, so instead of physically removing a cartridge and putting in another one within a single machine cycle, it just switches rom images into an emulated machine’s address space.

It’s pretty ludicrous, but at least the video maker is upfront about this. Correction: they’re up front about it within their 40-minute video, but not in the title. The title is pretty click-baity, but I guess creators get views however they can in the Youtube hellscape of 2025, if content makers can survive.

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4 in 2010: Crazy Taxi’s Crazy Box Mode With Live Band

Few games have as iconic a soundtrack as does Crazy Taxi, which boasts a memorable collection of Offspring and Bad Religion tunes backing its trademark atrocities of municipal transportation.

Word is that Crazy Taxi plays on Youtube are susceptible to copyright strikes because of all those licensed tunes. One solution? Have a live band play what the game would have been playing! That’s what this player, and three supporting musicians, do in this submission for the next AGDQ (14 minutes). You could complain that you never get to hear the whole song, but you never could do that in Crazy Taxi anyway.

The mode shown off is called Crazy Box. It’s a collection of 16 driving challenges bundled with the home versions of Crazy Taxi, and they’re all pretty, well, crazy. The highlight, I think, is the last challenge, which is simply to do a lap around the arcade city as if it were a traditional driving game, although with traffic turned up, because it’s not Crazy Taxi without a ton of traffic.

rodneylives

Sundry Sunday: From AGDQ, A Dog Replaces R.O.B. in Gyromite

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

This week’s fun video isn’t decades old, in fact it’s from just a few days ago, from AGDQ.

The NES title Gyromite, a.k.a. Robot Gyro, is a very interesting game from a design standpoint, possibly more interesting than it is to actually play (although I think its music is very catchy). It’s never been rereleased by Nintendo, for the probable reason that it relies on the accessory R.O.B. to play.

R.O.B: It’s not just that funky Smash Bros. character! (Image from Wikipedia, taken by Evan-Amos.)

R.O.B. was a motorized accessory that activated servos in its arms depending on light signals sent to it from the screen. No cords went from R.O.B. to the NES. It used photoreceptors in its “eyes” to detect the screen signals, which were ultimately caused by player input on the controller. A fairly roundabout means of control, honestly.

Only two official R.O.B. games were made, and Gyromite (Going by its Japanese name “Robot Gyro” according to the title screen) used the “gyro” accessory for play. A platform is placed in front of R.O.B., on which you place the controller for Player 2.

On the controller is a device that spins the “gyros,” colored weighted tops. By manipulating the arms with action on Player 1’s controller, making them swing around and opening and closing the claws at the right time, you can cause R.O.B. to lift the spinning gyros from their platform, then set them down on the NES controller’s buttons. In the game, this caused colored pillars to rise or fall according to the control signals.

R.O.B. with gyro setup. Image from the blog Nerdly Pleasures.

While manipulating all of this, you also have to watch out for the action of the game itself. Gyromite is a simple platformer, but one without a jump button. The difficulty comes from having to essentially play two games at once, the platforming on screen and manipulating R.O.B. to position pillars in the right places in space and time.

R.O.B.’s motions are not simple to command either. It takes time for the arms to pivot between their destinations, time that must be accounted for in the on-screen action, and while the tops spin for quite a while they will eventually have to be collected and set back on their pedestals so they can be spun back up to full speed, or else they’ll topple over on the button. This doesn’t produce a failure state in the game. It’s just left to you to pick the top up yourself and put it back on its stand to be spun again. R.O.B. isn’t capable of such feats of dexterity.

There’s a lot more to say about R.O.B., and how it was mostly distributed as part of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s “Deluxe Set” in the U.S., the more expensive version that didn’t come with Super Mario Bros. Instead of that, let’s talk about how, due to the fact that R.O.B. is just a fancy-shmancy way to press controller buttons, that you can replace it entirely with some other mechanism, or indeed, even animal.

That’s what happened Wednesday at AGDQ, where Peanut Butter the Dog, with coaching from JSR_, left R.O.B. gathering dust in the closet as they played through Gyromite Game B.

They didn’t make it all the way without running out of lives, but they picked back up and kept going. And that doesn’t detract at all from Peanut Butter’s skills, or amazing doggy focus. They are intent on reading those hand signals and getting those tasty treats. So while they didn’t earn a world record, for “Dog playing Gyromite Game B,” their accomplishment is of definite note.

There are around four minutes of introductions at the start of the video, so if you want to jump right in to the run, begin here.

Gyromite by Peanut Butter the Dog & JSR_ in 26:24 – Awesome Games Done Quick 2024 (Youtube, 33 minutes)

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AGDQ Starts Tomorrow!

AGDQ, one of GDQ’s two yearly life speedrunning events, begins tomorrow and runs to the 24th! Here’s the schedule!

Here are some highlights, according to me. The times I give are US Eastern/Pacific, but the schedule page linked above can convert times to your own zone:

Sunday, January 14th

Noon/9 AM: Tunic – Everyone’s favorite fox-based Zelda-like.

12:40 PM/9:40 AM: Super Monkey Ball – Monkey Ball speedruns are always awesome to watch!

3:40 PM/12:40 AM: Tales’ Adventure – A glitchless run of a Game Gear game, and one of the less remarked-upon of the Sonic series.

4:49 PM/1:49 PM: Donkey Kong 64 – An infamous 3D platformer experienced the best possible way: watching someone else play it.

8:55 PM/5:55 PM: Ultimate Doom – One of several billion speedruns of Doom, I’d expect this to be heavily optimized.

9:43 PM/6:43 PM: Jet Set Radio Future – The underrated Xbox sequel to the Dreamcast original.

Monday, January 15th

3:13 AM/12:13 AM: The Typing of the Dead – Worth checking in for the funny word list!

5:13 AM/2:13 AM: Marble Madness II race – At last, over 30 years after the prototype sequel to Marble Madness was scrapped, it finally comes to GDQ. Mere days after the game was leaked to the public there were already extremely proficient runs of MM2 on Youtube, so don’t blink or it’ll be over before you open your eyes.

10:01 AM/7:01 AM: Manifold Garden, reverse tree order – This game is amazing.

11:38 AM/8:38 AM: 30XX – sequel to 20XX, a procedurally-generated platformer.

2:37 PM/11:37 AM: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes – A competent sequel to the original Metroid Prime that tends to be overshadowed by the original. This is a 100% run, scheduled for 2 1/2 hours.

7:30 PM/4:30 PM: Sonic Adventure 2 Battle – Another underrated game, this run seeks to get all A ranks.

10:55 PM/7:55 PM: Pikmin 4 – The Pikmin games seem to alternate, with the odd-numbered games having strong time limits, and the even-numbered ones being a lot more laid back. They’re all terrific though, and provide a kind of gameplay that few other games attempt.

Tuesday, January 16th

8:46 AM/5:46 AM: Arkanoid – I presume this is the NES version. Coming from the lineage of Breakout, this game is extremely hard. I hope they’re playing it on NES hardware, with the official paddle controller made for this game.

9:23 AM/6:23 AM: Gimmick! – The new schedule page doesn’t specify which platform the game is being played on, unfortunately. This could either be the NES prototype original or the official (and ludicrously expensive) exA-Arcadia remake.

11:34 AM/8 34 AM: The Legend of Zelda – This run is glitchless, which is an important consideration for Zelda 1 these days.

2:03 PM/11:03 AM: Gyromite (Game B, Dog Assistance) – 🐕🐕🐕？？？

8:00 PM/5:00 PM: Octopath Traveller II – Might be a good opportunity to see what this game is about, if you haven’t jumped at it yet?

10:52 PM/7:52 PM: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – IGA’s post-Konami Metroidvania, with an emphasis on the Vania.

Wednesday, January 17th

2:59 AM/11:59 PM[Tue]: Diablo (1996) – The original game, but played through as a Sorcerer at Level 1?

3:46 AM/12:46 AM: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – News of the Switch remake has put this classic back in the spotlight. It’s still the best Paper Mario game, and one of the best damn JRPGs period, overloaded with humor but with a great story too. It demonstrated that the Mario universe has the power to tell actually interesting stories-but it may also have been the game that causes Nintendo to rein in Intelligent Systems’ use of the Mario property, as (I believe) it’s the last game with individualized Toads.

7:15 AM/4:15 AM: Ducktales Remastered – The final voice appearance of Alan Young, Wilbur from the long-ago talking horse sitcom Mr. Ed, as Scrooge McDuck before he passed away. It’s one of Wayforward’s technically excellent 2D platformers, so it’ll be interesting to see how they break it.

8:26 AM/5:26 AM: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade) – A 1 credit clear no less. I love seeing arcade games at GDQ, especially if they aren’t rhythm games, or as I like to think of them, Super Simon.

10:24 AM/7:24 AM: Super Mario Bros. 2 USA – I find it sad that NES games tend to be underrepresented at GDQ in this era, although I can certainly see why, as this run is scheduled to be just 12 minutes long.

11:06 AM/8:06 AM: Monkey Island 1 vs Monkey Island 2 – I don’t know what this means. Are they playing them both?

12:25 PM/9:25 AM: Metroid Dread – 100% NMG (“No Major Glitches”)

2:40 PM/11:40 AM: Pokemon Crystal Item Randomizer – Additionally, this is played co-op, meaning (I think) two players are playing, but when one finds an item the other immediately gets it too.

7:05 PM/4:05 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – This run is marked “MST.” To explain, that stands for Medallians/Stones/Trials. For an explanation of the explanation, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

9:35 PM/6:35 PM: Super Mario 64 – “16 Star Drum%” Oh those abbreviations. Whatever that means, they expect it to take 24 minutes.

10:06 PM/7:06 PM: TASbot presents Super Metroid – Past TASbot performances have reprogrammed games to present full motion video on a Gameboy and a completely alternate ending to Ocarina of Time, so whatever they’re doing this year is anyone’s guess.

Thursday, January 18th

2:11 AM/11:11 PM[Wed] – 7:25 AM/4:25 AM: Short games – I don’t know if this counts as “Awful Block” since Ninja Gaiden is in there, but they are running a number of lesser-seen games, including NES Beetlejuice, the Xbox 360 promotion Burger King tie-in Sneak King and Virtual Hydlide.

11:42 AM/8:42 AM: Kirby and the Amazing Mirror – That odd Kirby game that was functionally a Metroidvania and gave him Smash Bros. powers as one of his copy abilities. Also, Kirby has three other Kirbies wandering around as helpers, and you can call them in a cell phone. Kind of a failed experiment, but it’s still interesting!

12:19 PM/9:19 AM: Castlevania III – A solid NES game, and one that hasn’t been broken to pieces as it still takes 40 minutes to finish.

2:35 PM/11:35 PM: Super Mario Sunshine – 120 Shines. That means getting all 240 Blue Coins too. AGDQ had a cursed run of Sunshine where the runner suffered a Game Over, but because the play eschewed saving to save time, all progress was completely lost, and they had to start from scratch! Hopefully this one will go better.

8:37 PM/5:37 PM: Super Mario Maker 2 Glitch Showcase – Nintendo seems to be neglecting this game-it didn’t get a bookmark website like the first one did, and now Wonder’s out with nary a remark about SMM2. It feels like they’ll bin this one before long, so please enjoy these glitches while you can.

9:22 PM/6:22 PM: Halo: Combat Evolved – Co-op on Easy. I understand that this extremely niche game was nevertheless popular in some circles. The 3? 4? of you who know of this game will enjoy it I’m sure.

Friday, January 19th

9:17 AM/6:17 AM: Undertale, True Pacifist Race – It’s hard to believe this game’s already eight years old! When will we start seeing Deltarune chapters at GDQ?

3:22 PM/12:22 PM: Risk of Rain Returns – This game is very new but already has speedruns!

4:40PM/1:40 PM: Super Mario Bros. Wonder

10:34 PM/7:34 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – 100% No Major Glitches Relay

Saturday, January 20th

5:38 AM/2:38 AM: Star Fox 64 – 2k%, which means, in the style of speedrunners, a speedrun with a special requirement, here that the player finish a score of 2,000 or more. Back when I played Star Fox 64 a lot, my highest score ever I think was a bit over 1,700, and I worked hard for that score, so this requires some “skillz,” as they say.

8:46 AM/5:46 AM: Sonic Origins Plus – “Anniversary Mode” Relay

6:33 PM/3:33 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Any%, so, expect an unwise confrontation with Ganon with only four hearts.

7:51 PM/4:51 PM: Baldur’s Gate 3 – Last year’s other megahit, this goes through all acts but is only scheduled for 35 minutes. A friend of mine has, over a week, started this game completely over from scratch three times without finishing, so it’s safe to assume he’s falling way behind the curve.

9:04 PM/6:04 PM: Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster – The last game of the show, with “Cutscene Remover.” Even without them, scheduled for 2 1/2 hours.

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SGDQ 2023 Upcoming (and Past) Highlights

As noted yesterday, I forgot about SGDQ this year and we’re already underway. But there’s still five-and-a-half days of it left, so here’s some projected highlights and notes. Nearly every day of the weeklong charity speedrunning marathon this year has a Legend of Zelda game. I’ve boldfaced them below to point them out! All times US Eastern. For the full rundown, check the schedule page. And you can watch the marathon in progress here!

I’m pushing the next @Play to tomorrow since this one’s pretty time sensitive. See you with that tomorrow!

Past, Sunday

These should be on Youtube soon, if they aren’t already by the time this is published.

Sonic Frontiers, Any%

Bugsnax, All Bosses Co-Op

Mega Man Maker, Any% – hey, we recently linked to that! I have no idea what “Any %” means for a level construction program.

F-Zero X Expansion Kit, All Tracks (should be interesting, this didn’t get a release outside of Japan!)

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Any%

Luigi’s Mansion 100% Race, on Wii

Past, Monday

Banjo-Kazooie, 110% no FFM (FFM stands for “Furnace Fun Moves,” it’s a way to get the moves from a different save file unlocked on a current save, they’re saying they won’t do that, even though it’s possible)

Loom, Any% (always nice to see a Lucasarts classic here)

Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, Any%, on the Sega Genesis (not the even-more-bizarre arcade game)

Metal Slug XX, Normal Difficulty, Any %

Present, Monday

Here begin the runs that you might still have a chance to catch-

9:58 AM: PHOGS!, Solo Any% (this is an indie release with a bizarre premise, the character is a stretchy dog with a head on both ends, huh)

12:55 PM: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII – Reunion, Any% Race

2:24 PM: Peggle Deluxe, Any% (yes, Peggle)

5:18 PM: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, All Keys

6:42 PM: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Any% (given the success of BotW and TotK, probably the last “traditional” Zelda game we’ll see for awhile)

8:29 PM: Igavania sequence! Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, its sequel, and as a possible bonus game Symphony of the Night

11:33 PM: StepMania DX, Game Showcase, Arcade

Tuesday

1:39 AM: Hearthstone: Knights of the Frozen Throne, Solo Adventures

5:50 AM: SNOLF, Any% No Coordinate Warp (it’s a hack of Sonic 2 where you play golf with Sonic)

6:40 AM: Marathon Infinity, All Main Levels on Kindergarten Difficulty (sadly it’s a PC port, not on a classic Macintosh)

8:00 AM: Maniac Mansion, Any%, NES (only eight minutes is blocked for this, so don’t blink!)

4:16 PM: The Elder Scrolls Anthology, Main Series

8:00 PM: Halo 3, Legendary Difficulty, as a bonus game

Wednesday

5:25 AM: Dead Rising 2, Time Skip NG

9:19 AM: Gauntlet, Any% Co-Op, NES (only 20 minutes for this)

11:55 AM: Touhou 14.3: Impossible Spell Card, All Scenes No Items (I’d make a joke about this being for the kids out there, but Touhou’s been around for quite a while now, I’m just old)

1:32 PM: Shatterhand, Any% on NES (24 minutes, it’d be nice to have another NES game in a GDQ that’s not over in half an hour or less)

3:06 PM: Trine Enchanted Edition, Any% NG+

3:41 PM: N++, Co-op Legacy X-row (remember when this was just a Flash game? remember when there were Flash games?)

5:08 PM: Shadow the Hedgehog, Glitchless Bidwar (oooh edgy)

5:58 PM: Sonic Adventure DX, All Stories Relay

8:00 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask, Blitz Randomizer (randomizer runs are always fun!)

10:42 PM: Super Mario Odyssey, Any% as a bonus game

Thursday

12:16 AM: Paper Mario, Any% no ACE (“ace” stands for Arbitrary Code Execution, it’s one of those sneaky ways to glitch a game out to get to the end immediately, they’re saying they aren’t doing that)

3:46 AM: Golf It!, Classic First 5 Maps 100% Race (Golf It, which according to nearly the entire first page of Google hits for it is “a multiplayer Minigolf game with focus on a dynamic, fun and creative multiplayer experience,” blergh, is one of those silly golf games along the lines of What The Golf)

4:26 PM: Hobo Cat Adventures, Any%

5:51 AM: Give Me Toilet Paper!, Hand% (maybe we’re in Awful Block, because the next game is….)

6:14 AM: Pepsiman, Any% (yep)

8:54 AM: Pocky & Rocky Reshrined, Any% with Uzumi

9:39 AM: The Curse of Monkey Island, Any% Mega-Monkey (increases the number of puzzles!)

10:13 AM: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Any%

2:45 PM: Darkest Dungeon

4:45 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Any% (nice to see a Zelda game that hasn’t been compressed into nothing, three hours is blocked off for this which is a lot longer than for Breath of the Wild)

7:57 PM: Pizza Tower, Any% (yay!)

Friday

12:13 AM: Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy, Full Trilogy Any%

4:17 AM: Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse, All Dark Magic, Pirate Mode, No OOB

5:47 AM: Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series, Klonoa 1 Any% Easy Support Mode

6:52 AM: VVVVVV, Any% Glitchless

7:24 AM: SaGa Frontier, Story Bidwar

8:39 AM: Final Fight 3, Co-Op Any% (Easy), on SNES

There’s a lot of short games around here….

11:24 AM: X-Men Arcade, 2-player 1CC attempt (there should be more arcade games at GDQ)

12:45 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, Any% Co-op, on GBA (one of the least Zelda-like Zeldas)

1:25 PM: Metroid Prime Remastered, Any%

3:42 PM: Pokémon Colosseum, Any% Race (four hours for this one, it’s the traditional very long Pokemon playthrough, although this time it’s for one of the side-series battlers, a sequel to Pokemon Stadium)

8:09 PM: Kaizo Monkey Ball, Story Mode (this is a hack of a Super Monkey Ball game to make it even harder)

Saturday

12:16 AM: Celeste, TAS True Ending

1:02 AM: Super Mario 64, Randomizer- 70 Star Non-Stop

1:59 AM: Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, Any% Proud Race

6:09 AM: Neopets: The Darkest Faerie, Any% (Neopets!)

7:14 AM: Tony Hawk’s Underground, Beginner Any%

8:04 AM: Spelunky 2, Spelunker Trials Any%

9:19 AM: Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, Any% (while it has its flaws, this is an underrated game)

10:41 AM: Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster, Any%

2:56 PM: Super Mario Bros., Any% Warpless (20 minutes blocked for this, which is surprising to me)

5:01 PM: Pokemon Violet/Scarlet, Victory Road (a relatively traditional style of Pokemon play in this open world game)

7:46 PM: Elden Ring, Any% Glitchless

11:26 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Any% Blindfolded as a bonus game

Sunday

3:14 AM: Super Metroid, Co-Op Any% (Super Metroid is a traditional GDQ marathon ender. save the animals!)

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Super Punch-Out!! Blindfolded Race at GDQx 2019

Watching a lot of speedruns, as I’ve said before, can give you a distorted view of what video game difficulty is actually like. Speedrunning has been a going hobby for well over a decade now. New strategies are worked out and evolve. If they’re good ones, they become a part of everyone’s runs and are further refined. If they’re not good ones they’re discarded. What I’m saying is, the state-of-the-art advances. It doesn’t recede. People keep getting better. TASes are even more optimized than that, and are at this point really a completely different process, more scripting and exploring program function than playing a game in the traditional manner.

There may come a time, eventually, where, confident that runs have been perfected, speedrun becomes less focused-upon. Then after a period, people may come back and try to match the records of old. Or, maybe people will just stop speedrunning games, at least from the NES and SNES era. Many of these games are deep, but they aren’t an inexhaustible resource.

When you watch a speedrun, even one that’s three or four years old, you aren’t watching the effort of one person, but of a chain of people stretching back. Runners watch each other’s attempts and try to improve upon them. There aren’t many secrets.

Watching speedrunners who have played these games hundreds of times may cause you to think that the games are somehow easy. One way some challenge can still be preserved is in attempting challenge runs, like completing a game blindfolded. Like Punch-Out. Finishing Punch-Out blindfolded. That’s something that people do, but it’s still pretty challenging.

And it’s generally considered that Super Punch-Out!! for the SNES is the hardest Punch-Out game to do blindfolded. I’d think that that would be NES Punch-Out, since Tyson at the end is very random and can knock Little Mac down in a single punch throughout the first half of the first round, but the commentators on this video say it’s SNES Punch-Out, and I believe them. In this race, both players take a defeat at one point! That’s not something you often see at GDQ.

If you know what you’re doing Super Punch-Out is a fairly short game. This whole run (a race between two people) takes about 22 minutes from start to end. One nice thing about this race is that it doesn’t become a case, common in speedrun races, where one player jumps into the lead and stays there the entire rest of the race. The lead changes a couple of times, and is up in the air until the last fight.

If you’ve never encountered Super Punch-Out!! before, you might be surprised by how much it differs from the much better-known NES game. NES is very much a game of pattern recognition and exploitation. The SNES version brings back the two arcade games’ power meter, adds a dizzy mechanic that can affect every opponent, and just has a lot more randomness. Not blindfolded it may be a little easier than the NES game, it doesn’t have any opponents like Mike Tyson. But it still has its challenges, as much personality as the 8-bit game, and further, doesn’t lean nearly as hard on ethnic stereotypes, and those are all good things!

rodneylives

Why Speedruns And Not Score Attacks?

This editorial doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of this blog. However, blogs don’t have views anyway, so what would that even mean?

Here is a question you might not of thought of. Speedruns are, after some years, still very popular, streamers still chase records, sometimes a matter of shaving off tenths of a second off of the previous time, and AGDQ and SGDQ continue to bring in millions for charities.

But, why? Why is it speedruns that have gained the interest of so many runners and spectators? Many games have their own method of measuring player skill: points! The score record chase is even much older than speedrunning, dating back to the heyday of Twin Galaxies. It’s even encouraged on the attract-mode vanity boards of countless arcade machines. So why is it that quick-playing has attracted so much attention, and not high-scoring?

The first thing, of course, is that time attacks (playing to finish quickly) is universally applicable, while not all games track score. Score keeping has become a lot less common in recent decades. What does it even mean to score attack Metroid Prime or Resident Evil IV? And often a quick-playing game is a lot more exciting to watch than one where the player just seeks to increase some abstract value. Fast play is easy to understand, but high point awards are often not immediately accessible to a viewer who isn’t already familiar with the game’s systems.

But more than that, many games have very sloppy point discipline. If a game doesn’t have a timer, but does have a score and respawning enemies, then there is no reason, from a point maximizing standpoint, to not just regenerate the same enemy over and over, a boring way to play but still, by the strict rules of the game, valid. To some extent this can be accounted for through out-of-game rules, like how Twin Galaxies will disallow certain types of play that just seek to increase points in an empty manner.

It’s not always easy to decide what counts as actually playing the game and what’s meaningless farming, which makes the allowance of some types of play a judgement call, and any time an official’s subjective opinion becomes an important part of the legality of some behavior, you’re going to end up with people trying to push the boundary of what is allowable, and as we see from professional sports, that means no end of arguing about whether a referee or umpire’s call is valid or not.

This doesn’t even cover scoring randomness. Ms. Pac-Man is a great game in many ways, but one aspect of it that makes it less suitable for score attacks is that, in long games, the point values of fruit becomes such a huge part of the score. After the seventh board, the fruit generated in Ms. Pac-Man are random, and can be worth anywhere from 100 points for Cherries, to 5,000 points for a Banana. Up to two of these can appear on each board, and once the game progresses past the point where ghosts can be eaten for points, the value for the higher-valued fruit easily overwhelms all the other scoring in the game, up to the kill screen at around board 144. (Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have a definite kill screen like Pac-Man does, but a variety of possible screens.)

When point awards are random like this, getting a score record in an individual game becomes a matter of luck. What that practically means is, players who attempt more runs are more likely to get a lucky game that gets a record. Essentially, record chasers must utilize the law of averages: a person who plays 100 games is much more likely to get a lot of Bananas in a single game among all of them than a person who has only played ten.

But even so? Lots of games were made explicitly with scores in mind. After decades where it was a common, sometimes even primary mode of play, I feel like playing for points is fairly neglected now. I mean, I’m not going to go on a rant about young folks trying to get their games over with without stopping to savor them. Just, you know, it’s not bad to play for points.

I fully realize that this is a topic that no one cares about, and even I am not really that concerned with it. It’s just an arbitrary value to maximize. “Yay, I’m X good! I’m Y better than I was before!” Yeah not really terribly important.

rodneylives