Summer Games Done Quick 2016 has wrapped up. The event raised around $1.3 million for Doctors Without Borders during the week long charity stream where around 170 games and 200 players donated their time and expertise to give the gaming community an entertaining 24/7 display of gripping moments, glitched games and great commentary.
I’ve compiled a list of the what I think were the highlights of the event, based on how entertaining the games were, how impressive the runners were, and how cool some of the spectacles were to watch.
This list is a compilation of the best runs throughout the event, spanning races to co-op, blind-runs to glitch exhibition.
Watching SGDQ 2015 over the past week helped to prove two things to me. The first is that regardless of the game, watching someone who has devoted their time into mastering anything is mesmerizing regardless if the game was Tetris: Grandmaster, Mario: Lost Levels, or Super Noah’s Ark 3D. The second that should be apparent is that playing a game quickly is hard. To have small (1/60 – 5/60 per second) frame windows to inputs, mastering complex rhythm sensitive button combinations, and knowing how to react to during long sessions of concentration is something to admire. But some games can be made to be played faster, like the video below:
Rockman 4: Burst Chasers is a rom hack of Rockman 3 played at a high gameloop and that speed makes all the difference in terms of difficulty with the game. Think of strapping a blaster to Sonic and throwing him into the Megaman world.
The game was intended to be played at the pace and speed of Megaman, fast enough to get and understanding of the world and decent enough time to react to it. Throw Sonic into this world and it becomes a chaotic mess. The only thing that a player can do is to try and take it slow, like Megaman would, until you develop the reaction enough and are comfortable enough with RockSonic to run through the world at the speed that RockSonic was intended to run at, or memorize the game world to know when to do what action.
Summer Games Done Quick 2015 has wrapped up this morning. The event raised around 1.25 million during the week long charity stream where around 125 games and 140 players donated their time and expertise to give the gaming community an entertaining 24/7 display of gripping moments, glitched games and great commentary.
Background
For the uninitiated, the point of the Games Done Quick community is to beat a game as quickly as possible. For any given game, there is a pocketed community that devotes hours in finding the fastest path, developing the best execution and discovers the newest time savers. Completing a game can mean many things to many people. The categories are typically:
Any % (Complete the game with any percent of the game completed)
100% (Complete the game with everything collected)
Glitchless (Complete the game without unintended exploits)
Race (Compete against other players to beat the game as quickly as possible) – used more for games with heavy randomness throughout the game.
The Speed Running community is a fantastic example of people who take every opportunity to transition all games from a Reaction to Planned Gameplay. They approach every game with its predefined rules and regardless of how well a game teaches you a mechanic, the speed runners put in the time to perfect the most opportune route and routine in getting from the start to the end of the game. They epitomize the idea of “Reaction Gameplay + Time = Planned Gameplay” by learning all of the inadequacies of the player’s abilities and the gamespace’s rules and manipulating them to get a more optimized path for faster completion, and shaving frames, seconds or even minutes off of runtimes by understanding what can be done by the player and what will happen in the gamespace when the player performs the action.
GameIntrospection 