Semantic Nonsense: SGDQ 2022 in revue

One of my favorite fundraisers of the year is Summer Games Done Quick. You may have noticed this already.

The GDQ events not only support some quality charities (the Summer version covers Médecins Sans Frontières), they do it with a low overhead and have been far more entertaining to me than any telethon ever has.

I was at odds about whether to do my usual post-Games Done Quick post this year, as I hadn’t had the time to dig into nearly as many runs as I have historically done. I’ve certainly seen enough to make a post about it, sure, but I’m less confident I’ve found all the runs I want to shout-out. Still, that’s a poor excuse to not feature the ones I do know of.

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Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World by SethBling, IsoFrieze in 11:55

I’m starting off with the most ridiculous thing I saw the whole stream (and it wasn’t even in the silly block): Beating all five games in Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World by using the game to reprogram the cartridge.

About the only thing more ridiculous than the trick itself was how they recovered from flubbing it live.

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The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019) by TGH, Glan in 1:40:32

While it wouldn’t have sped up the seashell hunt, I really should have waited on streaming Link’s Awakening myself so I could try out some of the tech. Alas.

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King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! by davidtki in 27:46

There’s something I find conceptually funny about speedrunning a point-and-click adventure game. Though I think it would be funnier to speedrun a text parser game in which a world record would come down to typing speed.

But given the lack of any (known) beneficial glitches in King’s Quest V, this run is also one of the noteworthy pure execution runs. And because almost everything you can do in the game is required, it’s a hair’s breadth away from a 100% run, as well.

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Final Fantasy VI: Worlds Collide randomizer by drewlith, DoctorDT, seto kiaba and Jexvrok in 1:44:23

I suppose there was no chance of not plugging this one. I really enjoy randomizers. I really enjoy speedrun races. And I really, really enjoy Final Fantasy VI. The only reason it wasn’t the first VOD I watched was because I did not encounter it right away.

This four-way race has it all. Informative commentary, divergent routing, lead shifts and at least one huge mistake. It’s a little hard to keep up with the action at times, given how quickly everyone blasts through menus and dialog boxes, but it’s still one heck of a race.

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Mega Man: Powered Up by WhiteHat94 in 31:43

It’s a solid run, but I’m mostly featuring this in order to bring more attention to the existence of Mega Man: Powered Up.

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Kaizo Super Metroid by Oatsngoats in 2:28:19

Super Metroid runs have a long tradition at GDQ, and are in extreme danger of being worn out. This extreme ROM hack spiced things up nicely.

Kaizo Super Metroid really needs to be seen to be believed. It requires skills and machine-like consistency far beyond what was seen in last year’s “Impossible” Super Metroid hack.

This is technically a speed run of the hack, as some major glitches are employed to take a shortcut through individual rooms, two pickups are skipped, and the animals are not saved. But it cuts out so little of a game I could never in a million years hope to beat myself.