Semantic Nonsense: Summer games done late

Your regularly scheduled stream will not be seen tonight. In its place, we present a short expansion on Tuesday’s coverage as I’ve slipped a few more in. I expect Magnus to be livid that none of the Ocarina of Time runs have made it into my schedule yet.

If it doesn’t seem like too much padding, I might finish my list for you next week.

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Pokémon Emerald by Keizaron, 360Chrism, Shenanagans, adef in 3:14:04

This was a wild randomized run of Pokemon Emerald where not only were movesets, wild and trainer pokemon, TMs and item placements randomized, but also every pokemon will evolve to a randomly selected pokemon at every level up. The result is a chaotic mess where runners are desperately improvising at all times to keep making progress.

And as an added kicker, it’s a relay run where control of the game changes to the next runner at each evolution.

It’s a long video, but it was a ton of fun. I particularly enjoyed an early and ridiculously escalating struggle to get past the first gym leader. But where the run really shines is putting four experts together so you can listen to them talking out strategy for the various trainer fights.

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Super Mario Maker 2 by PangaeaPanga, juzcook, CarlSagan42, Aurateur, Shoujo, TanukiDan

While I said on Tuesday that the Super Metroid finale GDQ tradition was getting tired, a slightly newer one is — in my humble opinion — as fresh as the first time they did it: A team vs. team relay race of specially crafted Mario Maker levels.

We see all sorts of wild and fun things (but only because somebody else is being made to play them instead of you) as the creativity of the modders never fails to amaze. But the final level alone is worth the price of entry; it’s just a wonderful adventure that pushes the mechanics of Super Mario Maker 2‘s Link mode to their limits.

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Incredible Crisis by bramhallthefifth in 55:19

There isn’t much in the way of speedrunning tech in this game. I’m featuring it here for the same reason SGDQ featured it: It’s a weird-ass game you’ve probably never heard of.

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Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance by JupiterClimb in 40:50

Games Done Quick has seen a lot of Castlevania games, but never before has Harmony of Dissonance made the cut. Harmony always did suffer from middle-child syndrome, with Circle of the Moon being the first and Aria of Sorrow being the best of the GBA titles.

The bread-and-butter glitch of this run allows you to pile on a considerable amount of damage quickly. It looks like it should have been easy for me to stumble upon by accident (even if I wouldn’t have been able to figure out why it happened), but I somehow have never triggered it in my many playthroughs of this game back in the day.

Konami’s recent release of the game as part of the Castlevania Advance Collection added a new trick that really cut down on backtracking travel time: Quicksaving your progress (but not your location) and reloading it at the last used real save point. It’s too bad I don’t have a point of reference for how much time it saved or how different the routing is.