Best Speedruns Exploiting Done Quick Summer Games 2022

The Games Done Quick series of charity events has long been a favorite among game fans and Ars Technica critics alike because it combines classic and beloved video games and carefully considered methods for crushing them in pursuit of high-speed feats.

Advertising

This year’s summer episode is particularly special as it’s the first in two and a half years to take place in a physical location, albeit with some of the strictest masking and distancing requirements we’ve seen in a public show. broadcast live in 2022. (GDQ organizers appear to be reading the news, which makes sense for a series benefiting Doctors Without Borders.) Even with the precautions taken, their combination of players, commentators, and crowds in the same room has brought the excitement back to their shows, which is why we’re rounding up some of the best shows from the past week, archived on the official YouTube channel of GDQ.

The event is still ongoing as of this writing, which means you can watch it right now via his Twitch channel. The last races of the event, dedicated to elden ringIt will conclude in the early hours of Saturday, July 2.

Sayo2022, series “true ending”

If you haven’t played yet Sayo, we recommend you pause before watching this spoiler-filled adventure through many of its biggest secrets. (My review of the game from March has far fewer spoilers.) But if you’ve already collected the countless hidden pages of the game’s instruction booklet, consider it a must-have, as it includes a compelling guest in real-time commentary: Andrew Shouldice, lead designer, programmer, and game artist.

He was joined by a member of the Power-Up Audio team, who worked on the game’s soundtrack, and they leaked tons of information about how the game was created, including confirming how many great feats the game’s developers intentionally left out. At that moment, Shouldice sees a trick begin to play and tells the crowd that he programmed it to be a possibility, but that he never actually activated it himself. Moments later, the speedrunner demonstrated the trick, allowing him to go through a wall and avoid a ton of tricky content.

infinity halo2021, “no tank gun”

Quick races in many classic games include several categories, with the most broken being known as “any percentage” races, as they allow players to use as many cheats and skip as many missions as they want. For some games, these types of races can be boring to watch, and the infamous error infinity halo is not an exception.

This speedrun begins with a demonstration of the “Tank Cannon”, which fires a cannon of unlimited ammo at Master Chief’s feet. That’s a bit too much help for the likes of speed racers, but this SGDQ demo still packs a ton of wacky tricks combining geometric cutouts and otherworldly feats of physics, all powered by immediate access to Chief has a new element of grappling hook Sure, the hook allows players to move through the world much faster, but it also turns into a wild glitch that bounces players off exploding barrels in a gravity-defying way.

thunder in the sky1995, all cinematics

We don’t know if this is GDQ’s first dedicated full-motion video game (FMV) speedrun, but it’s certainly one of the goofy examples of the mid-’90s CD-ROM genre. thunder in the sky is based on the short-lived TV series of the same name, starring Terry “Hulk” Hogan alongside Jack Lemmon’s son as a crime-solving action duo on the beach, and it was as bad as it sounds. The video game version, relegated to the CD-I console, forces players to watch terribly bad live-action ion sequences between sections of small-arms fire.

In most video game speedruns, players skip as many movie scenes as possible, but GDQ opted to show the filmed footage of this game in its entirety while skipping through the gunplay parts as quickly as possible. Buckle up, brother.