Incredible games made quickly is always a great time of year. This year, of course, is a little sadder than usual, because the AGDQ clip – a crowd of fans shouting support behind the broadcast speedrunners – won’t be possible, thanks to this pandemic thing out there. However, the flow of fundraising for charity is happening, and it is a busy schedule as usual.
This year’s AGDQ started on Sunday, January 3rd, with a duration of less than 45 minutes. Mirror’s Edge, and it only got better from there, with speedruns on SNES, N64 and Game Boy Advance.
Today (Monday, January 4) the schedule has included so far Pikmin 2, Yooka-Laylee, and Startropics at NES, with the usual AGDQ sonic piece occurring at the time of writing (it has to go fast).
The highlights of the coming days include Hades, which will play until the end on Tuesday, January 5, in just over an hour (don’t tune in if you don’t want spoilers, obviously), a one-and-a-half hour sequence Sword to Heaven on Wednesday, a series of the little-liked Zelda CD-i game, The Gamelon Wand, on Thursday, and for the first (and probably last) time at a GDQ event, Super Mario Bros. 35, which appears to be being organized by four different speedrunners.
There are also some TASBot executions, including the Game Boy version of Link Awakening, which is always worth watching. TASBot – short for “Tool-Assisted Robot Speedrun” – is a smart little thing that watches a lot of speedruns from a game and then uses those inputs to create the ultimate speedrun better than human hands could ever get. Take a look at the video below to watch TASBot flying heavenly:
You can watch Awesome Games Done Quick on the Twitch page and check the schedule for yourself on the website. They usually place VODs from the streams, so if you miss (or are asleep), you can watch them again on the GDQ channel on YouTube.
Phew, there are a lot of links. Are you already in tune with AGDQ? Which speedruns are you most looking forward to? We can’t say we’re excited about the prospect of someone beating Hades in a fraction of the time it takes, but we’re still going to watch. Discuss your thoughts in the comments!