Year: 2024

The 30th Anniversary Edition of the Game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I’m trying to include these timelines whenever I make a post about something that’s gone on for a bit

Okay, this is mostly from memory, so here goes. And it’s impossible to talk

about this subject without launching into a discursive and random mode of writing that may be funny but often comes off as annoying if one doesn’t have the writing skill of a Footlights alum who was friends with the Pythons (Monty) and once script-edited for classic Doctor Who. I apologize for that, but understand that reading the book version in large part warped my writing style for decades. I think I’ve gotten better since then, but I doubt it.

So in the beginning Douglas Adams created a hilarious sci-fi comedy radio show called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then there was an album, then a TV show, then most improbably, a text adventure game from Infocom back at their height. One might think, surely a movie is next, right? And you’d be correct (2005), but because Hollywood is a twisty maze of executives all alike, only after 13 years after the last book had passed (1992), along with the life of Douglas Adams (2001), and somehow from the Disney company (still around).

Brushed aluminum styling!

The history of the whole thing is involved, and I already covered much of it in a previous post. This post is just to point out the updated, 30th Anniversary edition of the web version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the BBC’s website. It replaced the 20th Anniversary edition. If they keep to the pattern, there should soon be a 40th Anniversary edition, but there’s been no sight of one yet.

Web version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide text adventure game on the BBC’s website (bbc.co.uk)

Previously on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The fan-made sequel, Milliways

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!!

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

It’s a little risky to post this, because it’s a joke video game page on Tripod from 2001 that still somehow persists on the internet in 2024. I have to imagine that Phred is in his mid-to-late 40s by now. There’s several long pages here from that site, and there’s always the chance that a racist or neo-nazi joke, from an age when kids thought lightly of such things, could be lurking somewhere in there. Please understand it as a product of its time. It’s an amateurish site, but it has a lot of energy behind it.

I think it’s still worth looking at as a reminder of that age of the internet, which had many bad things about it, but also a lot of good things. I don’t know which this is. It contains a number of pretty dumb graphics hacks for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and/or its successor released after Nintendo’s licensing deal with Tyson ran out. Those hacks can be found here, although the background (the words “Master Phred” in fancy letters) makes the descriptions and download links really hard to read. (Try highlighting the text.) If you follow a few links, you can find actual NES Punch-Out rom downloads, which it’s even more amazing to find on a website in 2024.

Among the hacked characters are a robot, Doc Louis and Zelda, sure

The characters page includes, among other hacked characters like Rick and Nick Bruiser from the SNES Punch-Out, a character named after the Wii Punch-Out opponent Disco Kid, which indicates this page has to have been updated since 2009. There’s a links page where every outgoing link, other than GameFAQs, is broken, and a secrets page where most of the secrets are fake.

Well there it is, Phred’s Cool Punch-Out. You’ve survived 23 years. May you live a hundred more.

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!! (tripod.com)

The Marquee and Instruction Card For Vs. Super Mario Bros.

Vs. Super Mario Bros. was the arcade version of Super Mario Bros., which made it to US arcades a few months after the NES release. It’s a much harder game than the home version, with levels brought in from the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, and operator adjustments that can make it even more difficult.

A little remarked-upon aspect of the game is that it came about before the drawn character design of Mario and his enemies had been solidified, at least in the US, so the official arcade release of SMB had a weird marquee, with an image design that was never drawn upon by later releases:

Image scavenged from gameongrafix.com

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the flyer they distributed to promote the game when it was going to be titled Mario’s Adventure:

And even more interesting, it had this title card. Behold, an official Mario looking meaner than he ever had before or has since!

Can’t sleep. Mario will kill me.

Sundry Sunday: Ending Animation for The Mystery of the Druids

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I forget exactly where I saw it, but I observed, in pieces, a playthrough of the 2001 adventure game The Mystery of the Druids. It may have been during Awful Block at an earlier GDQ, or on some other stream. it was something. Actually, a thing. One thing. Just one.

(Amazingly, you can buy the game on Steam, and as I write this it’s like a dollar. One dollar. Just one. But the reviews indicate it has really serious bugs, so even that is probably too much.)

Besides constantly pronouncing the word druid as drood, the game’s notable for starring a police detective, Halligan, who frequently does things one might think unworthy of law enforcement. Not a great pillar of virtue, that Halligan.

The game itself doesn’t have a great ending, so someone on Youtube made their own version. It’s two minutes long, and it follows below. It is much more enjoyable than the actual game.

Bringle’s Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

I wish that these videos weren’t always videos. A lot of this information would be delivered just as effectively in text, but these days a lot of game researchers have abandoned good old text for flashy video, or otherwise locked-off Discord servers that don’t add to our common body of knowledge. I’ve complained about this before, and I am liable to keep complaining about it. Because I’m right about this, and yet it doesn’t change. Get to fixing this, world!

The video (21 minutes) has a lot of interesting changes though. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has sustained a huge amount of fan interest over the years, due to its story being actually really good for a Mario game, it’s terrific sense of humor, and its deep gameplay. It’s generally agreed to be the highlight of the whole Paper Mario series, building on the ideas of the first game.

This is a good opportunity to muse upon what the gameplay merits of TYD are. I identify these:

  • The combat system, which keeps most of your moves useful in different ways by giving them special properties that make intuitive sense. Jumps can’t hit spiked enemies or enemies on the ceiling, while hammer attacks only hit the first enemy in line and can’t hit enemies in the air. There are exceptions to these rules, but they’re more costly. Follower attacks also have their own limitations along these lines.
  • The action commands, and Guard and Superguard functions. Paper Mario wasn’t the first JRPG to add a timed minigame to combat (that may have been Super Mario RPG), but the design here is very good. Most moves have an action command minigame where good performance increases the move’s power. Guard reduces the damage taken from attacks by pressing a button in a brief time window, while Superguard negates damage if a different button is pressed in a briefer time window. The button you press changes both the difficulty and the reward. Both aren’t easy to perform consistently, as many enemy attacks have tricky timing, but the Superguard bonus is great enough that it’s really tempting to use it. All three of these functions largely replace the general randomness and variance in JRPG combat, making it a lot more skill-based. (Finding ways for players to demonstrate skill in RPG-style games is a long-standing design challenge. I should write something about that here in the future!)
  • And then there’s the joy of exploration, and the many secrets in the game world that reward it. Paper Mario had a bunch of them, but TYD really goes overboard. I can’t name a game with as much cool stuff thrown into its game world for players to just happen upon. The old line used in many Nintendo game manuals is to “try everything,” but how much of everything should the player really try? TYD is one of the few games that feels like it lives up to the true breadth of that word. There is a character in the game whose purpose is to give the player hints at finding obscure secrets. The Trouble Center offers further rewards and fleshes out the game world by giving Mario and friends the opportunity to perform helpful tasks for people. There’s so many things to do!

Super Paper Mario also had a lot of tricks, but it had a worse story (IMO), and it completely abandoned the classic Paper Mario battle system. Later Paper Mario games went in a completely different direction with unique battle systems for each. It was Thousand Year Door that got the most right in a single game.

So, um. The video! Yes, watch it, it’s interesting.

Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Youtube, 21 minutes)

On the History of Wizardry

Once upon a time, there was Wizardry, and nothing else. Welllll-l-l… almost nothing else. Here’s a makeshift timeline of CRPGs and CRPG-like released leading up to the original Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

Don’t be fooled by this chart, where Wizardry happens to appear at the end. Most of these games were not widely available. Anything for a PDP or PLATO would only have been playable by a select few. Apshai and Ultima I were more widely available than their predecessors, but Wizardry was substantially deeper than either of them, and wasn’t surpassed for a while. For a time, it was the benchmark in the field, and inspired its own substantial subgenre, which we’ve heard called blobbers in the past. (Set Side B on blobbers previously, including an extensive list of them.)

Blobbers get their name because a whole RPG adventuring party is considered to exist filling one space in a first-person view of a dungeon grid, but it’s not really a great name because the defining characteristic of this sort of game isn’t the unity of the party but the view of the maze. Creating a first person maze of this type was a popular early graphical trick, because it was easy to program, and could be drawn on a tile-based display or possibly even a terminal. Blobbers continued to rule the roost for first-person games until the foundation of the first person shooters with id Software’s Catacomb-3D and Wolfenstein 3D, and more atmospheric 3D CRPGs like Origin’s Ultima Underworld.

Video and computer games are a field terribly unkind to their legacy. You might point to Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man and such as examples of games where decades-old originals are still known and played, but numerically speaking they are greatly outnumbered by the lost and nearly-forgotten. Games that used to be well known among all game-playing computer users are now mere footnotes, due to their companies going under, or their IPs being owned by uncaring megacorps interested only in milking their very most profitable properties YES I’M TALKING ABOUT ELECTRONIC ARTS. Ahem.

Wizardry is one of the foremost examples of this. For a while it was the best-selling computer RPG around, and its sequels did well for a long while. Wizardry VII was released in 1992, but then its successor Wizardry 8, a landmark title that finally brought the series into true 3D, took nine years to finish, and was sadly released right around the time of the demise of publisher Sir-Tech, although their Canadian branch lasted until 2oo3.

After Sir-Tech Software shut its doors, the series’ torch was held aloft for a long while by a succession of Japanese developers, beginning with ASCII Entertainment. Many of these games are still extremely obscure to the Western world, which seems odd considering how connected we’ve all become. We don’t even know if Robert Woodhead had anything to do with the first of the Japanese games, Wizardry Gaiden. The Japanese Wizardly line is all over the place aesthetically, but in play sticks by the formula of the very earliest games: spell ranks, permadeath, and tricky mazes. Despite being made for systems as varied as the Super Famicom and the PlayStation II, in gameplay they’re all of the Apple II orchard with limited additions. Despite being much that we don’t know, we still know a fair bit, due to an amazing 2020 article on the blog of the CRPG Addict written by “Alex,” with a great comments thread, that all deserves to be etched in stone and set forever on a monument in the middle of the town square of Llylgamyn.

It is more than a mere shame that all of these games remain effectively locked off from the country of Wizardry’s origin. An aging legion of players from the days of the Apple II has no idea that, in a land half a world away, 35 more Wizardry games, with gameplay with a clear recognizable link to the originals, were made and enjoyed. Maybe some day those games will be made more accessible to English-speaking audiences, the ones that aren’t now lost forever, at least.

I’ve said all of this, and I haven’t even gotten to what I had originally intended to be the subject of the piece, the terrific remake of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord made by Digital Eclipse. Perhaps it’s best to hold off on that for a couple of days. Soon!

P.S. If anyone knows of easy-to-learn open source timeline making software, I’d greatly like to know of it, or even if there’s a good Excel or (preferably) LibreOffice add-on for that purpose.

GDQ Animations on GitHub

It turns out that the various animations that Games Done Quick uses are all in a repository on GitHub, where you can download them and run them yourself, and even make contributions if that is something you feel up for. The require Node.js, and a little command line use and tinkering to get started (it turns out you’re supposed to run npm install from within the repository folder, not from outside of it as implied by the instructions).

The repository can be obtained here. I got it working, and here are some of the displays running from my own machine. And don’t forget that SGDQ 2024 is still going!

GDQ Animation Repository (github.com)

Wolf Link’s Tears of the Kingdom Minimalist Playthrough

I’ve been waiting a while to post this one. Right now SGDQ 2024 is acclimating everyone to games being played very quickly, but this post is about a game being played over a long, long period, so by comparison, it should feel even looooonger. Longer than you’d expect maybe from the run being called minimalist.

Wolf Link has, for ten months, been trying to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in a minimalist fashion. By their definition, minimalist means getting a 100% map completion. That doesn’t seem too obvious, does it? But 100% map, which is the closest the game has to declaring you’ve finished 100% of the game. There is no 100% game completion counter. Filling out all of the map is as close as it gets.

That’s still a whole lot of things. It means unlocking all the towers, getting all the Korok seeds, and doing absolute everything need to get everything to appear on the map. What Wolf Link means by minimalist is going as little as possible beyond that, regarding to changes in world and game state.

For example. There’s a sword on the ground. You pick up the sword, and it makes the little item-discovered jingle for finding a type of item the first time, and putting its name up in a little description box. That’s not okay, because now Link knows about that kind of item, so go back to your last save.

Discovering a few types of items like this is unavoidable. Anything that has to be discovered in order to fill out all of the map, well, that can’t be helped, right? But what actually has to be done to get to that point? Are there sneaky ways around collecting essential items? And there are a lot of items that, the first time they’re collected, mark themselves on the run in an indelible way. Most items, in fact. Getting items out of chests that don’t respawn is also outlawed if there’s any way to get to 100% without it. Completing shines is also forbidden after the first four, so the whole game is played with four hearts and one stamina wheel, or later, possibly, three hearts and a little over one stamina wheel.

In Tears of the Kingdom, however, there’s still lots of things you can do. All of the powers you pick up in the first shrines, as it turns out, are essential to getting 100%, so all of those abilities are open. Meaning, especially, you get Ultrahand and the ability to glue things together. Getting Zonai items in capsules isn’t allowed, but using those that are found around Hyrule in the field is. The precise rules are laid out on the Rules tab of the document here.

Another interesting thing, it turns out, that you can do, that turns out to be essential in this challenge, is [spoilers]: unlocking Mineru, the Sage of the Spirit Temple that players aren’t even told about until finishing the other four temples, can be done first. She can be the first sage you get! And the useful thing about that is that Zonai devices can be attached to her, then she can be ridden to use those devices at will. Unlocking her early though by the rules of the Minimalist Run requires doing the Thunderhead Isles in the Sky without clearing the thunderstorm, which is no mean trick.

Over ten months the series has gotten up to 34 videos, and there’s quite a ways to go. The journey already is a long one, but here it is as it stands:

Earthbound Battle Backgrounds Website

This interesting, and even slightly useful, website combines the various layers that the cult classic SNES JRPG Earthbound uses to construct its funky battle backgrounds. There are more combinations here than actually appear in the game. There is a GIF-making function, but it seems to be broken for the moment. You can still make them full-screen and save screenshots, that’s what I did, though unfortunately doing it that way means they aren’t animated.

Here are a few still examples.

Earthbound Battle Backgrounds (a bona-fide website!)

Baseball Bits on Barry Bonds

Here’s a really different post on something that only borrows the aesthetics from video games, but does so in an entertaining way. It’s the Youtube series Baseball Bits on the channel Foolish Baseball, which makes explainers about a lot of different topics related to baseball. Not video baseball; real, Major League Baseball. As such I normally wouldn’t be too interested, but they do a good job of their explanations, and it’s not difficult to follow along.

As an example, here is their recent 19-minute piece on controversial baseball superstar and incredible hulk Barry Bonds, that distills the essence of his long career into four plate appearances.

If this is of absolutely no interest to you, believe me, I understand. I don’t intend to turn this into a real-life sports blog any time soon. But I thought the use of 16-bit video game aesthetics to talk about something that has nothing direct to do with video games is interesting. It’s possible that this pixel-art kind of vibe has staying power, and people will still be referring to it, making it, enjoying it decades to come. Hey I can dream, right?

If you want to find out more about this “Barry Bonds” person, it’s even further afield, but Jon Bois at Secret Base did a great demonstration of the fear he projected upon the sport of baseball in his own video asking: what if Barry Bonds played baseball without a bat? (13 minutes)

Now that that’s done, I’m going to play video games for a while, and try to forget that there ever was such a thing as professional sports. Ta!

Sundry Sunday: Zelda and Link are Gremlins Actually

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I thought the colloquialism was goblins? Gremlins fits pretty well for these videos though. Take a look. They’re all from Youtube animator RibbitSpell.

The first (1 1/2 minutes) is where the post title comes from, positing a time after all the adventure stuff is over and Link and Zelda are just hanging out and doing whatever. What did they get up to after Tears of the Kingdom? Why don’t we ever see them just hanging out? The games rarely tell us, so a lot of room is left for fans to fill in the gaps:

The title of the second (1 minute), “Zelda but you play as Zelda,” leaves out that you play as gremlin Zelda.

And one more, Ganon’s Rude Re-Awakening (30 seconds).

We get versions where Link is a cartoon character, where there’s four Links and where Link dies over and over and where he’s a train conductor, and now (at last) where we play as Zelda. Why don’t we get an official take where Link and Zelda canonically team up to cause random silly trouble all across Hyrule? Probably leaving Old Man Ganon to shake his fist at them as they run away, having left flaming sacks of dog crap on the doorstep of his big evil castle.

SGDQ 2024 Begins Tomorrow!

The past couple of years of Games Done Quick, the best-known speedrunning charity marathon out there, has seen contributions decline a bit, but it still brings in over two million dollars each year. Here’s wishing them well for their next major event, which begins tomorrow, June 30th!

Every time a GDQ happens I make a huge post about interesting games (to me) when they’re being run, and what’s interesting about them. This here is that post for SGDQ 2024. Times given are US Eastern time, so count three hours earlier for Pacific, four hours later to get to Greenwich Mean. Lettuce bee gin!

Sunday, June 30th

1 PM – Yoshi’s Story, All Melons: Yoshi’s Story, the N64 Yoshi game, was often derided when it came out as a kiddie game. You have to remeber, back then everyone was up in arms that there existed Barney the Dinosaur. But as often happens with Nintendo, there’s more going on with Yoshi’s Story than there seems at first. Not only is it the first Nintendo game to use the handmade arts & crafts appearance gimmick, but it’s really a score attack game, and the way to get the highest score is to collect melons. Every level is full of fruit, and eating 30 of any kind will finish the level. You can sometimes finish a level really quickly that way. But the best fruit is Melons, and there’s only 30 Melons in every level. Doing an all-melon run turns a quick and easy game into an ordeal, requiring you to actually play through all of each level, and that’s what this run is trying for.

3:50 PM – Mega Man 9: MM9 came out in 2008, 16 years ago. Can you believe it? I can, I’ve learned to stop being surprised at the passage of time. More time has passed since the release of MM9 than had passed between it and the release of the last NES Mega Man game, Mega Man 6. I don’t enjoy making you feel old, but I feel like, if I have to feel old, then you have to too.

6:07 PM – Splatoon 3: Side Order, New Game+: This is the recent DLC, so a lot of rapidly-evolving tech should be available to see.

7:00 PM – Pokemon Violet, Teal Mask: This is also DLC, for an endgame continuation of Violet’s story. Pokemon speedruns tend to be highlights of each GDQ.

9:o4 PM – Halo 2, Legendary Difficulty: Surprise, I’m calling out a non-Nintendo (Nontendo?) game! This is the PC version too.

10:49 PM – Tomb Raider I Remastered, Any% Glitched: The game is Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, but the run is just the remake of the first game. If you remember the original fondly and never checked in with the remakes, this is a good chance to see what you’ve been missing. (Apparently, what you’ve been missing is glitches!)

Monday, July 1st

12:16 AM (that’s 16 minutes after midnight) – Enter the Gungeon, Rainbow Turbo All Flows (No AWP) Race: Roguelite games and randomizers are always great spectacles, because you aren’t watching people who have practiced doing the same exactly thing for hundreds of hours. They’re playing the game in a more interactive way, reacting to the spicy mean the game serves them up. “Rainbow” mode means the game spawns a variety of items at the beginning of each floor, including two items guaranteed to be of high quality. The player can only take one of them though.

5:27 AM – Smart Ball: As GDQ events have evolved, 8-bit and 16-bit games have gotten less common.

7:50 AM – Live A Live, Twilight of Edo Japan, Present Day and Prehistory Eras: The remake of the Super Famicom JRPG classic that was released about a year ago. This is only covering three of the nine chapters of the game, but since they’re largely self-contained it works out. They picked three of the most interesting chapters. Twilight of Edo is a terrific branching scenario, reminiscent of the most complex TTRPG modules, with many ways to tackle it. Present Day by contrast is the shortest chapter, consisting of only a series of boss battles. And Prehistory is a fairly traditional JRPG story, with the caveat that it’s nearly wordless through.

8:45 AM – Ecco: The Tides of Time, and 9:27 AM – Puggsy: Two Genesis games, not often seen at GDQ, and both about half an hour long.

10:49 AM – Turnip Boy Robs A Bank: The sequel to the comedy indie title Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, which has appeared at GDQ events before.

1:41 PM – Sonic Project ’06; 2:21 PM – Sonic Robo Blast 2; 3:08 PM – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles: A whole buncha Sonic, two of them fan creations. Sonic Project ’06 is a WIP remake of the infamous 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game. Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a fangame, also in development, that uses the Doom engine. And S3&K is the “complete” version of Sonic 3 on the Genesis, the version that comes about by attaching its cartridge to Sonic & Knuckles with that game’s “lock-on technology.”

7:00 PM – Spelunky, All Journal Entries: Another roguelite. Winning the game, and through Hell, is necessary, but only the beginning.

8:05 – Bonus Game: Balatro, 3 Deck Random Seed, Skipless: Balatro is still teh hotenss at the moment. I’ve played lots of it, so naturally I’m going to point it out here. A “3 Deck” run seems to mean winning the game three times (finishing Ante 8), each with a different deck. Not being able to skip is a substantial drawback.

Tuesday, July 2nd

2:05 AM – Doom 64 (2020), “Watch Me Die Speed”: Watch Me Die seems to be like classic Doom’s Ultra-Violence difficulty. I don’t know what Watch Me Die Speed is.

4:52 AM – Castlevania Legends: A disliked Gameboy installment in the series.

5:32 AM – Haunted Castle: The much worse first Castlevania arcade game. The fact that it’s as GDQ yet says 1CC attempt should say everything that needs saying about its difficulty.

8:21 AM – Virtual Boy Wario Land: A rare chance to see a Virtual Boy game played live, and at 22 minutes, it may not even be long enough to get a headache.

10:07 AM – Little Samson: This game is hugely expensive on the collector’s market. Come see why? I jest, we know why: rarity. This game marks the beginning of several other interesting titles: Mega Man X5 for Playstation, Mega Man 4 for NES, Sunset Riders for SNES, then a Wii port of Chibi-Robo as a bingo race, and then…

2:14 PM – Katamari Forever: The music will be stuck in your head for days.

4:58 PM – Quake II Enhanced (2023), N64 Maps, 100% Kills & Secrets

10:22 PM – The Outer Wilds, 100% Base Game Shipless: This is the game with the time loop, not The Outer Worlds. I always get them mixed up.

11:52 PM – Undertale Yellow, True Pacifist: A fangame based on Undertale. Might be interesting.

Wednesday, July 3rd

2:11 AM – Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, Any% No Major Glitches or Manipulation: An underrated JRPG from the SNES days. The first game was all JRPG, but the second added interesting Zelda-like puzzles, and is considered to be the highlight of the series.

7:57 AM – Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, both Episode 1

2:46 PM – PowerWash Simulator, SpongeBob DLC with 6 players: How much do you want to bet someone will pull out a Squidward impression?

4:50 PM – Super “Sonic Saves the World” World, Abridged%: This is a romhack with a humorous angle. Since it’s a kaizo hack, it may be one of your few chances to see the gags outside of Youtube playthroughs.

5:50 PM – Kaizo Mario Galaxy: Oh sure let’s keep going with the brain-killing difficulty hacks. At least they’ll be playing it, and not me.

7:30 PM – Old School Runescape, Chambers of Xeric Solo: I know at least one person who’ll be excited to hear about this. Maybe you’ll be excited about it too?

Thursday, July 4th

3:07 AM – Monster Party: Why not kick off US Independence Day with this Japanese-made platformer parody of horror movie tropes?

10:53 AM – Pokemon White 2: Another of those crazy Pokemon runs, this one 3 1/2 hours long.

5:03 PM – Tetris: The Grand Master, Master Mode: Only fifteen minutes long, so set an alarm. This isn’t like the Gameboy or NES versions, the TGM games get fast quickly and only get faster. Soon they’ll be at “20G” and the pieces will effectively spawn in the bin, and the player will have to rely on lockdown delay to survive.

7:00 PM – Halo 3, 4 player Co-op on Legendary Difficulty: I include these as a nod to all the FPS fans out there.

8:43 PM – Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball: A sports game from the nearly-forgotten time before Electronic Arts locked down the rights to most professional sports under what seems to be a perpetual license. One of those seated at the couch for this one is Peanut Butter the Dog. An actual dog of course, not the Bojack Horseman character. It’d be hard for a cartoon character to sit on a physical couch.

10:07 PM – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Reverse Boss Order: “Reverse Boss Order” means using various tricks to find and fight the bosses in the opposite order than as the developers intended. I don’t know how that works in a game where the second half is gated behind a mandatory boss fight. Maybe there’s a glitchy skip. We can find out what they mean by this together.

11:32 PM – Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix: There are people in this world who adore the KH games. Personally I find it fun to make up titles. Kingdom Hearts: Unfortunate Destiny Eternal! Kingdom Hearts: Thirty-two Squared Ultra Power! Kingdom Hears: The Wrath of Michael Eisner! Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days! Oops, that one’s real. Note this run is over 2 1/2 hours.3;

Friday, July 5th

2:32 AM – System Shock (Remake)

4:42 AM – Mr. Run and Jump: Hey, I did a Q&A with the creators last year! I wonder if they’ll call in during the run with a donation?

5:29 AM – The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, All Main Quests: We all must know by now that Morrowind can be completed in less than three minutes, right? This one pads it out to almost half an hour by requiring all the main quests to be finished.

6:07 AM – Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Ephraim Route: There’s nothing in the description saying there won’t be RNG manipulation, so expect this one to be exploitastic.

7:39 AM – Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, New Game+ Campaign Character Bid War: Except the memes to fly by faster than you can notice.

9:28 AM – Stardew Valley, Skull Caverns 100 Glitchless 4 Player: The Skull Caves are randomly generated, so this is like another roguelite hidden in the schedule.

10:48 – The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, All Dungeons (Swordless): One of those runs where you just want to see how they do it.

12:37 PM – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Co-op Randomizer: Randomizers often make for interesting runs. The way co-op randomizers usually work is, there’s software running that watches both players playing a rom each randomized with the same seed, and when one of them finds an item, the other player is also awarded it.

3:37 PM – Super Mario Bros., Any%: Just six minutes are allocated for this one.

7:00 PM – Super Mario World, Kaizo Relay Race: Well frizz my hair and call me a toilet brush, it’s another kaizo Mario World hack. The two teams are the Groovy Goombas and the Funky Fuzzies. Expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

9:15 PM – Bonus Game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Defeat Ganon No SRM: SRM stands for “Stale Reference Manipulation.” It means that player frozenflygone won’t use a particularly glichy way to make the game, speaking technically, babble and foam at the mouth. They might use other gimmicks, but not that one.

9:55 PM – WACCA Reverse: Lately GDQ marathons have reserved a period of time for showing off someone utterly ruling at a Japanese arcade rhythm game, and that’s what this is this time.

11:36 PM – Grand Poo World 3: Another Mario World kaizo hack, made by a popular runner.

Saturday, July 6th

1:31 AM – Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Extreme NG+: Which one was this again?

6:47 AM – Hyperbolica: Another game where I interviewed its creator. I was hoping that their second game, the brilliant and mindwarping 4D Golf, would show up this time. Hyperbolica is brilliant and mindwarping too though. If you don’t know what it is yet, it’s an exploratory game set in a first-person perspective where you explore worlds that exist on a hyperbolic plane, a kind of non-Euclidian geometry. Parallel lines diverge at a distance! Regular pentagons have right-angled corners! Utter madness!

10:22 AM – Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire: Ah, a classic Sierra adventure game! I’m surprised that there are so few DOS games at GDQ overall.

12:01 PM – Kirby’s Adventure, No Major Glitches: There’s more NES games in the lineup than at past events, and this is a pretty terrific one.

2:07 PM – Pizza Tower, Any%, Noise, No Major Glitches: Pizza Tower is a recent indie success story, a rollicking game with art that looks like it came from a 90s cartoon like Rocko’s Modern Life, and with gameplay heavily inspired by Wario Land 4. “Noise” replaces main character Peppino with a different character with a different moveset, that makes traversing the same levels a different experience.

4:31 PM – Super Mario 64 Randomizer, 10 Star Blindfolded: Blindfolded runs have been highlighs of GDQ for several years now, but what will that mean to a randomized game?

5:26 PM – Baldur’s Gate 3, Honour Mode, Glitchless: Honour Mode means high difficulty and, if your party wipes, the game ends without recourse to saves (although games can still be continued outside of Honour Mode). Baldur’s Gate 3, along with Balatro, are the games of the hour, so a lot of you will want to tune in for it.

7:10 PM – Super Metroid, Race: Super Metroid race runs are a GDQ tradition. Whenever a donation says “kill the animals,” they aren’t expressing actual murderous intent, and when they say to save them it isn’t an additional expression of kindness. At the end of Super Metroid, during the escape sequence, there is a room that players can visit slightly off the main track that can allow them to let some creatures that aided them during the game to escape the decaying planet Zebes. There’s no game benefit to it, and skipping the room enables a player to finish the game maybe 30 seconds faster, but it’s a popular choice to save them anyway. In a race between two skilled players though, 30 seconds can easily cost them the victory, so they ask the viewers whether to save them or not, so both will be on equal footing in that regard.

8:10 PM – Bonus Game: Super Mario Maker 2: Nintendo seems to have abandoned the Mario Maker series, but it’s still a popular fixture at GDQ. I have qualms with how so many makers, and players, focus their efforts in constructing and completing hellishly difficult levels, but it’s true, they are popular. Bonus Games in the schedule are donation incentives, and are only played if targets are met, so this may not occur. Usually incentive targets are made in time, but not always.

9:15 PM – Elden Ring, Glitchless: Come see the popular soulslike get dissected like a frog on a workbench.

…and, at the end…

11:20 PM – Super Mario RPG Remake: this is listed as an RTA, or “Real Time Attack,” which I think is just their way of saying, they’re playing it through? But isn’t that just Any%? Anyway, it’s a new game that looks a lot like an old and popular one, you can see how far they’ve come along in destroying it since its release. I’m supposing that the remake of Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door will be in this slot come January.