Awesome Games Done Quick is always a great time of the year. This year is of course a little sadder than usual, as the AGDQ pile – a crowd of fans shouting support from behind the speedrunners on stream – won’t be possible, thanks to this pandemic happening. Nonetheless, the charity fundraising flow continues, and it’s a packed schedule as always.
This year’s AGDQ began on Sunday, January 3 with a period of less than 45 minutes Mirror’s Edge, and from then on things got better with speedruns on the SNES, N64, and Game Boy Advance.
Today (Monday January 4) the line-up has been recorded so far Pikmin 2, Yooka-Laylee, and Startropics on the NES, with the usual AGDQ Sonic chunk taking place at the time of writing (must go fast).
Highlights from the coming days include Hades, which will be played to completion on Tuesday, January 5, in just over an hour (don’t tune in if you don’t want spoilers, of course), a one-forty hour run Skyward Sword on Wednesday a performance of the unrated CD-i Zelda game, Gamelon’s magic wand, on Thursday and, for the first (and probably last) time at a GDQ event, Super Mario Bros. 35, which looks like it’s tagged by four different speedrunners.
There are also a number of TASBot runs, including the Game Boy version of Link’s Awakening, which are always worth seeing. TASBot – short for “Tool-Assisted Speedrun Robot” – is a clever little thing that takes a look at some of a game’s speedruns and uses that input to create the ultimate speedrun that is better than human hands ever could. Watch the video below to see TASBot fly through Celeste:
You can check out Awesome Games Done Quick on their Twitch page and you can check out the schedule for yourself on their website. They usually post VODs from the streams, so if you miss (or sleep) something you can watch them again on the GDQ YouTube channel.
That’s a lot of links. Have you already tuned in to AGDQ? Which speed runs are you most looking forward to? We can’t say we’re excited about the prospect of someone defeating Hades in a fraction of the time it took us, but we’ll still check it out. Discuss your opinion in the comments!