Games Done Quick Withdrawal

It's that time of the year again, huh? Well all last week was the 2021 alliteration of a little charity marathon known as Summer Games Done Quick, and I (mostly) took off the week to watch it in full while storms ravaged the area around my home. My game rooms saw no activity and I effectively wrecked my sleep schedule sleeping late and waking up earlier than usual on certain nights, especially Monday Morning's Nintendo Entertainment System block.

Overall, SGDQ2021 was a good marathon and something that I got a lot of enjoyment and hype out of especially in these times even when some minor nitpicks forming over some of the choices made for the event and the game selection. At the end of a day it was a great set with both some popular titles, some not-so-popular titles in my head I've been wondering when the Games Done Quick marathons would return to being in-person as they have from the very first marathon all the way to Awesome Games Done Quick 2020. With the past three marathons having to adapt the "Online" moniker and make runners run the game from their homes, it effectively killed the live crowds that crowded up behind the runner(s) and their couch and reacted to every single little thing the runner accomplished. Do some crazy stunt? Lots of applause. Pull off a successful clip? Thunderous cheers. Some lame joke is told through a donation? A chorus of booing. All that is lost when you make the event a strictly-online event but unlike your typical convention that could do only online panels as a result of the pandemic, the main part of the event (the speedrunning) is still fully intact, even though SGDQ2020 did have its fair share of technical issues as a result of the online shift.

If there's one notable element in the transition to online that benefited the event as a whole, it allows for a far greater and broader selection of runners from across the world that could participate in the event without having to deal with the time and cost to travel to the event physically, especially if the runner was based outside of the U.S. In short, it's a degree of accessibility that wasn't there in the marathons before SGDQ 2020 Online and it made me wonder if this aspect could be preserved for when the live marathons return, involving a combination of both live runs and online runs. The former would still be the main focus, including the single camera showing the runner playing the current game, the couch behind them, and the audience watching and reacting to the action unfolding on the projector screens not shown on the camera. Online runs, on the other hand, would continue the format used by the three online marathons but would swap out the runner's webcam for a shot of the crowd like what's used in live runs, only in this case the runner's webcam would be positioned in the corner of the view. Alternate views would be needed for runs involving multiple runners but at its core it would be a format friendly for both live runs and online runs.

For real though, the marathon was nuts. Day 1 was strong right out of the gate and I think it was the best Day 1 of the online era of marathons, Days 2 and 3 had some solid runs, Day 4 was swallowed up mostly by a run of Golden Sun: the Lost Age that remained a fun watch all the way through and has its fair share of great runs before and after it, and it only got better in the final three days. Day 5 brought the chaos that was the Silly Games Done Quick block, the Sonic block, two runs focused on the DLC for Doom Eternal, and a Generation V Pokémon race. Day 6 was the sole TAS run of the marathon followed by two very, very hype rhythm game showcases (separated by a run of Breath of the Wild), and Day 7 was the unofficial, day-wide "Nintendo block" co-starring Super Meat Boy Forever (the game that got advertised again and again during the GDQ marathons for years) and two Souls games, concluding at the very end with Kingdom Hearts II. Of course not every run was a hit for me, considering some of the games I did see felt very samey (all the first-person games I noticed in the late hours throughout the marathon and the four hours of five Castlevania games in a row on Day 3). The Mega Man runs all being on separate days in lieu of a full block and two of them taking place in the early mornings instead of the usual late morning/early-to-mid afternoons used by major franchises was also a move that I didn't agree with either, though at least it was an improvement over SGDQ 2020's single Mega Man run.

At the end of the day it was nice being able to take the week off and enjoy some games and now I'll be trying to get back to my regular schedule and find the motivation I desperately need in these times.