Speedrunners Without Borders: Summer Games Done Quick

The Games Done Quick gang have launched another week-long festival of speedrunning, bringing top runners together to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières. Some are impressive for playing the game flawlessly, perfectly timing every jump and shot, but my favourites are those which have felt around the underlying code and systems for weakness and exploits. They've probed for holes in the scripting, scratched at levels to expose glitches, and explored the weirdness of game physics, and runners explain these tricks while they play. That's what fascinates me.

The livestreamed event started on Sunday and will run until Saturday, with a lineup of over 150 games including a System Shock 2 speedrun somehow aiming to finish it within 20 minutes. You can get some of the games they're running cheap in a Humble Bundle too.

The schedule is dominated by console games, but plenty of PC games are coming up too. These include speedruns of Fallout 3, a 100% Nightmare difficulty run of Quake, Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne's Sentinel campaign, Dustforce, Dishonored, Heretic, Ultimate Doom, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, a solo run of Portal 2's co-op, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

For $25, the Summer Games Done Quick 2014 Bundle offers Dustforce, Gunpoint, Psychonauts, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Guacamelee!, Giana Sisters: Rise of the Overworld, Bleed, Electronic Super Joy, Noitu Love 2 Devolution, and Edmund McMillen's Basement Collection. (Not all of those are being run at SGDQ, by the way.) $25 is more than the Humble usual, but it's a fair bundle and all of the money does go to Doctors Without Borders.

If you miss a game you fancy seeing, such as the BioShock 2 run this morning, it should appear in the Twitch archive. Here's the live stream: