Summer Games Done Quick's charity speedruns start Sunday - these are our picks
Sunday! Sunday! SUNDAY!
Update: The show is live right now. Tune in for games being thrashed to within an inch of their lives.
The Summer Nerd Olympics are almost upon us. Every six months, the best and brightest in gaming assemble under the Games Done Quick banner to demolish games extra-fast and raise heaving sacks of cash for good causes. This Sunday, the speedster swarm will be descending on Bloomington, Minnesota to destroy games as you know it, all in the name of supporting Doctors Without Borders. As usual, the whole thing will be streamed live on Twitch (and archived on YouTube) and runs for an entire week, 24/7.
Below, find some of our must-watch picks from the full schedule.
The 2018 Summer show looks to be very PC-centric again, with our humble, boxy machines playing host to nearly three times as many games as any other platform. Better still, a lot of them are indie titles, and some of them are practically new.
The third game in the lineup is Konjak's Iconoclasts, a game which I reviewed and enjoyed more for its story and puzzling than as a platformer, but it's a game with good flow and energy, which should make for an impressive run at 7:52pm BST/11:52am PT, Sunday.
New deputy editor Alice B. recommends that people check out the Warcraft 3 run later on Sunday at 11:02pm BST/3:02pm PT. While real-time strategy can sometimes make for a rather dry watch, I can see her wisdom here, as it's being played by CovertMuffin, an infectiously enthusiastic man who kept up a gleeful hundred-miles-an-hour commentary during his Jedi Academy run last winter, as seen above.
New guides gremlin Dave, meanwhile, reckons that the Doom 2016 run (1:57am BST, Monday/5:57pm PT, Sonday) will be a fun showcase of how badly that game can be broken. Expect Doomguy to punch his way out of reality itself.
There's going to be plenty more worth watching, including precision platformer Celeste being raced head-to-head at 6:21am BST on Thursday (Wednesday, 22:21pm PT), and somehow they're going to blaze through massive strategy-RPG Disgaea 5 (still headed to PC, although currently missing a release date) in just under 90 minutes. That run begins at an estimated 5:53pm BST/9:53am PT on Monday.
They're also revisiting Arkane's Prey on Thursday too, just after midnight, UK time, 4PM Pacific. Previous runs were mere minutes long as they glitched straight into endgame. This one will be longer as they'll be playing it semi-properly.
SGDQ 2018 begins at 5:30pm BST/9:30am PT on Sunday, June 24th, and runs until the morning of the following Sunday. You can view the full schedule here, automatically adjusted to your timezone. I could ramble on for ages with more recommendations, but it's more interesting to hear yours; what are you setting your alarms for, or reckon is staying up to unreasonable hours to watch?