Summer Games Done Quick 2018's schedule announced
Go, Speed Racer, go!
There are few things as momentous in the gaming calendar as Games Done Quick charity speedrun marathons, and the full broadcast schedule for this June's upcoming Summer Games Done Quick event has just been published. Many of the world's weirdest, most diverse and implausibly skilled players will congregate at the end of June to raise money for a good cause (in this case, the increasingly important Médecins Sans Frontières), and systematically tear dozens of games into tiny, glitchy shreds over the course of a week of non-stop speedrun showboating.
While the previous winter Awesome Games Done Quick marathon (which you can watch in its entirety here) had a much higher quotient of PC and indie titles than previous years, this year's SGDQ lineup looks a little more traditional, with slightly more focus on big-name console favorites, capping it all off with a nearly seven-hour endurance dash through Final Fantasy VI with no glitch-exploiting allowed. That's not to say there won't be plenty here for the non-console-gaming crowd, but the balance seems more even this year.
Fewer glitches utterly destroying games seems a recurring theme of the SGDQ 2018 lineup in fact, with 2017's fantastic Prey making a significantly longer appearance than in its 12-minute Winter showing above, thanks to them adhering to the no-out-of-bounds rule. They'll still be smashing the game to bits in under an hour, granted, but they at least won't be smooshing through the ceiling and already headed to the final areas ten minutes into the game this time.
Other notable games in the schedule (which automatically adjusts itself to your timezone, so no math necessary) include Konjak's story-heavy puzzle-platformer Iconoclasts, which should be a very different experience to see dashed through like this. 2016's Doom is also getting another showing, this time without any restrictions. Expect to see all the reality-escaping antics that Prey has been spared from here.
Probably the highest concentration of PC titles starts at around 6:45pm GMT on June 27th for an oddly old-school first-person PC block of speedruns, including Redneck Rampage, Descent-like shooter Sublevel Zero and even PC stealth classic Thief: The Dark Project, which can apparently be sneaked through by a master of evasion in under 42 minutes; I'm predicting some Benny Hill-ish antics with an entire level's worth of guards chasing Garrett around.
One particular shout-out I'd like to make is to Dan 'FoldableHuman' Olson, who I've been watching on YouTube and Twitch streams for some time. While he's more of a complex literary analysis guy than a speedrunner, he threw his hat in the ring for SGDQ this year, and was accepted for the show. Quite why it had to be to play the utterly rubbish survival-horror game Amy is beyond me, but that'll be airing at June 26th, 10:30am.
So, what are you lot setting your alarm clocks for in order to catch live?