GDQ is always kind of a holiday week in our household - we love watching speedruns in general, so we really look forward to these big events each winter and summer. Leading up to each, my thought process is to dig through the schedule in advance for games I know, or games I have a strong interest in - but sometimes it's neat to see just turn on the stream and see WEIRD out of bounds / skip / glitch tech on a game you've never thought you'd care about.
So - here's my fav runs from AGDQ 2023 now that the event has come to a close and raised over $2.6million USD for the Prevent Cancer Organization.
Breath of the Wild - Any%
Run by Player5
Opening with this absolutely ridiculous Breath of the Wild run. Since Breath of the Wild's release, it's been a fixture at GDQ due to the nature of 'Link can kinda just go straight to Hyrule castle', but it'd be boring if it was the same run every year, so thankfully the tech keeps changing, and while 2017's runs were full of stasis-launching rocks and tree surfing, these are the moves of the past. There's some absolutely wild stuff in here that even if you've never played the game I think would be entertaining to watch, and the commentary provides explanations of the glitches being used and how they work. Excited to try some of the bomb zooms myself.
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Portal - Airboat%
Run by Msushi
This wasn't even on my to-watch list because previous Portal runs have given me motion sickness but it happened to be on when we flipped on the channel, and I'm GLAD it was. Here's the premise of this category: What happens if Chel never gets the Portal gun in the video game Portal? Airboats. Airboats is what happens. This run is for anyone who has ever played Portal, wants to see puzzles they agonized over get bypassed in seconds, and also for anyone who absolutely hated the Airboat river sections of Half Life 2.
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Super Mario Galaxy 2 - any% race
Race by by mutantsabys, supervipert302, hardcoregaming07 and jhay
I don't want to spoil too much and this is a long-ish run, but I will say that races are always fun (especially when they take different routes so you see different parts of the game in different order). Also - in a rare moment, the winner of this race got a world record which is not super common at a marathon event!
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Final Fantasy VII - any% no slots
Run by Zheal
Final Fantasy VII, original PlayStation version, being beaten in ~7 hours. Definitely a longer digest, or a 'watch it over a period of time' thing but it's great to see this traditionally 35ish hour game torn apart. The category is 'No Slots' meaning the runner is not allowed to use Cait Sith's absolutely broken Slots limit break to one-shot bosses making it all the more impressive of a run and time.
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Stardew Valley - Seeded Crafts Room Race
Race by blackheartwings and theValiantSun
What if two people ran Stardew Valley against each other to see who could finish the craft room Community Center bundles first? They're using a (they do a good job of explaining this) RNG seed meaning both players are on their own versions of the game but with the (mostly) same random generation of environment and forage items. Now, I say 'against' each other but they're so encouraging of each other and it's a really heartwarming run when things don't go as planned. A must watch for Stardew fans.
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Stray - any% Unrestricted
Run by Erims
Despite Stray being decidedly absent from my game of the year list for 2022, I was really looking forward to this run. Fun skips, interesting glitch tech being used - and SO MANY GOOD CAT DONATION reads.
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Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - 150cc all DLC tracks, no items
Run by Peas
Mario Kart runs were always something I tended to skip or not prioritize in GDQ schedules because it felt like on paper there wouldn't be much to it. Win as fast as possible, racer practices the levels a lot, it feels self explanatory, but then I realized how dismissive I was being. Since we started playing more MK8 deluxe as the DLC has continued to roll out new courses, on a whim we watched a few older GDQ MK8 runs a few months ago and not only did that make me better at Mario Kart but also made this one of the runs I was looking forward to the most. Doesn't disappoint, Peas is a fantastic runner and shows off really fun no item skips, and the commentary folks try their best to explain how some of the tricks world. Highly recommend.
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Celeste - Custom Map - Into the Jungle
Run by Comet625
Celeste runs at GDQ are always great; I didn't know what 'Custom Maps' category was until they started; it's a fully functional mod of the game with 5 new, completely different worlds with really interesting mechanics. This run was great and inspired me to install the mod myself to try it out because it looks so well done.
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Unsighted - any%
Run by roofon
This is more of a placeholder than anything else. Unsighted was my Metroidvania game of the year 2021 but I didn't have a chance to watch this one live so as I type this and know it's gonna be a good run, I haven't watched it yet and I'm going with vibes here. I can't picture beating this game in 38 minutes so I'm stoked to sit down with it. Also it's telling that, like 2021, Unsighted blew Metroid Dread out of the water in terms of Metroidvania I care about because I watched the AGDQ 2023 Metroid Dread run live and while it was impressive, it mainly served to remind me how much I don't wanna play that game again and yet the run I didn't even watch is on this list.
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Pokemon Legends Arceus - Attack and Dethrone God%
Run by halqery
God this run. I appreciate when longer runs have multiple commentators and it feels like people hanging out on a couch because like, this is over three hours but it doesn't feel that way because the skips are fun, the commentary rules and there's this ongoing donation incentive to hit a certain $ amount before halqery hits the end of the original run so they can do the special 'attack and dethrone god' final boss rush. Also some hilarious mispronunciations occur which steer the ship right into absolute chaos. (Pronouncing that 'ché-oss')
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There are plenty of other good runs that I did watch or ones I'm looking forward to checking out that I couldn't see live, but I did wanna highlight the above.
