for those who have finished the game, agdq2019 has a nier speedrun that shows off some good skips, though unfortunately isn’t blessed with great commentary, which makes it hard to watch consciously.
best run i’ve seen so far might have been:
either Actraiser2/PJ, since i didn’t know that a second game existed,
or the monster world 4 run, though that’s mainly due to the awesome sprite work of the game.
will check out the sonic block next!
I watched Urban Yeti, Virtual Hydlide, Phantom Menace and Sanic Ball. They were all pretty nice. I somehow expected more from the Sanic Ball run because so many people hyped it up as one of the best runs but I didn’t see it that way…
Virtual Hydlide gave me motion sickness during the volcano segment. The runner warned everyone but I thought I can’t easily get motion sick. Boy, that game sure did the trick though!
I will slowly filter through this thread for more recommendations and probably watch this year’s runs for another month
I’m glad I learned about Mohawk & Headphone Jack to finally answer my longstanding question about why most SNES games were so tentative in their use of Mode 7
‘Sonic Killer’ right here, boys and girls
hall of famer Grotesque Game
why do people keep yelling ORB
It’s (apparently) an SMW speedrunning meme that broke containment from that game.
It ain’t GDQ unless the audience gets fixated on one thing and runs it into the ground.
As for something positive, I gotta say, that Sonic the Hedgehog run was great.
can someone list some of the good runs this year, this is the first year I skipped entirely
Oh yeah, you can guess how tired everyone was in the Nier Automata-run after the umpteenth time they repeated the Glory to Mankind tagline…
things like that are why i don’t think i’d enjoy going to GDQ. in theory, i would love to watch speedrunners do their thing live and in person, but the way the audience treats the whole event like they’re at a Catholic mass or something with the memes is just too much. this is the year it finally broke me haha
the Sonic the Hedgehog 1-run managed to be more entertaining than I’d have thought… the couch being very hype about it def did help here.
*disclaimer: i am obv biased, gotta run fast~~~
This is a good speedrun. I fell asleep to it, in a good way.
Lucky you. I watched 20 minutes of it on a big screen TV and now I’m out
the gdq audience thinks it needs to suffer for charity too and that’s why they act so embarassing (even though attending speedrunner coachella is embarassing already)
I’m watching the Actraiser 2 run and it already taught me a great gameplay mechanic. You can stay in an enemy’s hitbox and not take damage as long as you’re dealing damage to the enemy. That is tight! I can’t think of games that do this right now but if I ever get into a position where I can implement it I’m going to do that. Maybe for my shoot em up??
Edit: I think Volgarr took a lot of inspiration from this game 
Really good run, I recommend it. Very high level gameplay and the couch commentary is informative and fun
The “Super Metroid/ALttP Combo Randomizer” run was pretty fascinating for me, because I didn’t know these combo randomizers even existed. Basically it shuffles all the items in Link to the Past and Super Metroid together into one big item pool and there are set points on the maps that will transition you between games. Sometimes you’ll need to find a specific item in Metroid to make progress in Zelda or vice-versa. Since the items are shuffled randomly between the two games the runners have to make a lot of routing decisions on the fly to try to beat the games efficiently.
They play it two player; one player plays the Metroid sections and one plays the Zelda sections. It’s sort of like a speedrun relay race.
Probably a bit too long for most people to watch, but watching part of it will give you a pretty good idea how it goes. Plus I think the two runners have pretty good chemistry; you can tell they’re pretty good buds.
Batman (NES) and Shovel Knight also have this form of invincibility. (I also want to say Shatterhand, but I’m not as sure with that one.)
I am a big fan of randomizers but had NO IDEA there was this joint 2-game randomizer, that is incredible
Those are two good games! Interesting.
Think Zelda 1 does this too. I think it’s a pretty common mechanic!