but isn’t it also one of the few things you have to experience, to understand the beauty of such a moment?
Playing a game, maybe even a bit sleep-deprived, and someone’s watching, mesmerized, surely also because of lack of sleep, or intoxicated, OK, but nevertheless, being there, with you, at this very moment, where there are no superfluous inputs, no distractions:
There’s no showboating, because you’re tired and not in the mood for it, and it is all about doing the job, efficiently, with that little bit of elegance that you amassed over countless hours of training your brain to provide the exact input at the right time, to create something beautiful without yourself realizing it, that super-rare moment where you don’t care whether you are in the zone, you just let it go~~~
… Having that silence, not an eerie kind of silence, but rather that beautiful kind of silence, where nothing’s trying to shuffle in front of sth else, there’s just this kind of serenity that sets the stage for you being there, doing nothing better than playing a game, and it is still something to behold.
that’s what I’d expect - or hope - the guy is feeling, tbh.
It’s a strange, endearing thing if you’ve encountered it, and it’ll stick around with you … sth like 14 years, at least in my case.
So they got super behind schedule and now the big Zelda block–previously at primetime tonight–now starts at 12:30am in my time zone. This isn’t a huge deal for me, since a) i’ll generally watch and enjoy whatever is on, and b) i’m off work tomorrow so I can stay up for zeldo, but it stinks cuz I had some friends who were gonna come and watch with me, but I don’t think mario Kart Wii and a bunch of Tetris is a strong enough hook anymore
Did any of y’all catch the Half-Life run? Shit was excellent. Also I didn’t get to watch Startropics, but APPARENTLY the runners and couch managed to get through -that one part- without saying anything bad, so that’s nice!
also hey is Jak II good? my impression of the series for a long time was that it tried to be cute (while also being stupidly difficult for no reason), and then 180’d into edgetown for the rest of the franchise. I always look at Jak 1 and think “oh, this will be fun and cute!” and then end up really frustrated when I play it.
Even though I’m normally opposed to games that “180 into edgetown,” Jak II is fantastic. Way better than 1, which I actually liked a lot as a kid but haven’t played since then so maybe it sucks
Yeah I gotta say there is some room for wholesome dipping into edge being a charming twist! It worked for Reboot, after all. And Revenge of Meta Knight, if you can count that. Maybe not Conker.
Jak 2 is Rock Solid. The the overworld is this giant clumsy thing that after 20 hours you are still having trouble navigating. You can finish the whole game with have only collected 5 of the collecting thing. You can also completely miss where you get challenges for the collecting thing.
I just bought the collection on vita so i could play jak 2 on the train. The one negative to the HD collection is it doesnt have all the voices the PS2 version does (Italian, Korean, Japanese.). It helped playing a dumb platforming game by changing the language and subtitles every time I played.
Supposedly (though silent at e3) the PS2 versions are coming to PS4 though think they might abandon that because licensing all the full game dubs are why they werent in the PS3/vita version.
Between watching the speedrun and watching my roommate play hard mode, I can barely discern any differences in their playstyles, except one always wins and the other loses over and over again.
Yes, Andy is the runner and is especially competent. And then his couch is basically all his buddies, the donation reader knows them well and there’s a lot of interplay between them all. A great combination of languid shooting the shit while still doing a technical run well.
bucky o’hare run makes you realize how good those folks at treasure are were. tech prowess never gets old.
bionic commando run rather normal, considering PJ running.
omnibus… is a game. feels pretty katamari-inspired, but in a good way.
Rosenkreuzstilette Freudenstachel has been to my knowledge an april fool’s prank, and_looks_ like it.
hammerin harry run was nice and breezy
SotC again just a bossrush, would rather see a full run some day, but not necessarily at gdq:
i feel like they went a bit overkill this year, what with ff7, kh et al. i’d rather see more games broken than someone fasttrack through a game that wastes not just the runners time, but also the audiences’ as well.
The NES block really reminded me how good those games are for speedrunning. I feel like a game needs to be designed to be completed in one session or extremely janky for best results. Normal high-skill play is a hard sell after an hour or two.
Clustertruck’s run was interesting. The game has Twitch integration which allowed the chat to vote on different modifiers that would impact the run, but the developers can also send messages or modify variables in any individual game session, which came up during this run.
caught a few more titles/runs and i think I start to enjoy the shorter runs more year by year. maybe because it starts to get old, maybe because I get old, or maybe it is just easier to slip in a 27 minutes run than a three hours CT run.
This is a fair thing. There were runs in there that I wouldn’t have cared for, but I was plugged into the rapid nonsense thread at SA which made it much easier to sit, watch and shitpost. I don’t think I would have waited out the enormous setup time for Tetris if not for that or kept with Titanfall 2 (even though that turned out to be a really good run in the end).
