8 Wonderful Moments From AGDQ 2017
AGDQ 2017 was last week, but if you missed the amazing speedrunning action, here are eight of the best moments from the entire marathon.
Did you miss Awesome Games Done Quick last week? Shame on you! AGDQ and its summer variant, SGDQ (Summer Games Done Quick) are two of the highlights of the gaming year. For an entire week, the best runners around participate in a marathon of speedruns, all to benefit a charity such as the Prevent Cancer Foundation, the charity for AGDQ 2017. Games ranging from popular, AAA titles to obscure, dead franchises are given their time to shine in the hands of some of the fastest players you’ll ever see.
It can be hard to convince people who have never seen such a run that this is something worth watching, but trust me; it is, especially for games you’re familiar with already. You’ll not only see some crazy tricks and impressive gameplay, but the couch commentators are notoriously excellent in their detailed explanations of how the tricks are done and why, along with tidbits about the game’s history and rules.
It’s a lot to parse through if you’re sifting through the entire week, so I’ve pulled ten of the best moments from AGDQ 2017 for you to check out in case you missed them. Some of these runs are funny; others are purely good examples of what AGDQ does best. Check them out, and immediately mark your calendar for SGDQ in six months:
Shovel Knight race
First up, we have Smaugy and Munchakoopas racing the game Shovel Knight. It’s an any% race, meaning they’re just trying to get to the end of the game as fast as possible. But because Shovel Knight is fairly watertight in terms of glitches, there aren’t a lot of exploits in this run. Instead, it’s pure platforming skill.
The Shovel Knight race was an especially good highlight because Smaugy and Munchakoopas stayed relatively close together throughout the entire race, with their ending times only within seconds of one another. Tight races like that can inspire the same audience fervor that professional sports can, meaning we were all on the edges of our seats right up to the end. The Shovel Knight race is a great one to watch if you want to see some pure platforming, execution-based skill in a game designed with speedrunners in mind.