Well, SGDQ (Summer Games Done Quick) is just a few days away. This most certainly means that Keri and I will be glued to our Twitch.TV streaming devices for a solid week. We’ll be texting and chatting in amazement as the various games we watch get absolutely destroyed. There will be plenty of hype as games such as NieR: Automata are completed in two hours, and the runner will do that while playing the game one-handed. It’s a stupid fun week of video game streaming.
I figured with SGDQ kicking off on Sunday, July 2, I would help newcomers with some of the terminology that is thrown around. Here are some of the phrases you might hear during the event.
PB: This stands for Personal Best. This is when the gamer achieves their best time in a run.
WR: World Record. That should be pretty self-explanatory.
Frames: Games tend to run as 30 or 60 FPS (frames per second). This means the game is drawing the world 30 or 60 times in one second. If you hear someone say this is a frame perfect thing they must do, that means they have fractions of a second to execute whatever it is that they are doing. 30FPS games are also considered more cinematic in presentation while 60FPS games tend to look much smoother during action sequences.
Save the frames. Kill the animals: The big finisher for any GDQ event is often a Super Metroid run of some sort. Sometimes it’s a race. Sometimes it’s two players one controller. At the end of the game, there is a small area that you can go to that has some animals that can be set free. Over the course of the event, people can donate as to whether or not these animals are saved, or a few frames of time are saved and they are left to die when the planet explodes. This is by far the biggest donation incentive and it gets pretty crazy as the game draws near to saving or killing the animals.
Version of the game: You’ll see a plenty of Japanese versions of games being run. This is done to save time. Sometimes it’s due to text being faster to plow through. Sometimes it is because certain glitches are not patched out.
This also applies to patch levels as well. In DOOM, they tend to run on an unpatched version of the game due to the glitches that exist. The version of the game is a very important part of speedrunning.
Optimized: This refers to the routing used to get through a game. If a game is optimized, it means that plenty of work has gone into finding the optimal route through a game. When a game is considered “optimized”, squeaking out fractions of a second to improve times comes down to player execution.
100%: Speedrunning a game and achieving 100% of all the tasks that need doing so the game says it is 100% complete.
Any%: Speedrunning the game, but beating it as fast as possible. This can mean bosses are skipped, quests are incomplete, and/or glitches used.
Glitchless: Glitches, such as clipping through the world, are not allowed to be used.
RNG: Random Number Generator. This can be how a boss attacks (like Dark Souls III bosses), what items are found, or just manipulating getting specific Pokémon to show up at the exact time they are needed.
OOB: Out of Bounds. Some glitches allow you to go outside of the game world and just cruise to the very end.
Bonus: DS Dad: A few GDQ events ago, an older gentleman was sitting towards the front of the audience. He was consistently playing his DS. He became dubbed “DS Dad” via Twitch chat. He has subsequently donated to the event (AGDQ 2017) thanks to Twitch chat. He has even done commentary a time or two. At this point, he is pretty much an icon for GDQ.
There are plenty more terms that I know I missed. However, this should be a good primer to help get any new watcher into the event. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to go watch some 2016 VODs. Cuz I don’t have an addiction problem. DON’T JUDGE ME!
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