NOTE: 'Awesome Games Done Quick 2014' was a 7-day charity marathon, decidated to speedrunning – the completion of video games in the fastest possible time. This is a heavily edited transcript of that event (produced entirely from a 3-hour Highlights & Bloopers video) presented here as a piece of abstract writing.
**
Wondershot
I'm going to show you a dance move that you can perform,
that all you kids will really like out there.
Everything that you're going to see here is seemingly random,
completely intended.
You can do this in one cycle, but it's really, really difficult.
If you die while going for 100%, you don't get it.
First boss of this game is Charles III.
He's a giant bat, he flies around the arena.
He can actually throw rocks – and he's dead. So... yeah.
This is awesome, Oh my goodness, we desynced!
What you just saw was a desyncronisation,
where the hardware has slightly different timing...
This is a brand new TAS, it was finished yesterday, midnight.
So we've done extensive testing,
we know exactly what's going to happen.
What he's actually doing is spawning tiles in a specific order.
There's a table which contains all the physical, graphical properties
of all the tiles on screen.
You're gonna see me shoot at the save point and drop down and
essentially suicide.
Objects don't exist until they appear on-screen
I'm going to try and scroll each rock off-screen and then quickly
come back on, before the game can register the spawn.
This is a ridiculous level, it's incredibly technical.
That room is a pretty good indication of why this game is...
because he can just double jump straight through all those.
This stage is monstrous, for me at least –
this is the hardest stage in the game.
With really, really smart damage boosting,
you can actually make it across there like that.
When you're out of weapon energy and you try to attack,
it fires just a basic pellet.
Here comes weapon energy, it always follows the hat. Here it is.
There's a trick to kill this boss in one cycle.
I'm gonna pause-cancel my black hole bomb shots.
There's a lot of button pressing.
Can sneak in a shot here if you have courage.
This could take anywhere from fifteen seconds to infinity.
It's given me the fake good pattern.
The submarine is particularly annoying to use, because the missiles
– depending on the frame on which you fire them –
do completely different things.
So the fire alarm went off? I blame my cold hands.
Holy shit! Oh my God! Did that respawn? No... Yes!
There's nothing left, there's nothing left.
You have to release and repress the button within three frames.
But it also has to be at the right time as well,
right at the apex of one of the flutters.
But it only saves three seconds.
We're going to get a taste of the forbidden... forbidden substance.
Not the wall, not the wall, that's good too, but that's not what it is.
The game is totally fucked... this has not happened before!
I can't scroll the screen.
What? That has never happened before.
Discovering new glitches live.
Normally you have to go to the top of this statue and capture the...
but I know the secret knock. It involves a special gas grenade.
Come on kid, open the door. What are you doing?!
Open the door, damn you.
How to move NPCs: shoot them in the head.
This is a real problem. What the fuck Paul?
Apparently he didn't like my rocket launcher.
She's got a great scream, so I have to light her on fire too.
Broke my legs, now I gotta wait for my legs to heal.
Little known fact: he's got a secret tree-house in the Man Chai
market, which I am now about to go visit.
The game engine doesn't care, but as you can see,
the visuals are pretty broken.
This is probably one of the strangest clipping bugs I've witnessed,
the actual level geometry collapses in on itself.
Everyone who plays knows about super-bouncing,
you're about to see it.
It's basically intersecting the player model with the geometry,
in such a way that it pushes you back out at really high speed.
You have to land exactly between two polygons.
This is the largest auto-scroller in this game.
The gondola isn't designed very well,
so you can kinda jump around and get above the map on it.
If you crouch, you lose complete physics and that sucks.
I have a box. I'm supposed to open the box during this section.
I have no idea what's in here. We hope it's not sex toys.
I've been told it's appropriate,
it weighs like a pound.
This is a random boss, if you get a bad pattern it's not good.
If you hit the queen the right way, she'll kick you immediately
afterwards, and she'll just stay in the ground for the entire fight
instead of using the tornado.
I'm gonna do a trick called waterless, it's how we get the heart
before we go to octopus' stage. Okay, I'm gonna improv this.
It always looks clutch, but it's pretty easy to get off.
You have to release shoot and fire,
and press jump on the same frame.
Killing him with fireballs is faster than just hitting the axe because
it skips the bridge crumbling animation.
I'm gonna get the midway point,
because you have to be big to do the clip.
Essentially what I'm gonna try to do is crouch and then spin-jump,
at the correct time, when the ceiling's just above me.
The god pixel. You're not supposed to be able to...
Double god pixel!
Not only does that take a pixel precise dash-stop,
it also good RNG with dashing up, to actually get through.
I'm gonna pull out a water-bomb. I'm actually doing the swimming
with water-bombs glitch right now.
Excuse my language, but fuck that boss.
…use the invincibility frames from getting hit by an icicle to
get between her and the wall.
A small demonstration here, by the way,
of why we don't really want to deal with AI characters.
The path-finding is spectacular.
I'm running this on the 1.0 cart,
which is the cart that was packaged with the rumble pack.
You can get a score of over 511 on any planet.
Second place is a higher score than first place.
My scoreboard is just an incomprehensible mess.
You're supposed to fall with these parrots and they go down real slow,
but yeah, we're not doing that.
All these double-jumps are three frame windows in order to...
It's simple called: chaos optimal.
But I'm just going to team throw in the air... a lot.
To get all the cycles in one try.
It only works in the American version as well.
When you throw a sub-weapon, you gain a little bit of height,
maybe a couple of pixels.
He's gonna abuse that to just go straight through a wall.
You make me really nervous!
In case you can't tell, it's kind of close. That was really scary.
Even Mecha's health, I don't know, like
– a Garian sword would definitely – they one hit I think... Like,
there's no safety in this run. None.
Are you kidding me? That has never happened in my life.
Out of eight-thousand runs, that has never happened.
Here comes the big daddy of them all,
the one I should not be doing.
But I'm gonna do it anyway, obviously.
This is the white land two double jump, this is where I use both
jump plates to cut off a small portion of the track.
For chapter five, forty bucks if you skip a capsule.
You don't have to do it, it's just forty buck.
Um... I'll consider it.
CGN uses a technique called momentum-throttling boosting,
where in-between boosts he turns his engine off.
...in what I think, according to the story, is actually hell.
Doing an MTS here is optimal, but I wouldn't do it....
what he actually does there is an MTS into a quick turn,
which is an interesting combination of two techniques.
Yeah, so you need to lose grip altogether to initiate an MTS.
It's quite tricky to follow,
'cos he's going roughly the speed of sound.
One thing to note is Deathborn is basically invulnerable,
so – you can't kill him, and if you do manage to kill him,
he'll just respawn in five seconds anyway,
so you just gotta out-race him.
Pretty much this game has so many glitches that we've had to
divide it into three entirely separate ladders...
…also has hyper-speed side attack, to reset the side attack thing.
There's also snaking, where you press L and left, R and right
repeatedly to gain tons of speed...
Snaking and space-lining are pretty much impossible
unless you've got the right vehicle.
It's really hard to lag the game but he's loading the whole level
virtually at once here.
Show the face, show the face. The hen hover.
I love that he stops juggling the eggs, they just spin in place.
So do you know the technical details behind this trick?
Well – it's a chicken. Chickens can fly.
The permutations of the lasers are all fixed
from the time you start the stage.
These oscillating laser and kind of like the theme of act 5.
I'm not supposed to kill the wife, nor that bodyguard,
but because accident kills don't count towards the rating,
I can just throw a coin at the glass ceiling, and – that happens.
Falling glass is pretty deadly.
This map has a tricky bunny hop sequence at the very start.
It's faster to load the auto-save here and cross the ocean again,
if you have good speed. Oh... my input. You can bounce on water
holding jump but I think I held jump during the loading screen.
You need to grab the rocket launcher here because there's no other
real way to kill the airships up ahead. So you basically render the game –
for all intents and purposes – uncompletable, if you don't pick that up.
You could tactically use SMG grenades and explosive barrel but...
good luck with that.
I'm feeling it, I'm feeling it. Gotta land – we're good!
Welcome to portal.
Portal is a video game where physics don't exactly work.
That was it. I'm stuck. No, I'm stuck.
You can fly? No, no, I cannot fly. I'm pretty sure if I access any of
my menus the game will freeze.
That should be a 7.49 I think.
I usually get like 6.90 on him. I'm guessing that's right too.
I'm on pace for a 12.94, it depends on what he does though. Yep.
I accidentally did a frame-perfect counter.
I'm gonna dash over the trigger to start the fight.
Where d'you get the suit from?
I had a spare gravity suit the whole time,
just wasn't authorised to use it.
So again, look at the ammo count now,
you can see we already have some variability.
And that might not be such a big deal right now but
it could have implications later on.
I'm not sure, but I think that might be the first time we've had
synchronised quick kills live anywhere in the world.
The runners are coming up to a difficult room here, the red tower.
This is normally why you would pick up the ice beam,
there's some enemies that you would freeze to traverse the tower.
This is a tough room too. We might see some people fumble it here,
we'll see how it happens.
Coming up we have a trick called the full halfie.
Look at Ivan, see if he goes across this room with that shine-spark.
He nailed it.
Almost screen for screen on that kill. Look to see the head.
Whose head hits the ground first? That's the player in the lead.
Less than half a second lead.
This is down to fundamentals at this point.
Let's put it this way: on any other category, you walk into the room,
he does his entrance and then he self-destructs.
On low percent, he's a legit final boss.
There might be one gang member up here.
Do I have my chainsaw? I've lost my chainsaw.
I'd like you guys to see cannon-less, so I'll try again.
Not only was it good that I got him quickly, but I got him right next
to the door, which is what I need him for.
You don't need a star at all, you just need his corpse.
If you try to place a bed then sleep on it,
it's gonna blow up in your face. So that's a really cool Easter egg,
but it's actually extremely useful in a speed run.
You need to be pretty close to the bed,
you're gonna be at point-blank from the explosion.
Time is gonna be really soon, really soon. We need to regenerate,
alright, and – time. No, I died! I finished the game and I died!
Wow – I've never seen this before. I beat the game.
I didn't even know it was possible to beat the game while dead.
Once we finish this, hold the time, and also hold the applause,
because we have a donation incentive for the credits duet.
Hey, I didn't talk to anybody. I picked the wrong ending, what the crap is that?
We'll just pretend that didn't happen.
Sorry, I'm just so used to doing that.
Are we doing the last level again? Or we might be soft-locked.
That might be cool...
Cool, I just soft-locked us. Run's over, time!
This is a one frame precise thing right here.
There's a very difficult clip you can do to actually skip that cutscene trigger,
something that's only done in new game plus,
because if you skip the cutscene in a full game run,
it'll be there waiting for you when you come back in 600 AD.
You had one job skeleton, one job.
We don't... nobody really quite understands what's happening now
but – just by getting a specific RNG seed from the reset...
To hurt red knight you have to cast ice 2 on him.
The defence power down lasts... wondershot!
...until he gets him with the core gone.
As long as I keep the core alive, I don't have to keep casting ice on him.
Wondershot! That wonder shot.
Red knight knows whats coming... No, there's no way... wondershot! Ahaha!!
The almighty omega flare. You got this Lucca. Wondershot!
Wondershot!!
(clapping and cheering)




