Weird Fake Gaming Shorts

 

A couple of years ago there was a video put out by a group(?) going by the name of Badabun.  To my understanding Badabun are a shitty content farm type of channel that produces low grade insipid crap for 6-13 year olds, not the kind of thing worth looking up.  This video consisted of a guy sitting in front of a camera pretending to play Super Mario Bros on the NES while a TAS speedrun video played in a window next to him. He was claiming to have beaten the game in under 5 minutes which is certainly a feat that has been done by a great many people it seems but the fakery of this video was so obvious that it was laughable.  A number of other creators made their own videos clowning on this guy for being a dipshit, we had a good chuckle and we moved on.

Fast forward to current day however, in a new age of short form content and these fake gaming videos have become pretty widespread.  Not only that but the number of people now falling for it seems to have grown a great deal and it's making any faith I might have had in the general audiences in gaming spaces has now been well and truly crushed.  The short that inspired me to make this post was a guy playing a Super Mario World romhack where the footage he was using was so obviously either TAS or spliced that you would think a child would recognize the fakery but the comments section was filled with things like "omg this guy is the greatest mario player ever" with only a couple of comments calling out the obvious fakeness that went mostly ignored.  What made it even worse is that he had included a webcam feed at the bottom of the video showing his hands and the controller to add legitimacy to the video but even just glancing at it you could see it wasn't matching up.  Despite the guy in question putting the fact that it's fake blatently on screen for all to see, I guess most people's mindset is that "oh there's a controller feed there so it must be legit" and then go no further than that.

I've also noticed that this has been a massive problem for short form content regarding rhythm games.  There's a very simple rhythm game called A Dance of Fire and Ice that is just CRAWLING with hundreds of fake videos of people getting all perfects on meme songs like Rush E or really cringeworthy songs about that cocksocket, Mr Beast.  A lot of rhythm games come with autoplay features so you can see and maybe study the chart a while if you are struggling but these guys are taking autoplay footage, slapping on some footage of them mashing the keyboard like a child playing with a word processor for the first time and then uploading.  The fakery here is even more obvious that the Mario videos as well because just listening to the clacks of the keyboard while watching the gameplay clearly shows they aren't hitting those notes and yet at the end of the short they have a no miss all perfect clear AND EVEN THEN the comments are filled with praise by idiots.

The big question I have is just "why?", why go through all that effort to get a couple of thousand views on the most ass type of content that can be made on a platform like YouTube.  Even if you suck at rhythm games, let's say, and then you did a series of videos where you documented yourself practicing to full combo the hardest song in whatever game it was, I think that would be infinitely more appealing to more people.  People love seeing a shitty underdog struggle and train and then do a thing.  Uploading fake videos to get a couple of thousand fews so you can make a few bucks in ad rev is actually fucking pathetic.

I guess the solution is to stop watching YouTube shorts, I dunno why I bother anyway.  For some reason I click that shit every so often and I just end up mad or disappointed.  But either way, my bad habits with shitty short form media aside, fuck these users, put some effort into your fucking hobby

AGDQ 2020 Vods You Should Watch

AGDQ 2020 concluded on Sunday and they finished with a whopping 3.1 million dollars for the prevent cancer foundation!  GDQ holds a special place in my heart with it being the event that inspired this very website and while the last couple of years haven't really held my attention too well, this year really knocked it out of the park.  Here are a couple of the runs (that I caught live) that I think you should check out once they get uploaded to YouTube in no particular order

1. Animorphs

Strictly speaking I don't think this was a part of the Awful Games block that they include every year but every crappy game they did a run of this year was highly entertaining.  This run, however, had me snort laughing at my office computer like a lunatic.  The commentary from the runner was funny, the crowd was super high energy and there was a part where the entire room is chanting "PUNCH THE SQUID!" over and over during a combat sequence.  Bonkers game, bonkers run, worth a watch 

2. Trauma Center New Blood

I love the Trauma Center games, a series about weird anime surgery where ALIENS HAVE TAKEN OVER HIS BODY and doctors that can slow down or freeze time using nothing but the power of raw concentration.  The only thing more bonkers than the plot of these games is the INSANE level of skill put forward by the runner who was donning a nice set of scrubs during the run.  Not only did he play the game and play it fast, but he managed to get an XS rank (the highest) on most of the missions.  If you don't know anything about TC then it might be a little confusing but if you even have a passing knowledge of this game its extremely easy to tell just how incredibly skilled and precise this runner was.

3. Ocarina of Time 100%

Just when I think OoT couldn't get any more broken someone comes along and proves me very wrong.  The 100% run this year had some extra thing in its category that I think was called "no source requirement", meaning that the runner was not obliged to go to each location in the game to actually get the items he needed to fulfill the 100% requirement.  This means he's using bottles to write spritual stones in his inventory, duping NPCs to get heart containers, all sorts of far out stuff.  I remember watching the any% run of this game being done in 20 minutes or so way back when and thinking "damn, you probably aren't getting crazier than that" only to have my jaw completely on the ground every year the play this game.  It was followed up by a glitch showcase as well which was equal parts interesting and hilarious.  

4. Super Mario World "One Mind"

Some of you may have heard of doing a game "2 players one controller" where one guy takes the buttons and one guy takes the movement and they must sync up their gameplay in order to achieve victory.  I even did a 2p1c marathon with my good buddy Pithoui a while back!  One Mind however is a different beast entirely.  It's a rom hack where each player is using their own pad but they are both controlling a single Mario.  Every so often the sprite will switch between the Mario sprite and the Luigi sprite to indicate which player is in control so when he's red its p1 and when he's green its p2.  The idea is that if you are of "one mind" then the run won't look any different from any other SMW 11 Exits run but if you try to do anything even slightly different it's going to start screwing things up.  Also when I say he swaps, I don't mean every couple of seconds or something, I mean he's swapping CONSTANTLY at high speeds.  It's a really interesting run and I can't quite explain it well so just go check it out for yourself.

5. Super Metroid Impossible

The finale run of the event and the title really isn't kidding when it says "impossible".  This is such an intense run that I don't really want to say any more about it, it's basically the Kaizo Mario of Metroid but it seems that some of the stuff in that game makes Kaizo Mario look like child's play.  It stands out for me because, I'll be honest with you, I don't give a rats ass about Super Metroid speed running and yet when I saw this run in motion I COULD. NOT. bring myself to look away.  It was so intense that I even clapped wildly at my TV when he finished, I just couldn't contain myself.

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So there's five runs to start you off, go and dig through those VODs on YouTube or Twitch or whatever and find some other games you like.  There's a whole bunch of runs that I caught live that I've not mentioned in this list that were awesome and probably a whole bunch that I missed live that I'm going to catch up with as soon as I hit "post"

Roll on SGDQ, I can't wait!

2018 Speed Schedule

So 2018 is nearly with us so it's about time I informed everyone what games I'm planning to speedrun this coming year.

While it was fun last year to try and run 12 games, there were a number of problems doing it that way.  First is that I had to spend a few days de-rusting, so I wasn't actually doing any proper runs for the first few streams.  Then after that, a single month of running the game wasn't really enough time to build up enough skill to get any kind of decent time in anything.  On top of all that I was losing days to social gatherings, parental visits and other events and the like which cut the time for actually speedrunning things down even further.  So this year I'll be running 4 games for 3 months each and then if you wanna see the other speed games you can donate for the mini speed marathon incentive

So with that said, here's the list

January-March- Silent Hill
April-June- Megaman 4
July-September- Super Mario World 11 Exits + Casually learning a new game maybe
October-December- Super Castlevania 4

Where Did The Difficulty Go, Mario?

Look at this old motherfucker right here.  Whenever someone mentions video games, Mario is that one character that absolutely 100% of people will be able to recognise.  It doesn't matter if you're the hardest of core, super turbo nerd game enthusiast or the kind of person who doesn't know which way on a controller is up, you know this fucking  guy.

So yesterday, in a fit of absolute boredom I decided to fire up a bit of Super Mario Bros and play it through without using any of the warp zones, because I always use the damn things and I've forgotten what most of the game looks like.

Now I've not played any old school Mario game for a long long time.  Hell, the last Mario game I played a great deal of was Galaxy 2, but my memory of recent Mario games has been that they are all fun, but not exactly challenging.  Basically everything after Sunshine has had the challenge stripped from it in order to appeal to a wider audience, which is fine for a series like this with broad appeal, but Jesus Christ the old ones especially don't fuck around.

The first few stages are an absolute cakewalk, but once you hit world 3 or 4, the stages actually get pretty tricky with precise jumps, fiendish enemy placement and game overs that mean that you have to start over from 1-1 meaning that beating Mario Bros is no easy feat.

Let's not forget Super Mario Bros 2 as well, and no, not fucking Doki Doki Panic, real Mario 2.  Real Mario 2 was so fucking hard that they didn't even bother to release that shit overseas, they just re skinned an easier game and gave that to the west.  There are parts in Mario 3 and World that would make even veteran players groan at it's difficulty and I'm sure there is plenty of other shit in the older games that would make me lose a few continues even now.

The new Mario games are all good and fun and whatnot, but like I said before, the series hasn't seen a real challenge since Sunshine.  I don't blame Nintendo for wanting to get Mario in the hands of as many people as possible, but they should make a game sometime with that old school level of challenge.  I'm not just talking about bits that might have one tricky jump or something, I mean proper, full on, challenge out the arse Lost Levels type of difficulty.

Make it happen Nintendo, gimme some New Super Mario Bros EX Masters Edition or something, I'll even fund it for you.