Grand Genesis Tour

August 1-15, 2018

I never had a Sega Genesis as a kid and never really had many opportunities to try the games. Those that I did try, I absolutely hated. After many years of animosity towards the Genesis, I decided I should give it a fair chance. My plan was to dedicate every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday throughout August to playing Genesis games, as voted by my viewers.

This event lasted only half of the month before I had to abandon it for personal reasons. Overall, I had a really fun time trying these games, even though I didn’t particularly enjoy all of the ones that I played. Some titles were absolutely outstanding and others were painful to play. I plan to continue to explore the library outside of this format in the future.

For more information on the event structure and finished runs, please visit the dedicated page here
Grand Genesis Tour page

Bionic Commando (NES) 60-run RTA

June 1-2, 2018

After having improved my world records in both the any% and 100% category of NES Bionic Commando, I was finally satisfied and was prepared to put this verison of the game away once and for all. As one final dramatic send-off, I intended to do a real-time attack (RTA) of 100 consecutive any% runs. This was expected to take approximately 30 hours if my pace per run was around 15:30.

Unfortunately, after about 50 runs, my controller started having serious issues and my PC was having some other irritating technical difficulties. Things had gone downhill so much in the following 10 runs that I decided to call it quits early. My time after completing the 60th run was 17:56:00, which was about 4 minutes ahead of the 30-hour pace.

I intend to run some more detailed statistics on this event in the future, but for now, I present a brief summary:

• The average completion time per run was 15:22
• The fastest run of the day was 14:26, 30 seconds away from record and 9 seconds away from 2nd place
• 27 out of 59 runs got the truck skip (46% success rate, compared to the theoretical 37% chance)
• I just barely kept my deaths-per-run average below 1 (55 total deaths)

Bionic Commando NES 60-run RTA in 17:56:00:

Grand Memory Clobber-rama

January 28-February 2, 2018

The “Grand Memory Clobber” is a glitch in Dragon View that is triggered initially by killing the first boss, Piercia, and manifests itself as a colossal game crash at the cutscene in Ortah (about 40% of the way through the game). The death animation of Piercia uses one byte in RAM as an animation timer, and doesn’t clear it after it is done with it; this byte is later used as a loop counter for the Ortah cutscene. Instead of running the loop a single time, the loop iterates over a hundred times, storing/overwriting a bunch of bytes in memory, running all kinds of nonsense code it should never see, and cycling through every single byte in RAM. The real description is quite a bit more complicated than that, but this is close enough for our purposes. In short, this creates all kinds of boo-boos that will crash the game, but if we are extraordinarily lucky it will accidentally call the credits. As this glitch depends on literally every single byte in RAM, and control to that extent is far beyond our capabilities, it is essentially entirely random whether or not the credits are called.

In order to maximize the chances of completing a run of this category, I organized the Grand Memory Clobber-rama.  This was a stretch of 6 days of attempts of Dragon View Grand Memory Clobber, with at least 9 hours of attempts each day.  I was hoping to hit around 60 runs for the week.  I managed to successfully finish a run on Wednesday and spent two more days trying to improve it, eventually cutting the event one day short!  In total, 40 runs made it to the Grand Memory Clobber and exactly 1 run finished.  The other 39 crashed the game.

Dragon View any% Grand Memory Clobber in 1:07:12:

Full VODs:

Swingy Guy Any% Thingy

April 23-May 12, 2017

The “Swingy Guy Any% Thingy” was a 20-day long grind to improve my times in each of the 7 Bionic Commando games, and then attempt to beat the entire series in under 4.5 hours. My final time at the end of this stretch was a 4:12:17.

Additionally, every cheer, tip, and new subscriber during this 3 week period was added to an ongoing total; I set up a number of challenge runs and additional speedrun categories for the Bionic Commando series to be unlocked as that total crossed certain thresholds. A list of these challenge runs and milestones can be found here, but I will be revising this in the future as a result of more equipment complications.

 

Due to PC issues, I missed four of those days and had significant technical difficulties on the remaining days. As a result, I highlighted none of the event itself besides the final full-series RTA. While I would really like to get a sub-4 time on the full series, there are too many setup complications for me to reasonably work on it any further.

4:12:17 Bionic Commando series any% RTA:

Batman Forever Forever

November 5-6, 2016

Batman Forever Forever was one of my worse ideas. Based on the amount of tips/bits/subscribers I got during this entire week, I would add more runs of SNES Batman Forever. I started with a baseline of 5 runs with each character, and added from there according to the following:

• $100 in tips/bits added 1 Robin run
• 5 new subscribers added 1 Batman run.

Over the course of 26.5 hours, I completed 15 Robin runs and 10 Batman runs (and 3 bonus co-op runs with Klaige).

I hope to never reproduce this effort.

Link:

Swingy Guy Action Hour

August 2, 2016

In Bionic Commando lore, August 2nd is the day on which Super Joe told the story of Spencer’s heroism and triumphant victory over “Master D”. To celebrate Spencer and “Bionic Commando Day”, I decided to play through both the any% and 100% categories of all 7 Bionic Commando games (except 2k9’s 100% category). At the time, I had the best times in 4 of the 7 Bionic Commando games, but instead of blowing these as quickly as possible I really just wanted to showcase the best that the entire series has to offer and have a lot of fun playing great games.

Links:

Bionic Commando (NES) 24-hour any% marathon

June 4, 2016

I had to replace the pads of my NES controller because it had worn down to the point of being unusable. To break in the new pads, I decided to see how many times I could complete Bionic Commando (NES) in 24 hours. The answer was 74.

 

I may in the future do more detailed analysis of the distribution of completion times, but for now, here are some fun tidbits:

• Run 38 was a new world record by 6 seconds (15:32; previous record was 15:38)
• Average run time was somewhere around 17:05
• 19 runs out of 74 got the truck skip (37% chance in theory)

Link:

7 Days of 7th Saga

Jan 17-23 2016

The goal of this challenge was to complete one single-character run of 7th Saga every day of the week, using a new character every day. I picked Wilme to start and Lux to end, but the character for each of the other 5 days was voted on my viewers each day. Character name was chosen by the highest bidder of the previous day. For more details than you could ever want for each run, please see the 7th Saga page.

 

Character	Wilme	Esuna	Kamil	Lejes	Olvan	Valsu	Lux
Link(s)

Soviet Saturday

October 2015

Soviet Saturday is a fun collaboration with my Russian friend, SireAlligator . He sent me a Russian care package containing many Russian-exclusive Sega Genesis games and a Dendy console with games. This began as a one-time event for me to experience first-hand what many Russian gamers played as children (the Dendy!), but we have plans to develop this into a recurring series! Stay tuned for more details!

Links: