What to watch on the fifth day of Awesome Games Done Quick 2016

Awesome Games Done Quick 2016 hit a new personal best yesterday, surpassing the 200,000 viewer mark for first time. This was across all GDQ channels, including foreign language restreams, with a peak of about 230,000 during Super Mario Maker. It may not be the world record for viewership, but in the "Speedrun Stream" category it takes a solid first.

Today's viewings include some real gems, from Sonic to Animorphs.

Polygon's livestream post for Awesome Games Done Quick 2016 is here. The full schedule for Awesome Games Done Quick 2016 is here.

Videos:

Sonic Lost World

Sonic Lost World holds its rightful place in the Sonic timeline — a mediocre sequel to dash the hopes of fans that were excited by Sonic Generations. Despite its issues in a normal playthrough, Sonic Lost World is still a 3D Sonic game with incredible potential for a speedrun. This run featured a ridiculous amount of Sonic going fast, glitches and general chaos. Great commentary makes the speedrun accessible.

Kaizo Mario Bros. 3

Kaizo-style games refer to a Super Mario World romhack that was considered difficult and infinitely cruel. This painful style of romhack, which generally features traps, overly precise platforming and meticulously designed puzzles, is almost always impressive to see beaten cleanly. With the added execution a speedrun requires and the amazing performance by the runner, this is an excellent watch.

Animorphs

Calling the Awful Block's Animorphs speedrun a trainwreck might be too negative for trainwrecks. Despite some of the worst luck in the world, the Animorphs speedrun community managed to keep their pep alive and show amazing community spirit. As Hork Bajir after Hork Bajir caused massive problems, the nightmarish game developed into one of the most tense speedruns of the AGDQ 2016.

Upcoming runs:

Thursday, Jan. 7th.

3:30 p.m.: Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge lends itself naturally to speedrunning, and the game developed a large running scene at the time of its release. The basic movement is incredibly fluid, and the variety of parkour glitches and tricks pushes Faith into a heart-pounding freefall as she breaks the world. A word of warning, though — some of the motion in Mirror's Edge can be hard to digest, especially for anyone that gets motion sick. If you had trouble watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you might want to hold off on streaming in full-screen.

4:40 p.m.: Stepmania

To be quite honest, this is a run I recommend out of curiosity instead of knowledge. Stepmania isn't a speedrunnable game — it's a rhythm game akin to DDR on keyboard. A lot of this challenge run's pizazz comes strictly from the incredibly fast rhythm of the harder songs. The runner has previously played songs with a beats per minute over 400, which would be considered a great number of actions for a professional Starcraft: Broodwar player (who get to use both hands). It may not be a normal speedrun, but it should be interesting.

9:30 p.m.: Halo 4 - Legendary

The Halo series has managed to be one of the most reliable series to speedrun ever released. Halo 2 has sword flying, Halo 1 has grenade boosts everywhere, and Halo 4 can cause Master Chief to run at super speed. This is, of course, in addition to the normal barrage of movement tricks, combat skips and some standard game breaking. To add that extra layer of challenge, Halo 4 is also being played on Legendary difficulty, meaning that any mistake is heavily punished and death is not out of the question.