GamesDoneQuick
SGDQ 2026 Bonus Stream - Dark Souls: Remastered - All Bosses Randomizer ft. @Regole - !schedule !hotfix
07-12-2026 · 5h 43m
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Hello everyone, and welcome to the game's title.
Welcome to the games done quick hotfix or as I like to put it if SGDQ is so good. Why didn't they invent SGDQ too?
But thank you very much to everyone who watched if you stayed up all the way through the finale
What are you doing up right now? I mean like welcome. We have a great day of programming for you, but also take it easy get some rest
I had a fantastic time was fortunate to be some small part of the event
If you heard me hosting earlier in the week
It was it was great to work with you then and it's great to show you some amazing speedruns today
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you want to see.
Because this is the SGDQ bonus stream, we thought we'd show you some of the very best of
GDQ runs over the years, going back to basics with some good old fashioned Dark Souls,
just like Miyazaki Dono used to make. But a little bit different. This is going to be an item
randomizer with all bosses of Dark Souls remastered from our good friend Regal. Regal, the floor is
with yours.
Yo, thank you, T. I am Regal.
I'm also joined by my commentator, Ashwin.
You want to say hi, Ash?
Hello, thanks for having me.
Thank you for being here.
We are going to be doing an all bosses run today,
but with the item randomizer made by Hot Pocket Remix,
randomizing all the items in the game.
It will just be the item randomizer.
There is an enemy randomizer for this game
that we will not be using because we have a certain time crunch time window to to play
in and the we wanted to be able to have end within you know a certain percentage of estimate
not like yes we didn't want it to take as long so we are doing just the item randomizer
and this will be with race mode and we'll talk about that later also hey I think some
I'm hearing myself and I think maybe
Yeah, Ash is just a little bit.
Is it? Yeah, a little bit.
Sorry.
They must love to both the tech team and the talent.
Yeah, these things are always a process.
Yeah, it happens.
So we'll talk about what race mode means coming up.
But for now, just know that the key items are shuffled,
but they're not completely shuffled like they can't be anywhere.
But with that, we'll go ahead and go through my decision-making process a little bit for the classes here.
Usually the most important classes, what I am going through is going to be Hunter, Sorcerer, Appirements, or Cleric, I would say.
I'm still hearing that a lot.
The hunter is probably the most common one because of the bow.
The hunter gets the bows very useful for a lot of things.
This is a pretty decent hunter because we also have the sunlight maggot, which helps
us open a couple doors in the DLC.
The sorcerer is not particularly good, I already looked over these.
clerics okay but the pyromancer is actually really really good because we
have this really busted weapon the blacksmith giant hammer decent shield we
have a good headpiece as well and we also start with a pyromancy flame which
can be useful for a number of things in terms of our power level but also
glitches that we can perform throughout the run and yes we will be doing
glitches throughout the run this is not a glitchless run we're gonna be doing
pretty much all except for force quit wrong warps that's like the one which
that we don't allow. I feel like souls being a run type people are so familiar
with casually getting to see the glitches is honestly one of the more fun
parts because unless you've done them yourself you may not be familiar with
what they look like and how they've been to a run. Well they also to me I think
make the item randomizer even more fun because you can even more break out of
of like the constraints of what the item randomizer is doing.
Sure. Yeah.
There's like a logic of like, yeah, expert randomizer logic.
Exactly.
There's a logic to where the key items are placed,
but you can just break out of that logic a lot
by just doing skips.
And that gives it a little more open world nature to it,
which I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the term I just use expert logic, randomizers,
archipelago, all those sorts of games that encourage you to play
in randomized fashion or in kind of remix of the game
in a way that is not typical.
There is a certain level of expectation that like,
hey, you're gonna know how to do this much coming into it.
And usually the community guides and information
will tell you about that.
But there is also what is frequently referred to
as a toggle for expert logic,
suggesting that you know how to do sequence breaks,
glitches that may not be super common casually,
all those sorts of things.
There is that for this game, but I'm not using it for some other reasons.
But but you can do that with the sign of randomizer as well.
Right on.
But yeah, so we have our we have our stuff set up.
We also are going to take the master key so we can open up any doors.
And other than that, we're just going to go ahead and get started.
Are you ready to start the time? Of course.
All right. Well, we're going to start on go.
three, two, one, go.
Let's do it.
All right.
And it's going to start off
with a pretty fast asylum because we're going to have this blacksmith giant hammer.
And we don't say you picked this class for a reason after a brief look at
this is not a vetted seed.
We are not expecting a specific finish time, but we took a look at the classes
available to us before getting started.
And the pyromanzas seemed way out ahead.
Yes.
The Blacksmith Giant Hammer will fall off later on, but in the early game, it is extremely
powerful and will save us a good chunk of time, and this is like, you'll see soon, like,
what I'm talking about, it'll save us some time on this boss and some upcoming bosses.
We don't want to use it the whole run, though, so we want to eventually switch off of it,
but it will be very good early.
We also get a nice shield here, Crest Shields,
like one of the best shields in the game.
I just want to make sure that you can hear me now
about being stupid.
I am not hearing any feedback.
Sounds like you did a great job.
Great.
The problem is we're both in the same house.
So I think I'm talking so loud.
It's picking up in her microphone.
As it turns out, there's more than one way to make tech setups difficult.
Yeah, yeah, yep.
Oh, I also, since I've been running all achievements, my life split has a built-in thing that resets my achievements every time I start a new run.
So I'll be getting achievements throughout the whole run here.
Trust me, I have played the game before.
Welcome to our casual playthrough of Dark Souls Remastered, all achievement?
Wait, no, not all achievements. That's a different thing.
All right, that's the one even everyone. Yeah, that's why the bgh pretty good
First boss down
So now we're only just gonna hope that you find good materials for that
so
This is probably a good time to describe what race mode settings are
So there are a couple of different ways you can shuffle the key items
in the hot in hot pocket remix that's the guy I made it hot pockets item
randomizer there is a full shuffle as you can do where like the key items can
be just about anywhere or there is race mode and race mode is it's not the key
items won't be in their default locations but they also won't be just
anywhere. It's kind of an in-between. So key items will be placed in a place where normally a key item would be,
or they will be in chests, or they will be from Black Knight drops, or they will be from
most boss drops, or did I say bosses? Or they will be at Ember locations. So there's a lot of checks
that we're going to have to do. This guy doesn't really have much of anything.
So do they is it more about the category of drops that could potentially contain a key item or is it also respectful of like sphere logic?
It's just it's just where those things are located.
Okay, okay.
So like I'll be going to all these chests and there is there is some logic for like certain items won't be in a place where they would be impossible to.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, as is always the way with randomizers to kind of peel back a layer of terminology here
spheres are another common term in
Understanding the logic of how items are shuffled
Which is to say that there is a certain expectation very much like casual progression of hey
If you get an item that lets you get to further items
There should be at least one more useful item in that next kind of layer out
Think of it like an onion, if you must, that each layer you keel back should have at least one kind of
Careaway point to let you get to the next layer. Otherwise, you could get to a point where you are effectively softlocked because there are no more
Progression items available to you. So when we talk about spheres and logic, that's kind of what we're talking about
This this randomizer is made with logic to prevent softlocks
I've never seen it soft walk unless the player did something that would cause it to stop
There are ways there are ways of the question
There are ways you can thought soft lock yourself, but it wasn't the item
Now there is a
Remember I was talking about the expert logic earlier. Mm-hmm there you can absolutely soft lock yourself while doing that
There is some pretty cursed stuff that you can do
Skip logic, so we are doing logic without skips in mind
But we will be using skips to break out of that
Very good
Hey one quick question from chat related to the logic as we're talking about it
Somebody wanted to know if there's anything potentially locked behind NPCs, you know, you might have to defeat them to get no items, okay
typically hammer
He's going to quickly do something that's really important early on.
He's going to basically do some souls and he has to kind of like move up his primer
soul to the top slot and he's going to be quitting out to be able to store one quantity
in the storage and wrap it around to 99 and he had an overlay menu of a breakfast menu
on top of his inventory he was doing some quick menuing that allowed him to consume 99 souls.
So now he has a lot of souls to be able to make some essential purchases here at the merchant
which we found some black fire bombs that he's going to quickly prom swap to get
99 tight knit slabs there but he's basically making a lot of purchases right now that are
going to come handy potentially later on in the run. So if he finds any items that like
resource materials to upgrade weapons he'll pick them up especially if he can kind of like
litch around to get as many as possible or any useful items that he might need for any kind of like
skips or anything down the line but if you can make as many purchases as he will because he has
the ability to do souls um and this just makes a lot of things so convenient like right now he has
196,000 that's not even that much you'll have even more no granted it's not even more now because
he's going to be doing that uh quantity soul dip again i overlaying the menu but this time he's
Look at the quantity of an eye profit of 999, maximum, that you can present, be able to vessel 999 times, which, very shortly, is at the arrow, so it's 999, he's doing the menu overlay right now, and he's going to 999.
Yeah, no, I loved getting to see the fact that we're using Steam controller binds and many other things like that.
Yeah, we saw that.
It's essentially an accessibility to make this happen.
Yeah.
You can do it without the steam rebinds.
It's just so much faster.
Yeah, that's why I described it as accessibility.
It makes it easier to have the controls where you need them
so you don't have to rewire your brain in the middle of a run
to do this trick.
Yeah, that was a thing.
As soon as we found this glitch that I used,
that steam rebind, the action set,
as soon as we found it, that was something
that we immediately started using.
because most of the community plays with controller.
So it was really annoying having to reach over
to the mouse to do this particular glitch.
So people were like, okay,
we'll just place your cursor in the right position
and then change the action set with steam
and then you don't have to reach over the mouse.
It's been a thing for many years now.
So all these items that he's picking up right now
or potential key item locations, which is why it's so relevant for him.
You'll see him walk by a lot of...
Not all of them. You'll see him walk by a lot of them,
and I know it might bother some of you at home that he's not picking these items up,
but it can be a time waste to try and gamble.
Like, the only item he's going to be looking for that isn't a key item location
is gonna be like some quick and easy access pickups that he can do without wasting any time,
because we are trying to go fast, and the only item that he would want to try and find
Is the purple cowards first now? This is the one that you guys the most that's the most important nine
Exactly because that will allow him to a wrong war wrong warping is important because if he can find the purple cowards
Crystal he will not need to collect all the Lord souls
Which he has to place in the Lord vessel to be able to get to win
Which saves him a lot of key items so he's found every other item in the game that he needs to complete the game
Then the Lord souls become
So he happens to find
It would be so like
Out of all of the things that won't be in the key item locations the purple gouge crystals the best and there's also just other like
Things I could be getting from these random item locations like I could be getting spells
Sorcery is actually pretty powerful in this if you get the right stuff
I'm just going to run through and hopefully I don't die here.
Oh, you're not going to bring down Helcite.
Easy. Let's go.
Just get lucky.
Perfect.
So, we did have some people asking in the chat and given what's at the bottom of your screen
in between your active items and your soul count, tell us a little bit about key items,
which items are the key items, you know, outside of the Lord Souls and anything else like that.
Well, there's a lot of key items, and it's like just stuff that appears in this place or things that are progression related like the rings that are progression related.
But most of them are not important.
There are a few on the bottom that are important ish.
Some of them, like so depending on what we get, what skips are available to us,
We can avoid getting a lot of the items beneath, but they're all relative.
I would say like if we get just the right things we can actually avoid having to get a lot of those items.
Was there a reason you didn't kill that Hollow?
It didn't really matter. That's really...
That's a key item. Covenant of Arcturius.
Did I not kill it?
necessary no that is a I was talking issue that's okay I just have to climb
up so not all of them are you don't need to get all of those but they all can be
wrong like for example the the one on the very end the that's the crest of
Artorias you absolutely don't need the crest of Artorias whatsoever. It's just it saves time you could get it so it's relevant
The four Lord souls you might need the four Lord souls to access the final boss
But there's a several things that you can get that can circumvent that so you might not need to get them
But it's it's useful to track them
Especially because even if you do get the item that allows you to skip them
You might get them anyways and then then you can save time by not having to do the skip
So it's all stuff that's relevant to know
Do you ever actually have to refer back to the tracker at some point while you're playing with me?
Yes, I do. Just to be like, alright, what do I mean?
Because there's a certain point, like maybe now we're in, we're just thinking like, do I have everything? Am I in go mode?
Fair, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have to just like double check to make sure.
And as everyone can see from home, there are two items that are live up right now.
up right now we have one lord soul on one cup and have arteries so two key items
that we have required so far and the cup and have arteries is very important
because you can't do for right so there's a few that you know all bosses a lot of
them like I said you can probably buy this
We're going to need to do some weird stuff.
Remove.
He's trying to prompt soaps to basically buy a stack of twinkling type knight because
there isn't a stack of twinkling type knight.
I couldn't buy the 100,000 soul soldiers.
Yes, it was very expensive.
But yeah, so there's like, there's a couple of key items that you literally just cannot
skip.
And that is the Covenant of Artorias and the Doll.
You cannot kill those bosses without those.
See, Regal, that was pretty good, but I just, Chad had you beat.
They raised over 2.4 million souls over the last week.
Wow, impressive.
Right?
Okay, so we, we are good on Twinkly now.
So we can go plus five BGH and we are really strong now.
Like I was saying earlier,
we don't want to use this weapon the whole run,
but it will carry us for a while.
The reason he doesn't want to use it for the whole run
is there are bosses that are going to be resistant to it
or just not going to take as much damage,
like especially going to DLC,
he'll probably want something like a Black Knight weapon
if he can find one.
We'll have this good boss.
We're gonna have this boss.
But to have the resources right now to upgrade your weapons is huge because he's done runs where he hasn't found resources for his weapons
And has stayed at like plus one sometimes the entire run and that hurts that good that's slow
Well, when it comes to getting like a fast randomizer run, there's so many different things
And it's so common that you're just missing one or two things and the other day I
I had a run where I have like everything except for the ability to upgrade so it
have any damage at all and that's like pretty uncommon for that to be I
imagine you're grabbing a lot of safety items now just to find purple cowers
crystal or something or is that just like muscle memory we're grabbing a little
bit more I'm grabbing things that are on the way I didn't like like honestly I'm
grabbing fewer things than I used to so I didn't clear the graveyard all the
way for example. So his objective now other than killing bosses will be to
find the Lord Vessel. The Lord Vessel is going to be the most important item that
he's going to look for and he's gonna be making certain decisions and certain
routes to be able to scout that out as fast as possible because without the Lord's
in a toad. Let's go for it. Let's get that bomb toss. Nice. Nice. Into an R2. Yeah. That's
cool. That's a very well-placed bomb. It is a very cool strat. Stacker's the gargoyle
right off the fight. To back up what she said, yes, the Lord of
Lord Vessel is the most important thing throughout the whole run, especially in the early game.
We can save a lot of time by getting an early Lord Vessel, and we can lose a lot of time
by getting it.
If we get it really late, we'll lose a lot of time.
We kind of want to get one as early as possible, but we don't need it right away.
But the sooner we get it, the more we'll start saving time.
We're going to be doing a standard route that we usually take, which is ringing the bells.
We could do since gate skip, but since gate skip is a little more of a, if you're going
for a PB strategy, it is less safe, I would say.
You wouldn't want to probably do since gate skip for a marathon or a race because...
I was wondering, you were talking about different routes and logic, and I was wondering if that
came into like if you're racing against it does it absolutely do races of all
these different kinds of steps of settings yes so if you do a sins gate
skip what you're what you're trying to do is just hope that you get the lord
vessel before without even going to blight town without even reading the
bells but if you don't get the word vessel it is really annoying to escape
to do reverse sins gate skip so it's typically just something you kind of
The biggest thing I would say is getting a Lord Vessel before you defeat the Light Town
boss, Quilog, when you ring the two bells so you can take that bonfire, called the Daughter
of Chaos bonfire, so then you can go to that bonfire later, because in this game you need
to rest at the bonfires in order to make them warpable later, but if you rest at them it
sets your new bonfire location at the one you rested at, which means that you're stuck
there in fall control that's good so if we like rested at the daughter chaos
bonfire to make it workable we would then be stuck in black town and that's
slow so we had the only person to be happy about that would be Miyazaki yes
us being slowed down yes though like it's a big deal to get the Lord Vessel
early especially before clay log and then after that it's kind of a question of
of well, hopefully you get it before you finish Anor Londo
because we typically go to Anor Londo
after we ring the two bells.
And a lot of this is just different routing
to avoid having to visit the same areas multiple times.
That is the easiest way to save time
and the item randomizer speed runs.
If you are going back through the same area again,
you're gonna be losing time.
You wanna do them one and done.
but sometimes the way that the items are laid out,
you can't really avoid that.
And, you know, it's just unfortunate time losses
when that happens, but there's a lot of just energy
being put into not having to go through the same place,
twice.
Speaking of heading to a different area.
Well, this place, we have to go through twice, unfortunately.
It's true.
We have been here before, but.
We have to go there here twice because of the boss.
We've had first undead asylum, yes.
But what about second?
Exactly.
So we're just going to take out Stray here.
It would honestly be better to do Stray Demon later.
He's pretty tanky.
We would prefer to be a little stronger for him.
But there is a check for the Lord Vessel here.
And we want to get that as soon as we can before we go
and ring the bell.
So this is just a natural place to go to.
Yeah, if you've been watching over the last 15 minutes,
can tell our strength doesn't quite scale to this second visit so well the
damage is not bad the plus 5 BGH is still pretty good but he is a chonker he is a
chonker so we we would like to come here later but you know we want to get all
the Lord vessel opportunities we can before going to Blight Sound and there's
also a small chance we'll get the key to the depths here which is where we're
gonna go afterwards and unless we literally get the Lord vessel here we
We are going to be going to the depths.
Because the depths is another Lord Vessel check before going to Blighttown.
That we don't...
There's also some other Lord Vessel checks we could be doing before going to Blighttown.
But those are in places that we want to try to not do twice.
So like a darker base.
So we're going to try to do darker basins later.
or we're going to gamble the Lord vessel isn't there.
So Rigo, over what length of time?
Like you seem so eminently comfortable describing your logic and the path through the game,
whether this is a for you thing.
I think part of what you described is that this is kind of generally a good path to take in along with the principle of
don't go somewhere more than months if you don't have to.
But like at what point did going through a route like this just start making, you know,
inherent sense to you rather than something you had to talk out and think back through later or anything like that because you put I
Don't know more hours into this game than most people could conceive of so well
It takes a lot of time especially just like honestly it took me forever to be able to even do it all bosses run without
forgetting bosses
like that was like already took a long time and then
but with the
The randomized runner took me a few weeks of just grinding out a lot of runs before I really had a good sense for the routing.
We make optimizations to it all the time.
I've been trying to do like...
We've been trying to do like PB attempts recently.
Which are just not good for marathon or race.
race, just like fast, fast strats, but it's fun, like, it's just you resettle for a lot.
Yeah, definitely. Like, there is a certain, you know, especially once you have the speedrunner
mentality of the kind of thing I always tell people who want to get into speedrunning is
you'll know you found a game that's good for you. If you can be mad enough to throw your
controller across the room and then be ready to run again, like five or ten minutes later.
So throwing those, you know, 1% chance runs at the wall to see what sticks is its own
kind of fun once you have that sort of familiarity and like you can be a piece
for the run that gets lost even further in. This is also just a really addictive item randomizer.
I think the item randomizer for this game is extremely fun and good. The enemy randomizer
is entertaining but I would not describe it as fun. Fair, fair. But people love watching it,
Yeah, that's for sure. I'm trying to do a, it's not obvious, I'm trying to achieve by doing a glitch right now.
You just did a condom shot where they just killed Kappa Demon while he was in AFK, didn't have a chance to explain that.
But he's trying to actually achieve a specific equip load here to be able to do some air rolls, which allows him to roll into depths without ever having to get the key up depths.
And with Capra's arena he jumped in in a way that didn't activate the boss and as he killed the boss
He quit out at just the perfect moment before
Arena became stable ground to rubber band him back to that like
Little like area he was traversed out of bounds location
And then from that out of bounds location
You can more out of bounds though
Get into the depths without having the key to this and this is good because this is the Lord vessel check
uh areas in here. I appreciate that in an aggressive repudiation of what the game is
normally about equipment is literally just for like making platforming work specifically glitch
platforming but yeah the rest of the time uh all of our health and our ss is also for platforming
rather than for combat so it's a rule of combat here is don't get it they're all they're all just
resources to use. You're not wrong. More twinkling.
It's unbundance of twinkling type night today.
All right, well, no word vessel yet, so we're gonna hope that gaping drops.
So this is actually a good example of logic that we are doing a lot to, like, we're trying to
avoid the logic of skips even though we have like non skip logic going on here
the Lord Vessel could potentially be in the depths but the key to the depths is
something that you like need and we don't want to have to like go and get the
key to the depths of course but it absolutely could be here depending on
how the logic is, like, sorted.
But, you know, for an imagine, especially in a marathon setting,
I imagine you're going from, like, least out of your way to most out of your way.
Yeah, but, like, this could, if it's here, it saves us a lot of time,
and we don't want to have to worry about, like, getting the, um...
...eating the deads.
So we're just coming here and hoping the word vessel is here.
And it wasn't.
Which it wasn't.
Yeah, it's nice to get to say how he's gonna have to do that even if only through his armor, but that's super useful
So now you'll have to do the long descent into blight town and if he's lucky he will find the Lord vessel down here
And then he can do something like you know grab the daughter of chaos bonfire
We were talking about without having to make a return trip all the way through blight town all the way to the bottom
This is like on love getting to the point where it's like we're either going to save like
two or three minutes or we're gonna lose you were three minutes if the
war vessels here I'm gonna keep but yeah yeah as you can see he's not kind of
haphazardly moving through the game he already has like these decisions he makes
and routes that he'll take depending on the items and these are very likes very
tried and studied methods to kind of find the fastest routing and nothing
between each location and unfortunately things are not going his way in key
evidence but maybe things will better. This is another merchant here that will
always sell a talisman and I think he's gonna try and prom swap to purchase it
even though he doesn't have the souls for because hot pocket made that talisman
costs like 500,000 souls but it's a soft lock protection because there is the chance that
you might need to cast a spell called cast light on to open a certain like door in the DLC and
you might not find a catalyst for it depending on how the logic works so hot pocket just gave
one merchant a guaranteed catalyst but it costs 500,000 so it's like you can you're not soft lock
You just need to come up with a lot of money.
Yeah, it's just, it's your problem to figure out how to do it.
Especially here in Blighttown at this point.
It's really the grind of shame if you have to go for that catalyst without item swaps and other glitches.
Yeah, well, since it's always there, we can just abuse it and prop swap it and just get it.
Granted.
All right, thank you for the guaranteed Sorcerer's Catalyst.
Griegel's going to do some pretty cool, like, reversal through the area here to kind of make
Blightown crossing as trivial as possible and these chests again all key items and so I'm going to chat asked our tailcuts key items
No, they're not they're just extra items
Key items are any item that would have been a key item in the game. So like black Knights chests boss items
Well, I just see out of locations
Boss some other ones like black
Technically aren't care
Yeah, it's just like a little, it's like a few more checks to add some spice to it, you know?
It's a nice middle ground between full shuffle and everything being in its normal location, which is boring, right?
So we still have to check a bunch of stuff, but we don't have to check absolutely everything.
And typically, even when you are doing full shuffle, to where the key items can be anywhere,
they really can't be anywhere, because they won't be in a place that is missable.
So if it's like a tail cut, technically you could kill the boss without cutting their tail,
and then you'd be out of luck.
So, Hot Pocket made sure to not include key items in locations like that.
There are also some important things I guess we can talk about. For example, we're going to have to
eventually find a broken pendant to try and get into the DLC, but the broken pendant can only be
behind Golden Foggins. And Lord Vessel can never be behind Golden Foggins because that wouldn't
make sense so like without knowing that logic you will know where to search for specific items
as well so we know that the lord vessel won't be in certain spots and the same for the verbenpinde
which narrows things down a bit thanks to the logic
he looks like we are going to lose a bunch of time unless
we law drops the lord of vessels so we're we're hoping that she's going to drop for this right
churly a boss dropping a lord vessel
he did that in his practice right he did actually yeah like the winner of the
last thing I'm like this might not be as lucky though yeah well really there's
also important things he just I just want to point this out really quickly
I think you had a chance to say that but like there's a reason he didn't sit in
bonfire down here is he wants to prevent having to climb back out of this place so he's keeping it
back at the Fire Lynch Try and so when he bones out he's not having to do the whole massive
like walk of shame back up Blightown yeah it's quite for safety. It's faster to just not take
this bonfire and just traverse downwards to get back here later than it is to take it now and then
run out. Climbing your way out is very slow. But so is going through here twice, so we're
gonna hope that we don't have to do either. But it's not looking good. Not looking good, gamers.
Look, if we know anything about it looking over, there's always that possibility that we'd be,
It becomes so back if you watch the ballad show run earlier. I've heard things
I don't I don't want to be spoiled on it because I haven't watched the whole thing, but I've heard I've heard things
It was a roller coaster
You out there listening and watching did not get the chance to get definitely recommend putting that on your pick list for vots to watch
As someone that has done a lot of nanophrones myself
I'm sure it was awesome. Those are that's actually my favorite way to play ballad sure. It's just doing nanophrones
So that that's all oh
No, it's just cast wirely relevant. It could be important. It's not
Gonna save us a couple minutes
All right, so I want to take this inflection point here of knowing that blight time didn't work out
I want to ask each of you starting with ash
Because I know you also play this what they're each of you thinking as far as doing next
I want to see if there's any difference between the two oh
Oh, I doubt it just because we kind of have done a lot of these races and ones together
but at this point, hmm, I'm, hold on give me a second considering the items you have.
I think, I think he was, is going to do Darkroot Basin and try and do the checks in there
to avoid having to go through an Orlando and having to come back out risking not having the Lord muscle.
Nope.
We're risking it. We're going.
You actually are going.
Okay. All right.
This is where, you know, obviously different runners will have different decision making and that's what makes the races between
so cool.
Is that like sometimes someone will take a ball.
See like risk and be like, okay.
Well, I will say on this.
If you're racing and there is the you're in a matchup that you feel like the your opponent is better than you
You can absolutely
break away from the normal decision-making that
you might make and do something that is
Not optimal, but if you are if you get paid off you'll you'll be ahead of the other person because they're taking like the
you know
This one particular round but it
The Lord vessels in this other place that they're avoiding because of X and Y reasons
But it is it's there and if they had known it was there they would obviously have gone
They don't and so you just kind of take like a gamble that it's at one of these unoptimal places
And that boom puts you ahead so that is absolutely a strategy in races that I've seen you also
I
You'll you'll choose locations where there are more key item checks so you have a higher probability
Yes, that's it's relevant. We honestly would rather find something that allows us to skip the Lord's soul collection
But we'll take it something
But when it comes to like doing this
We really just don't want to go to dark route because darker is a place that we can
do a one-trip through and it's quite fast to one-trip dark route. So we're
trying to just, we're gambling that we don't have to do that. We don't have to
go through it twice. And the punishment is that we have to traverse backwards
from Anirvando, which to be honest is not that bad. It is slow, but it's it's
It's about as slow as doing darker twice.
So it's like, you know, we would rather just like risk it.
Especially because I have good damage.
All right, another question for the both of you.
And Regal, you first on this one.
If there is a part of the game, you know, a backtrack
or some other thing that you don't necessarily
have to do every time, but you're always really unhappy
to see when it shows up, what is that for you?
Set can you restate that again? Yeah, yeah, of course
Basically, what is something that and sometimes happened during the randomizer that you're always like unhappy to see what's basically the least favorite thing?
Oh have to do with any regularity
Having go to go to the tomb of the Giants to check for the Lord vessel. It is the worst thing that can happen. It is the most
like time-consuming awful thing that you can have
and
You're there's a chance that the Lord vessel is in a couple of really bad spots
And that's just like the worst that it is by far the worst
So anytime that happens you're like of course
How do you have a tomb of the Giants Lord vessel?
Actually you want to expand on that answer?
Well, no, I think it's very similar to him
But like also it really shows how little you know about a game when you have to try and climb out of it and
Reverse and you're like I don't know if I know how to do this because the game puts you on such a specific track like at that point
You might have already not ever have to do that before
There's a lot of speedrunners. You don't know how to do that. They literally don't know how to go back the other directions
They are definitely two of the Giants catacombs just having to work your way back up from there
Well, you should the thing is you should not take the fire if you don't have the Lord vessel to avoid that
but I have seen people accidentally take it because they forget and then they're like stuck and it's like, oh
I could use one of those. Yeah, that was a bad decision
Yeah, I I it always fascinates me to find people who's
familiarity with the logic in the areas the game is entirely through speedruns and especially randomizers and then non-standard forms of content
As soon as they have to do a casual knowledge check
Yeah, it's just like they they look like they know everything and they are this perfect player and then they get through it at Kerbal
I don't know how to do this
It's it's interesting. I I have like less of those weaknesses that I used to but you know that would happen to me in the past for sure
I'm doing a full shuffle of this game full item shuffle really
increase your knowledge of this game it's just so much it's just slow and
high variance it like the the full shuffle runs like you could lose like an
hour just from having that RNG like which is ridiculous
I suppose I'll take some demon tight night we need something
in a prop swap.
While we're doing a little bit of shopping
and you're talking about the different sets
of randomizer settings and kind of combinations
to make unique experiences,
what are each of your favorite setting sets?
Which are your favorite like sets?
Yeah, like what is your favorite settings to run?
Exactly what I'm doing right now.
Okay, right on.
This is like the speed run.
We even have like an unofficial fingerboard for it.
This is the race settings that people do.
You'll see like there's a lot of different configurations you'll see different people do depending on what their goals are.
If they want to play casually, if they're doing a challenge run or if they're doing a race or a speed run,
you'll see different settings depending on what they're doing.
This is typically the speedrun race settings, and this is what I have the most familiarity with and it's just so fun like
blazing through the game
I also really like full shuffle, but like I was saying earlier
full shuffle can be a bit of a
time like
investment a lot of
He says this but he beats it so fast
Well, I can do all bosses full shuffle in about three and a half hours with
RNG
But if you aren't really familiar with how to pick up all the items it could take you like
hours and hours to do that
So like being really familiar with all the item locations is important
But with race mode you don't need to know all of the item locations
So that is this is probably a little more beginner friendly as well
It's faster, there's less variants to it. It's also a little bit easier for a beginner to jump into.
What about you, Ashwin? What are some of your favorite ways to play the Randomizer?
I do the same settings, because I agree with them. It's just really fun to just kind of test yourself on the same sort of conditions, just a different seat each time.
But for a little bit of fun, if you want to mix things up a little bit, I would recommend the addition of the Foggate Randomizer to Item Randomizer.
another randomizer that is I think the fog
randomizer is great fog randomizer is my is the most fun one to pair with this
like the enemy randomizer is entertaining but maybe not fun for the
person doing I was gonna say is the enemy randomizer more fun for you or for
chat it's it's more fun for chat but for me I'm just like getting mad the whole
time because it's made to slow you down. If you're going for fun level, like your own
personal experience, the item renders like perfect.
And add fog and then you get mind boggled. You're just like where did I go and how did
I come out of this place and how do I return back to that area and then you're just like
in full note mode and you have like 50 sheets of paper, all kinds of notes.
randomizer I would say adds fun rather than adds frustration which the enemy
randomizer can add frustration so we're talking about all these different sets
of settings and regular races think of that nature is there a community
resource or a discord or place people can go if they want to learn more about
and potentially get involved in doing some of that themselves absolutely there
is the souls speedruns.com which is like the wiki that we have for all of the souls
all the souls games and there should be like an invite to the discord within there somewhere and
you know there's like dedicated Dark Souls one channels there's even a dedicated Dark Souls one
racing channel so we love having races like not as many races as like we used to have but we
We still probably do them like every now and then like community races.
Sometimes they'll we'll have like maybe four or five people.
Sometimes we'll have like 10 people doing a race together at the same time in the discord.
That's always fun.
And anyone that wants to like participate and learn, especially like randomizer races,
like we're down.
We're down.
Just just be aware you you might get smoked at first, but if you just you keep trying like
you'll you'll get down.
Yeah, it's all part of a process.
Like, no one's first.
There are very few times when you're first speedrun of any game.
Even if you're like me and you like running in new games to kind of help develop the tip of the sword as far as how techniques come together.
Your first speedrun rarely feels good. It's like, it's the second and third where it's like, oh, I, like, actively learn something and manage to apply it during the course of a run to save lots of time.
That's when things start feeling good and fitting together.
And we don't really take film super seriously anyways, we're always there.
trying to just like have fun and help people out to get better or just like
have a chill time so it's it's it's never super serious although sometimes we do
tournaments but we haven't done a tournament in a couple years because
they're they're a lot of work sure yeah anyone anyone in this line of work as
you have been noticed that the organization is easy to under appreciate
it. Yeah, I organized the last
tournament. It was fun.
No, appreciate you and appreciate
like a supportive community.
It sounds like there are a lot of people there
who would just be interested in helping get more people
to see what Dark Souls remastered
and the randomizer has to offer.
Yeah, and if you want to play prepared
a diadition as well, that's totally cool.
The item randomizer works for that too.
So there's like a nice there's two
different versions of the game that are very different in terms of the tech that's involved
with them.
So you'll have a lot of people playing one or the other, which is Prepare to Die Edition,
the original Steam release, which has 30 FPS.
It's a little jankier, but it has unique glitches for speedrunning.
And there's the remaster.
The remaster is more accessible, so it's usually more popular.
people still like to play prepared to die addition so we we mix and match
well we'll raise prepared to die addition first of all you can no longer
get prepared to die yeah right not by any like you know if somebody still
happens to have a key sitting around I suppose that'd be possible yeah you can
it was like was prepared to die initially back in the win the games for windows live days
it was originally released as a games for windows live thing like that was like the maybe the 1.5 patch
and then the 1.6 patch was like the steam release i believe the steam release is basically one patch
uh for prepare to die edition and uh i would not uh suggest like games for windows live
No, that's more for the archivists, the people who like to see what older
versions had to offer and like fascinating in their own right.
It was one of those.
Fair.
So what's your, you know, what's each of your history with souls in general, just
like, you know, speedrunning or not?
I started playing Dark Souls 2011, the week after this game came out.
I didn't know anything about it.
There was a game before it called Demon's Souls, right?
Demon's Souls was like a hit for, you know, at least compared to what it was expected to
be.
Right.
For a studio that made Armored Core in Kingsfield, back when nobody knew who either, you know,
what either of those series were.
The game almost got canceled, I would say, ended up being hit by what they released.
i'd never even heard it
i just remember looking up like
my dad was like uh...
he was uh... he was offering to buy me a game
going out that weekend
uh... is i looked up the reviews for like an rpg is i like playing
and this game's got pretty good reviews should get me this
and little did i know i was signing up for
this game
and anything about it
and i just got like obsessed
It's just a wee little 15 year commitment. Yeah, I know I tell my dad this all the time like is this all your fault
But yeah, just kind of just randomly came across the game when it first came out
Just it like I had like a
Total
Reversal of like how I view video games when I was like in my 20s, which I feel like it's pretty rare
That late in your gaming career.
I just haven't been playing in a lot since then.
There's something to be said for, I feel like, it's totally natural.
People's, like, passions and the way they approach games to kind of change over time.
Like, and change back and forth, you know, as people, you know, move out of one phase of life, start a family, those sorts of things.
things but then with things like you know the switch the ability to play Dark Souls over there
you know even if you have a family if you still have that itch to play games there are lots of
different ways to get it done. What about you Ash? I think it started with Bloodborne well actually
my first experience with Dark Souls was just watching my brother back in like 2013
run around as a silent demon not knowing that there was a door he could escape from trying to
kill it with the sword notes. And I think he just talked about how difficult the
game was and he just kind of dropped in. I think that was the first time I was ever exposed to him
but I didn't really know what it was until I played Bloodborne because I was seeing a lot of posts
about the gothic architecture of it and the Lovecraftian vibes which got me into my first Souls
game. My first was Bloodborne and funny enough I knew we both were meatball friends and stopped
find my stream one day and he was like hey Ash have you ever played Dark Souls and you know
I have played Dark Souls all the way later. Have you ever played Dark Souls?
So he kind of infected me. I was just imagining the Lord of the Rings scene with just Regal
whispering from behind the throne actually. You should just be careful of Regal if you
ever meet him in real life he'll probably do the same to you. You should speed up Dark Souls.
It's really easy to get started speedrunning Dark Souls.
I'll teach you.
Crest of Artorias.
That is helpful.
Yes, it is not needed, but it will save us time.
For anyone who is watching, the current state of key items is pretty poor.
It is.
We are not in a great spot.
We do have a coveted of Artorias at the least.
Yes, and the Crest of Artorias.
We're not.
of their group. They're not completely in poverty right now, but you know, we're on the
world. We could really use a Lord vessel. We have, I'd say four more checks in and Orlando
before we are just, you know, having to just run back with our tail between our legs.
But as you can see, there's a lot of chests in here.
So there's a lot of key items that could possibly be scattered.
Usually we just get it here, because there's so many checks in Anirwondo,
and then sometimes you don't.
And it's it's it's feeling pretty bad. Yeah
Yeah, I mean like casually this this area is kind of like all right
You understand how to play the game now. We're gonna put you in an area that really tests your fundamental skills
but also reward you with lots of cool stuff and
Unfortunately, we're not getting the experience of that that last part of previous sentence today
I'm still using the weapon I started with
I
Just been carrying this a little time although I say this is one of the bosses like they were about to fight is that where this weapon falls off
They are
resisted to lighting
We'll still be able to do it, but it'll just be a little slow not not the best
That is not what we wanted
Maybe this is not even the right. Yeah, maybe this guy just a pendant flavored pendant
Maybe this guy will have a
come on give me something that hits out being like me that is not it those are just shields
okay to say but this might end up being so you have to go through well I could get okay
Actually, I have I in my great wisdom kept this Gwyn's greatsword with a bunch of demon titanite.
I'm just gonna use that. I forgot I have this. See, I know what I'm doing. I've done this before.
He's moving away from the lightning weapon, so he doesn't struggle
against Hornstein and Smaug because of the resistances. It's nice to have like a variety of like weapons in these runs like for example when we did
Stray Demon earlier bleed weapons are particularly effective against Stray Demon which is just nice to have.
If you were able to do that then obviously you have like Black Knight weapons which are fantastic against everything. It will be great against DLC.
Some weapons do fall off in the DLC.
And then just like any weapons that use to have resistant that bosses are resistant to and if you're lucky enough
You can find like magic and sorceries that could also help you overcome a lot of enemies
But then again, you do also have some bosses that are resistant to magic. We're gonna do like our teaser for the crowd
That's gonna be fun this weapon actually kind of chunks it's not bad
All right, let's do it berserk style. All right. Well, this is the worst possible energy, but that's okay
Ah
Of course now regal, I don't mean to backseat, but I do believe you can hit them before they
We're gonna do it again, that was bad
Badly executed by Obang.
Yeah, there's like three different O&S openings and that's like being one is not the same.
That's the one you typically quit out and redo.
That charge attack is also kind of annoying to dodge sometimes.
When he's going around slow, you don't really know exactly how he's going to come out of it.
So he kind of jumpscared me there, to be honest.
All right, let's try this.
It would be RTSR, so I'll just commit it to it.
Woohoo! Get chumped!
Appreciate Smoke pushing orange team into us.
No!
Okay
It's not even faster at this point because I have to set it up with the enemy. True
Nah, it's always worth the one time for the people. Yeah, I mean I wanted I just wanted to see the damage
the thing was choking.
Granted, we did get to do that part.
So thank you for showing that off.
And hey, if you are here watching with us,
we appreciate you being here as part of the SGDQ 2026 bonus
stream here on the Hot Fix.
If you like what you're seeing here,
know that we do streams almost every day,
including on weekends as part of the Hot Fix showing off
content from people around the world,
like a lot of our runners will be today,
the kind of folks who may not get to show up on mainline stages
that often but we love to show different runs, different categories that you may not always
see and just a lot of great content so please consider subscribing if you're not and enjoy
the rest of the bonus stream today.
Looking a lot better.
Yeah, still got hit by a shovel.
Yeah, you did.
Oh, that is actually that oh oh so actually okay uh that that opens things up for you
a little bit.
We might be able to hit the lord vessel in the painting.
I was just about to say he's gonna have to run with his tails between his legs back
through an Orlando but getting that means he gets one more area to check before leaving
and Orlando. So let's hope for the Lord's vessel.
More importantly, she likes to talk so we're going to play with her.
You know it is. Just speedrun her things.
And how appropriate for an unseeded run to have something important on O&S, just so
we got to make sure we got to see them.
Well, we're going to see Evan Boss.
Granted.
So he's going to go to the Painted World right now, because there are a collection of key
item checks in there and we will get to kill one more boss.
And that will just give him one last chance to check if the Lord Vessel is here, otherwise
he's going to have to run out.
It's typically like you also want to try and do an Oralando and one visit if you can,
kind of clearing out all the areas, because you have the Lord Vessel, you also go to Dukes,
which has a lot of key item checks as well.
And yeah, unfortunate here, but he's still searching for it, but maybe there's a little
lifeline in the painting world.
Yeah, it still won't be like fast, but it'll be better than...
Okay, like if it's in the painting, then fine.
It's better than some of the other alternative places it can be.
There's going to be three checks of the painting, right?
There is the sewers with the bone wheels, there is the annex, and then there's the boss.
We have three, well actually we have four checks because there is one more Anor Londo
check at the beginning that we haven't done yet.
It is the last one we call the copium chest, like Shirley.
Is that the chest next to the neck?
Surely it's in here. It never is.
Yeah, actually, I've actually had it be.
I've had it be in there once, and it was like the most amazing feeling I've ever had.
It's that one episode of House where it actually was Lucas.
Yeah.
This place isn't too bad. I like being able to just run through here.
There's one skip that we'll do here that is usually fine, but sometimes it's like,
if I'm having a bad day, I'll take a lot of time.
See if we can land on the tree.
Or it's actually not a tree, it's like a...
a... a pipe or something.
this area is kind of annoying because the bone skeletons here can be quite
close to you if you're not fast enough. I think you took a wrong turn.
All achievements muscle demerits.
Dangerous.
Fasten was my name.
Good quit out there because that would have been certain death. As I was saying, if you
go too slow they will catch up with you and then you will die before you get your key
item.
This is the key item for, this is the key item check, but in all achievements you go the
other way to get on the spell. So I keep asking him to go in the other way.
He's suffering from too much success of knowing too many things.
Yeah, this is, it's a huge problem. This game is like all the different routes are so like different from each other depending on what you're doing.
So they bleed into each other and you'll just start doing incorrect stuff.
genuinely it's the tyranny of muscle memory as somebody plays a lot of
roguelites playing a different character than the one I normally play will
just completely set me off the wrong like hey this is the right note that's
not the right technique for this character well time to reset it is it
is a muscle memory issue I mean a muscle memory is amazing
sometimes it curses remember what I was saying that there might be a skip that I
mess up yeah I'm surprised you're doing the partner version versus it's faster
I was I was going to credit you some of those asking like oh isn't it faster
like is it faster to actually do the skip or get an axe key and then go annex
the proper way and I was gonna say the skid this faster but not when you rock
This run depends how many times it's oh, it's faster to get it first try right if I did the easy thing, but I
There's there's what's not but then there's also what's funny first try. Yeah, this is also that was a 30 seconds funnier
You can quantify it
So here's the other
And we got nothing.
Amazing.
I love nothing.
Did you move?
Alright.
So we have one more...
Well, two more checks.
I'm surprised I haven't got any, like, spells.
Oh, okay. Actually, we have another chest.
Yes, I was going to say you do have one.
Well, my muscle memory was taking me there, so...
Forgetting it, like my brain forgot it, but my hands...
Remember, you know?
And it's nothing.
All that's left now is to deal with Priscilla, leave the painting and sadly walk all the
way back.
There's two chests.
There's Priscilla and then there's the fourth chest.
Yes.
Yes.
The copium chest.
Hopefully the copium chest is off today.
Are we going to deal with Priscilla in one of the funny ways or?
We're going to do a new strat.
As long as I don't mess it up.
We're going to try to skip her going invisible.
I know you would argue that this is not the best seed that you can have and you're not
going very fast, but I think it does keep everyone on their toes because the tension
is a little high here.
Like, where is it?
Yeah, that's why I didn't want to do a vetted seed as well.
It's for the plot.
They, like, I feel fairly confident about my ability to do a unvetted seed still, like,
underestimate so glad I didn't but I mean we might get something
we'll see yeah and it's fun like I find this sort of thing is a fun exercise for
people in the know-about game logic to kind of start doing their own checks
based on your item tracker and everything that's on you know available to you
and what they've seen so far what else they think you could potentially be
going to do next I missed but that was so cool there's there's something that
really interesting about Priscilla. We've always had speedrun strats, so basically always find
where she is because she does go invisible. However, very recently, if I'm not mistaken,
someone just found that if you go to this particular side of the room and just stand
there, Priscilla just doesn't see you. Yeah, she doesn't do the teleport where she goes invisible
if you stand in just the right spot. But I stood in just the wrong spot, so she teleported her.
But then I got to use a backup strat where you use the lock on to tell you where she's gonna be
All right, but can you hear it is that tiny arena? No one has found I don't know
All right, what is it? No
Well supply tongue key
All right, okay, so now we're going to dark route and then it's gonna be in dark route
And then this is gonna be the seed where Ashwin would have kicked my butt
Cuz she would have right she would have taken the gambit
But they go to Darker I would have paid off so that that's my guess. I'm hoping it's in Darker
All right, yeah, so you set a timer for about ten minutes to say ash told yourself
Yeah, we're gonna get the I told you so
This to his content
Yeah
Did I get a cage key?
You know I could just like not look and just try to open the cage and it'll tell me that.
That's a great way to try to get you or not.
I'm scrolling through my entire image.
I'm just imagining the the undead so literally just pulling out a giant key ring and looking
at it like nope.
Yep.
Yeah pretty much pretty much exactly what was happening.
Alright, I don't. I don't have one. We're just gonna drop them.
This is the walk of shame right here.
Oh, we have claw control.
So at this point, you do have claw control.
Oh, I should put that on. I should really put that on. I would have been smart.
here we get a fall control is nice because you can do fall control there's
some extra tech you can get it out yes so like you can basically fall damage
cancel if you have fall control enabled because fall control kind of just delays
your death by just a tiny bit so you'll splat when you fall with fall control on
but you won't die immediately. So if you quit out just when that splat happens and
you resume the game, you're at the bottom. Not dead. Beautiful abuse of all damage.
Reminds me of Earthbound. If the game hasn't put you at 0 HP yet, you're still alive.
Yeah, it updates your coordinates before it will kill you if you have fall control. So when
you reload the game, you're at those coordinates, but you're not dead. It's like the spell itself
makes it to where it just takes a little bit longer for the game to update your HP. And
that works on like other Souls games too. Like Dark Souls 3 has a spell called Spook,
which is very similar. You can do it in that. There's the Cat Ring, which is a fall damage
like item like it prevents ball damage and demon souls you can do the same thing with
that so this is a very common strat in souls games.
Alright well let's uh let's go to Darker and uh so at this point you've cleared like
what 11 well bosses?
I am 11 bosses now.
Okay yeah that's about right.
We have 15 more to go.
But at a certain point, they will start rolling off pretty quick.
Because we're still at the point where we're having to check it.
But once you get into go mode, you run very fast.
I will say that this is a little bit slow.
We do have the doll and the Covenant of Artorias.
So those are huge.
I don't know if we have the ability to get homeward yet.
Don't think so.
We do not.
We do not.
I don't think I got homeward.
So we're...
I did not see you get homeward.
Yeah, I think we're...
I could be wrong though.
Still looking for a way into the final area.
We're looking for a way into the DLC.
And we are looking for the load vessel, of course.
And we also need the Crest Key to shoot down the Calvary.
So we're looking for a lot of stuff.
I just like to thank you as you made your way through that area for not visiting unnecessary violence on my siblings and family
You know all the rest of the trees. No the trees. Yeah, actually it would have been faster for me to
to
Dispatch them, let's say. I believe it. So you're welcome for me losing time. No, thank you
Honestly, they're just kind of annoying
I mean, yeah, fine. I wasn't gonna say it, but they are family. That's a that's a survival strategy. Just be annoying
Absolutely
So we got moonlight butterfly coming up and there's like several tricks here
I get Lord Vessel at butterfly a lot
Think I actually got that
Oh, uh, fun fat about butterfly.
If you hit butterfly with just a little bit of damage, butterfly will land about 15 or
30 seconds faster.
We're going to toss a couple bombs, now, and just wait, and the boss will land a bit sooner.
Normally you would want like a spell to shoot butterfly with, it's actually, well I think
I think I actually do have a great...
I could have a tune great heavy selector.
We haven't had any really good magic.
I could have been a little more optimal by putting something on,
but I've just been focusing on the talking so much.
Do you want me to remind you of the next bonfire you set up?
Well, I also need to level up.
My intelligence only is at 17.
Oh yeah, you didn't even, are you a typical...
Well, it's because I couldn't get any large items until later.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
I could get it now then, I could get it.
One struggling is relevant.
It's not strictly necessary, but it is relevant.
I don't know about this.
Unportrait.
Now he'll try and go to the other key item checks in the area, like, um...
Are you gonna tackle Sif now?
Yes, we're gonna do Sif, and there's two chests.
on the way. Yes. But Regal likes to, if he gets like big soul items at the beginning, he likes to
put points into specific levels and specific like attributes right off the get go because it kind of
backs them up in case he does end up needing sorceries and he'll have the intelligent for that.
He'll have the two min slots. He'll have the faith for it to do specific things. But typically he
He pours a lot of his points into vitality, strength, dexterity, and he's the type.
I usually get 40 of like, bit, endurance, strength, and 45 dex for casting speed, and
then I dump the rest into intelligence.
Okay, yeah, so basically you're going for like the floor, you know, you want more health
to be able to do fall strats and the like, and then the more reliable DPS, and then back
it up with, hey, just in case I get a really good spell.
Yes, and the thing is, once you get to like 40 in most of the stats, going above 40 is
not going to do much, but you can get a decent amount of damage out of scaling your intelligence
up.
So I kind of just use that as like a stat to dump into after the others are taken care
of.
And then this particular run, I didn't get as many souls as I normally would, so I didn't
really have that resource available to dump into.
But I have it now so let's just get a lot of souls.
You guys like souls?
I've heard good things.
How about we get 9,999, or 990,000.
All right then.
It's pretty good.
And we're going to take them all with us while we pet the dog and nothing else.
We might want to look away.
I will be.
That was a good stuff, like, it's a little bit of a smooth.
All right, well
There is one more check here, I guess
I have a question for you. Is that sword?
Still better than the blacksmith giant can write this one. Maybe this this sword's real good
A lot of people don't use it because it's like you get it from Gwyn Gwyn soul and you gain plus
So it's not as commonly used, but this is actually pretty good
I am happy to just
Oh, yeah, we have fall control. We can do some cool strats.
We can do a plunge. Just a second. I'm going to grab the second cure.
So we do need to take out this Hydro in order to access the DLC and since we're already
here we should have it down.
There is a Black Knight check in the area which is usually one of the checks that we
just never do unless we have to because it's just like in a really poorly positioned spot.
But we are going to do it.
He says we, but it's mostly him because he thinks that.
That's the royal we... me and Chad.
Okay.
Me and Chad, we're going to take out the run.
I was going to say that of course every runner has things that they don't like to check.
This is the things that he doesn't like to check and then sometimes it will work against
us.
No, it's just the nature of running a category like this, you know, especially in like a
race setting.
You can't be everywhere at once, and when two players pass, diverge.
Ooh, that's a spell.
That's a spell.
That's a good one.
Might as well attune something.
That's what we call it.
Beautiful.
The Lord Vessel cannot be in a DLC, that would be.
No, it can in Race Mode Plus, that's the expert.
Yes.
Which is one of the ways you can get softlocked.
If you go into the DLC, there's ways to skip into the DLC
without the Lord Vessel, because like you have to,
in order to get into the DLC, you have to get the Lord Vessel.
But you can use skips to get in there
using the Purple Cowards Crystal.
So if you go in there without the Lord Vessel
and you rest at a bonfire, you cannot leave.
You are stuck permanently unless you use a chance
to burn a new character.
But race mode plus, that is absolutely a thing
that can happen, and it is one of the true.
I appreciate people both speculating
where aggression items might be at this point
and also asking whether or not it's safe to say
that Ash told you so.
I feel like the answer on that last question
is un-conclusive so far.
We have one more check in this area.
if it's this guy like you know what
fine no one's ever checking this guy this is just bad energy
it's like
insane gambit to check this guy you you can't make people go to pinwheel
willingly
yeah i mean that we it might be in the demon beings
Which would be annoying.
Demon Ruins is the... Demon Ruins and two Magillots are the two bad spots.
Which one do you think you'll do after this?
Not that if you don't find it here.
You do have an orange shard rank.
I know. The thing is, it is more...
Doing Ceaseless.
There are more checks in two Magillots.
In the catacombs in two Magillots than there are in...
But I can... I think I might have a Demon Ruins because
If I take a bonfire, and if I don't take a bonfire in Tomb of the Giants, Catacombs, that's slow, and I want that option, I guess, so I'm probably going to deal with them first.
If this is the Lord of Us.
It's a key to see.
Actually, it could be a new one though.
Yeah?
That opens up a possibility there.
That's awesome that you got that because now it means you don't need to walk all the way through
There's also a really bad spot for it to be but
It is not as bad. There are a lot of checks area
Yes, so wait another area that he doesn't like to go to because it wouldn't be a one return
That is obviously
New London
New London exactly
Because if he doesn't have the key to the seal there's a lot of items under the water
You will not be able to check if he is forced. That's how you would
Yes
It is like
New lando can be problematic for the whole one
And if he didn't have the covenant Artorias, he cannot fight for King's law
But he does have so now I have both as actually I could have made that decision already because I have fall control
The fault control makes it to where the key to the seal is not needed to get all the checks.
I could have already made that decision, but it just wasn't clearing in my mind. I could have done that though.
This is where things get a little hairy. The more complex and based on the items that you get, you kind of have to sit there and think through.
through, even though he has a lot of experience doing this,
each seed provides a different opportunity
and different tree of decisions he could make.
And sometimes those decisions aren't so obvious.
So you have to kind of like slowly cup to the realization
of like, oh, I could have done this faster and sooner
because he has a library and archive of like
glitches, skips, and sequined bricks
that he can use to be able to go as fast as possible
and do things that you wouldn't normally be able to do,
but it just takes connecting those dots
and in this like kind of high pressure situation.
Yeah, I totally forgot about open for a little bit.
Being able to allow me to go to pieces.
They wouldn't have changed anything,
but the fact that I got the key to the seal
clued me into a decision
that I already should have made,
even if I hadn't had the key to the seal.
This is where I should have gone in.
I didn't get to have, I told you so a moment,
So that's fortunate both were wrong. It wasn't in an Orlando. It wasn't in dark group basin
So a third player would have had the one up on us here
She would have gone to dark route and then just been sad. I
I think I default I think that means chat wins so cat give yourself a pat on the back way to go check so
All right, so now the
We want to take out, I guess I should actually, there is one chest I think that we need to
drink one.
Have you a tomb dark bead yet?
I'm so focused on the next decision that do need to attune dirt.
As stock is one of the early checks that you do when you're kind of like running through
this area to fly town, some convenient item pickets.
So we need to go take out Ingward, then I'm going to drain the water.
I don't know if I really need to do this one, just in case.
So we need to take out this fool up here.
This is every Glitchless Runner's least favorite NPC in the whole game.
Ingward.
He drops a key item, and you can just kill him from a distance.
And whether he starts sprinting, oh, that's good origin.
So he sprints, so he's taking extra damage.
That's just random.
Yeah, whatever.
a really nice setup here because you would have all these like banshee ghosts trying to
kill you as you climb a ladder to talk to Ingrid or kill him.
When he dies, he just tosses you an item like you just Kobe Bryant's straight to you from
where you're standing.
Fortunately, not an important item or anything relevant at all.
It's a chance that the, um, porkings, I have it.
What's an interesting thing is that there is one bonfire in the game that you can warp
with even if you don't have the Lord Vessel and that is the Abyss bonfire.
So some, some runs, you could actually take out four kings just to use the Abyss bonfire
to warp somewhere.
Even if you don't have the Vessel.
I don't think it's going to be relevant for this room.
It is an option.
Like one time I had four kings drop the doll,
and then the lord vessel was in the painting.
So I used the best bonfire warp to warp me back to Anor Londo
to enter the painting.
That was a cool run.
Yeah, that's one of those things I never recall in the randomizer. It's just like
We found it finally
Now the run that has locked but not the worst like one of the worst
This is like so much better than the other two worse ones
It was all thanks to darkroot basin had not gone there
You know you wouldn't have come to New Londo, and you would have gone to Catacombs
So I told you some in a roundabout sort of way
Yeah, that was it was all you
But you're supposed to fall off usually this
and it just falls off of me.
Woohoo!
I hate these enemies.
Guarding a chest. This enemy is usually like, you shoot it and then he runs off and dies, but he'd not do that since...
I'm very annoyed.
Yeah, that chest was is normally the very larger I'm as you're gonna kill four kings
and yeah there's one more destination after this.
Dukes.
Probably Dukes, yes.
Dukes has the highest concentration of checks in the whole game.
There's like 12 checks in Dukes.
So we're just going to go straight there.
The most likely, if we're going to find our way into the DLC,
it'll be from the Absarctites.
I should probably equip the ring.
That would be a good thing to remember,
so you don't just splat.
Now ring here, I spell there.
You know.
Yeah.
I found stuff that'd be helpful to get to play the game.
just keep it track
uh... ash has been
what are the nice things about having commentators
maybe this is a party star
all just out of range
I gotta say though, this weapon chucks.
I should have dropped it a little bit.
I was about to say you're kind of living life on the edge in this run.
Because we didn't get any ability to warp, he's still going to be searching for those Lord Souls.
So that is also going to be a more key item, which actually needs to do so.
Right now, we're missing the Broken Pendant, we're missing...
Did we get Crest Key? I don't...
We are missing the Crest Key and the Pendant and the Way into the final area, that's all it is.
Yes. Well, the Lord's Souls will be important, but yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the way into the final wave.
Exactly, exactly.
The pendant is usually not super hard to find.
The crest key and the way into the kill can be anywhere, so...
So, the crest key will allow us to kill Calamites, because it will allow Go to shoot him down.
The burg and pendant will allow us to access the DLC and the souls obviously will help us unlock the final area
But if all goes well, there will be a lot of key items in the dukes archives, which then
Will free us up from having to do more key objects
Yes, but the way this run has gone
It doesn't seem that statistics is on our sides here. No, no, no, no called shots in this one
That's for sure
Ted mentioning how the sarcah head
Remembering to put on dark be
Had mentioning how the hallowed
Main character looks like Deadpool which of course I assume means like Brian Reynolds, which is to say very spelt and handsome
Yeah, this is a this is the
I hate the way it looks when you go human in this game, I'll be honest, I'm so used to just running around like a corpse.
Yeah, I mean, it's one, it's what you get used to and two, like, extra work is only so elegant in this era, so I actually kind of would agree with you.
I can go human and I can show you how disgusting it is that to be human while you're speaking.
It is awful. I'll show y'all. It is not nice.
I will say if you go human is less iconic than Jerky Man.
Yeah, I can die.
You'll always remember Jerky Man, but the human is just so plain.
I'm imagining the human form as that one SpongeBob where he doesn't realize he's stinky.
I hope he'll excuse my horrible ugliness.
Haha!
Uh, yeah, there it comes. There's how many green blossoms? No, hopefully I don't die.
So, a little side note here, but if he had happened to come to Duke's Archive early,
because he got the Lord Vessel in advance, and he didn't kill Hydra and didn't read Dusk,
killing that Golem there would have been absolutely useless, because it wouldn't drop the broken
So you would save that for later usually you run past that guy cuz like in a good run you would have come here before
This is a bad run so actors already does
We're still looking for key items, so
You know all runs are good runs
Just like all donations including ones made through the twitch charity tool after sgdq 2026 is over our good donations
and we appreciate everyone of you being involved with GDQ content and if you choose to make
those donations that'll also go to Doctors Without Borders. Thank you very much for that.
This is GoopSkip with a bow strap. Classic. Makes it easy.
I think that Ringo didn't talk about earlier was the class decisions that he makes like
choosing a class based on whatever randomized.
One reason that people will typically go hunter is not because of the weapon choice that gets
randomized with the seed, but because hunter guarantees a bow.
And there's a lot of skips in this game that are very bow dependent, meaning that like
The bow just makes it more convenient of a setup to do, but some runners know how to
do these setups without bows.
So you'll see like...
He chipped runners from many years ago before we had the bow setup.
Know how to do it without bows.
He can forego the hunter risk not finding a bow in the game and still know how to do
the backup strats without the bow.
But if you're someone who is very bow dependent, not finding a bow in a speedrun like this
will put you at advantage, come to do something like doops, skip, and have no
bow. There's always different ways to do it. Like there's the upward, you can
arrow down as well. Yep. That's one of the library of knowledge you have. There's a
lot of different ways to go fast in this game depending on what you either have
available to you as a resource in the game or what you are comfortable with.
Just from experience. A lot of different things. This game has a lot of tech, it's really cool.
And whenever you do more conventional speedruns like the leaderboards, you end up getting locked into very specific strats for a very specific route.
sure. Luckily this game like the discovery of new strats constantly changes what is optimal for
those routes but still you just like if there's an old strat that people used to do and now it's
like not used anymore like you might not ever do that strat again but like doing a randomizer run
you can come up so having like this large pool toolbox of things you can do in terms of your
knowledge is to be very helpful in randomizer. I've been speedrunning this game for about eight
years now so that helps a lot just knowing all these like old strats
that would not be relevant at all in like traditional speedruns.
I could have done default control.
Unfortunately, most of these checks on the first way down didn't yield us like a broken
pendant or anything.
So we got a crust key, which is going to be useful once we get into the DLC, but we're
still missing two Lord Souls and a broken pendant, which would be very handy.
I'm going to save the second half of Dukes and go to Atacons and Tomb of the Giants.
This is a check here as well, so let's see if there's a check.
We are just missing a few things.
I'm going to order and get rid of them.
The broken pendant would be...
If we get the broken pendant, we're probably going to get straight from DSM.
This is actually one of the few bosses that I think Darkbead would probably not be good on.
Yeah, I see.
He's resisted to it.
Part two finished.
For the one time for the people. Yeah for the fans.
Breaking apart the giant crystal dragon with a sword instead of a hammer. That will give us a little more danger.
Let's go to uh firelink and we'll do um
I'm going to call him.
The Lord vessel ended up being in New
on the very one of the chests.
Yes.
So the broken pendant here, the only spot
that we're really expecting baby to drop is from Nido.
Because Nito, as we were saying earlier, the broken pendant will only drop on checks behind a golden fog gate.
And the only check behind the golden fog gate here is Nito himself.
So we're looking for that.
Also for that.
We're looking for Nito to drop.
Broken pendant maybe.
Plus there's just other things here.
Are there any other golden fog gates that we haven't gotten yet or checks behind?
I guess like Dukes.
Just a few there's a couple of dooks. Yeah
Yeah, the thing is the dooks checks are
Not progressing us towards a boss whatsoever
So we're going to save them if until we like want to check them and we're not losing any time by saving them
It's kind of like a free wait until later
If we're lucky, we won't have to go there at all.
If we're a little unlucky, we'll just go back and won't lose any time for saving up the
later in the race.
So the check here is the Darkmoon Seance Ring, which is normally a key item you would use
to get to Glingolin.
It's a ring.
It is a check.
And it was nothing.
There's two more checks in the catacombs.
There's the Black Knight, Black Knight, Great Axe Knight, and then...
I'm just going to cast some damage.
I wanted to ask you, did you place the Lord?
No, you did place, of course, the Lord, because you went to Dukes.
Never mind. You know me.
How could I come on here?
All right, I hope this lasts, we don't have to recast fall control here.
Ooh, purse users.
Purse users.
Yeah, that's purse users.
Ah!
My granted pockets are all so nice, but yeah, I mean, you know, whatever you want to use.
Imagine having both though, they don't have that in the game.
First, pursuers is pretty good. It is a little slow on approaching the enemies, but it can do some choking damage.
Fun fact, the camera and the remaster is actually pulled slightly closer than the bearded Irish, and so avoiding these bone wheels
is even more difficult than the remaster because you have less time to react to them.
We're going to try to dark-feed this guy.
One shot! One shot!
Try being the operative ward.
Yeah!
Ooh, nice.
Feels good.
Very satisfying.
Residence key. You pay me.
That's exactly what we need.
Yep.
Thank goodness we found the residence key.
One of the fun things about speedrunners is they know how to navigate two of the giants
in complete darkness and very optimally.
So for a lot of people this is extremely impressive, but like he knows exactly where
to slide, jump, and roll to find himself exactly what he needs to.
This is a fun area to live through.
I want to switch this to probably homing some of us.
Oh, okay, I'll use one.
Even better, but it takes two slots.
Do you have any other way of casting light at this time?
I don't need it.
Okay, no, I mean for DLC checks.
I mean, I can, yeah, no, I don't think so,
but I can just equip it at this point.
This is, um, maybe the most dangerous check in the game?
Which we just fell, that's not good.
If we die, it's okay, though.
Oh, I forgot to go, as you know, to show people how disgusting it was.
Yeah, that's okay.
Ooh, one more soldier to the collection.
This room's very dangerous, but there's a check.
Sometimes the Lord Vessels in this room.
That's the worst place for the Lord to sit, by the way.
It's the worst, awful.
That's what I was hoping you'd wait me here.
Just missing a broken pendant and a soul now.
Lord Soul.
Let's hope Nido has what he needs.
And then...
My best pairing.
Okay, remember when you were talking about how Dark Souls, like if you wanted to be,
the arcade as you play the games or Windows Live version of Dark Souls, there actually is
speedruns of the 1.0 version of this game. Very first patch. Which it's actually really
interesting because there's so many differences in the game from that version to this version,
so you would think that you could just run the game like you would this one, but it's so dramatically
I think they have to come up with a different speed run out for it.
They patched in glitches.
Like, most of the glitches that work now don't work on the original version of the game.
It's just like straight up worse of a speed run.
See, I was expecting answers like, you know, some weapons just fundamentally aren't balanced.
You know, once you've got players in there using it, it's like, oh, okay, this weapon's
way too powerful.
No, they think it's, well, that happened with the DLC, which came out like after this.
Like the original patches, the slowest and the most difficult version of the game.
Enemies are more aggressive, things cost different souls, you know, there are just so many different
things about that game that like someone can study the 1.0 patch and what is currently
This is specifically that like you can only play 1.0 on console or with the main game.
So it is not available on PC. The games for Windows Live version was 1.5 I believe?
Yeah that's what you said earlier.
And Steam is 1.6. You need to have the disc version on console to play 1.0.
He didn't drop. He must have dropped something straight to the ground.
You didn't yeah must have been something if you have 99 of something it'll just drop the item bag straight to the ground
So that's probably what happened all right
So I
Mean you do you didn't you did want to go there before and you've longed or opened up to us
I mean we literally just need the
I mean, we also need the...
But the Izalith checks are kind of annoying though.
Are you going to do the Cecilis feet check?
Yeah, I mean, I need to not skip anything really.
There's nothing I can really feel comfortable skipping.
I mean, I know you said that the second half of Duke's, you don't lose time by doing it later,
but there are such convenient checks compared to Izalith.
Oh, you're right, I forgot about that.
That feels like Izalith is just kind of a pain.
Maybe just get the daughter daughter of chaos fire.
Well, I can what I can do is I can grab the demon
Grimmons bonfire and then just don't sit at a new bonfire.
I think so, because I feel like that's better than the painful
I think I might have cast walkers with the order.
I'm just going to do this.
I would have been fine.
I was afraid of walking.
Better safe than sorry when it comes to playing cash.
Like the thing that I dread the most in any run it the two things I dread the most happening in any like sort of marathon setting run is
Dying in blight town to any sort of number of any of the skips that we have well
It's not in traversals. It's not really any worse than any other place
But like typically when you're traversing by town you're doing something that could kill you
Yes, it's like you're going you're dropping far far down
like a lethal distance.
Like, Blytropp, or like,
Arrows are at least likely to mess up or just a seam skip.
Like, there's just so many ways that you can die in this area
and I hate having to do it again in the marathon.
And I would say, failing the Gwynperion dying.
That's also up there in the Waukesham back when you die.
Especially if you have to wrong work again.
Yes, sure. Especially if you have to wrong work back into the game.
You know, I think just to be safe,
I am going to take the daughter chance on fire, literally just being safe for like me doing some bonehead at the rest of somewhere.
Just gonna do this.
What about you? Do you have a death that you particularly dread? Oh, I really hope I don't have this happen to me.
Earth on kind of thing.
Or is it just all?
I don't like dying to bosses.
I was kind of like trying to show off and deserved to die just trying to show off.
So we are going to try to do, there's like a few checks here.
So one of the fun things when you do play this race with other people is like everyone's
trying to sabotage each other or like kind of play their cards close to their hand so
they don't give away like what they found and where they found it.
Because typically everyone that's racing together will be in a voice call chatting about what's
happening and what they're doing.
There are strats for giving people wrong information.
Ooh, that was really good.
And they just got nothing.
just sit there speculating where you might be based on what you talked about last and what do you get
definitely a little bit of a poker plan yeah there's information can absolutely leak and because
of that you can like try to leak at it this is a cool strat our stable ground is stable position
is still over there and the elevator doesn't update your stable position, so we're going to rotate,
quit out, and then we will take us back to the other side, we can just drop down to this chest
which is normally kind of annoying to get to this chest.
That's a handy strat, makes that a lot easier.
Then we have one more check upstairs.
There's a chest that appears in the Seath's room after Seath is defeated.
We don't have to go to the prison because of race mode.
In race mode, the key items in the prison, the prison area that you go to after the first
seat can count in, when you are scripted to die to a seat, that area you don't actually
have to go to.
Because all of the key items in that area are just other, just open the doors in that
area.
They won't open the doors anywhere else.
That's how the logic works.
If you do full shuffle though, then you might have to go there.
This is the same for Ash Lake, there's no key items in Ash Lake, but full shuffle you
might have to go there.
Oh no, it didn't pay off.
Now we know we need to check a lot of places.
Yeah, yeah
We are this is not the fastest
I think we can still finish on the rest of it
We're just going to have to do a lot of checks, is it actually might be on the perfect time
to run to make sure we don't finish too fast?
Yeah, I guess you were worried about if we go too speedy.
But I think it gets to show off more of the game and like how, like if you had skipped
a lot of these key item checks because you found everything you needed very fast and
you found something like a purple cowards crystal,
then you wouldn't have been showing off the potential
of what you would have to typically do.
Yeah. And a run like this.
But it would be cool to show off purple cowards crystal
with functionality.
Yes, I agree.
Yeah, I agree.
But it does, what it does get to show off
is like your knowledge of like other skips
and perversal of the game that just like is also super cool.
There hopefully we won't have to go check near his feet.
We are going to check.
I should have actually checked the feet first.
Why would you check the feet first?
Because you don't have to deal with the tourist demons.
Oh, the tourist demons only spawn after you kill Ceaseless Disarch?
If you quit out, they disappear.
Oh, I didn't know this.
OK.
That's a handy little tip for me to keep in mind.
All right, but it's okay. We'll just have them. We'll just run past the choice.
Are you at like 17 bosses now? 18.
This is the demon ruins checks that are like really like spread out so just a lot of running
like get to them.
There's one like way over here.
This is one of the ones that you'll often skip.
We're not really in a position to skip.
We're still looking for stuff like we really just need like the Lord Soul or Homeward.
would also do it. Yeah, if he basically got a homeward or purple cowards crystal, he would
be able to warp into the DLC without a broken pendant, which is why... No, PCC. Homeward
will get us into the kill. It won't get us into the DLC, but purple cowards crystal will
do both. Yeah, okay. My apologies there. But yes, it's kind of a handy little circumvention
items so that if you didn't find specific key item checks, you're still able to get to those areas.
They're not fun to do, like the wrong work that you have to do to get into the DLC isn't...
They save a lot of time. They've been just preventing you from having to do all these checks. Like,
the fastest thing that you can really do in Item Randomizer is not pick up items, just kill the boss.
But the thing is, like, if you don't get all the checks early, well, you have to do a lot of checks.
The faster you get everything, the faster it runs.
This run, we're doing a lot of checks, so it's going pretty slow.
Hey, we get to do a world tour at the World of Battles.
This is all checks.
All checks run.
And this is why you try not to come to Isle at first, it's just because it's just so long
traversed from one track to the other.
But it's also like typically whenever if you don't have the Lord Vessel, it's like a long
run to here, but if you don't find it, you're just dead-ended and you have to go back and
then you have to run back here later again anyways.
You won't be able to pick up a bonfire, you know, on the water vessels, and it's just
like a really problematic place for it to be along with the same issue with two of the
joints.
Now, the New Londo wasn't great because it's one of those areas that ideally you'll save
for later, but it wasn't, it's not as long of a trek to get to New Londo if it ends up
not looking good.
Alright, so here's a game knowledge check that I'm curious of either of you will have
off the top of your head.
There are tourist demon enemies here in Lost Asalith.
Do they have the same stats as the tourist demon boss?
I believe they are stronger, but I'm not sure.
I don't know that question either.
I don't know the answer to it.
Same with like you have Capra's for example in the world.
Also, it's a boss.
I do know that the Western Capra Demons are not as strong as the boss.
For example, they are much easier to stagger.
Thanks, guys.
So, it could be the same thing for these tour students.
I'm not sure about the tour students, but I do know that the Capra Demons are weaker.
Yeah, knowing that this is the, those are this game's main opportunity to do the, oh
hey, remember that boss?
It's just the normal area now, sort of thing.
I love Darkbead.
Alright, Chesh comes through saying that Ruins, Taurus, Demons have about 75% of the health
of the one in the United States.
Gotcha.
Yeah, that tracks with the Caffer Demon, also being weak.
That makes sense.
What the heck was her?
I keep forgetting I have her scissors here.
I can't stop calling it that. I've been calling it that for years.
Just like, always call it that.
You let them loosen, they just grab their handbags and start beating people about the head and shoulders.
Hey, they're powerful, you know.
They're not fast, but they're powerful.
All right, so this the centipede fight is actually quite nice when you can just run straight through the lava right at him
I'm sure he's like hey what the heck
Oh, this is where you yell. I'm not trapped in here with you. Yeah
This could be a pinda, okay, so this
next check
Like all the like next several checks can be broken pindits. I
Believe you have at least three checks now one chest running to a lava here. There is the
There's
I mean, I don't consider bet of chaos a check because you're gonna go kill it anyways
But you know what I mean like the the ones you have to detour for
right um the senior craft four things left that will be the broken pin the
broken pin it is guaranteed to be here it will be one of the next four and if
it's not I will lose my mind I will be very confused I will not know where it
is so it better be within these next four
All right.
He will see me very confused if it's not where the next board.
That would be confusing even to me because like I think we've done everything behind
the Golden Fog gate at this point, so.
Pretty sure it's going to be here.
The sad thing is if you don't get a Lord Soul here, you're still on the hunt.
Yeah.
I could get this chest by the Chaos Eater first and then double back to the Swamp if it's not there, but the thing is I still need two things anyway, so it might as well go to the Swamp.
I'm also noticing Regal pick up a lot more on the side items, which typically he doesn't do this late in the run, but I feel like he's kind of hoping for a warpable item at this point, so he'll have to circumvent.
PCC yeah, I'm just getting stuff. That's like directly
Yeah, but typically at this point. He's just not doing anything. I was
This isn't a very typical run this is a high percentage completion
This chest is kind of annoying to get
It's just a little out of the way.
It's not like we're falling through.
Do I have a divine blessing?
We have two of these.
Have you ever accidentally fallen into that pit?
No. I haven't.
I'm not sure it'll happen one day.
It's the first time for everything.
That has continued to not happen before.
Two fear along. Thanks. Welcome. No fears. Hey, have you ever gone into that? One fear.
I don't think I've seen this before, but it does look handy. The jumping is in the
Yeah, that's a hundo strap
Hi, you're working out your hundo straps hundo is like
The best way to get good at randomizer I swear
So you have two more checks we have a chest with a chaos eater
Just
I mean like at this point you're like I feel like doubting yourself to something but it
will probably be better. Yeah, you get to see the cool strat for better chaos here. It's
called toky bombs. It stings a little bit to like have checked everything and it'd be
be the final thing in the area.
I mean, I would rather it be the final one than not sure at all.
Like I said, I'm second guessing myself.
I'm here.
I'm here.
The turkey bombs is just a powerful placement of bombs that basically dispels those like,
barriers that allow you to penetrate this area and kill a bit of chaos, so.
cool okay please very precise thank you all right you'll see time told you I know
what I'm doing I just I'm just unlucky you see you knew what you were doing you
just didn't know how long it'd take to do it which is you know that's the nature
of a randomizer, so. Yeah.
Kind of a troll, see.
So, Regal does have that unofficial sheets where people submit their times
for their best randomizer runs in race mode, because there obviously isn't an
official place on the leaderboards for these kind of runs.
But I'm curious, I can't even remember what is your fastest time, Regal?
What is the past time that is known for our boss?
My fastest time is a 145.
For all bosses, but the fastest time is a one third.
There is a. Yeah, very lucky for us.
I'll say that.
Who is that by and drop?
And it was a really good DPS like seed with like
all the checks like right off the bat and then it goes fast yeah and did you ever provide the scene
for that yeah no of course that's part of the leaderboard you have to provide the scene that's
that's why the leaderboard isn't like an official one is because it's like actually grinding out
like an optimized randomizer one it's just like super intense um it's too random for it to really
be something you can take seriously, I guess. Because whenever if you're trying to optimize
like a randomizer speedrun, you're you're gonna have a bad time. It's cool.
To give you a point of comparison there, the world record time for all bosses in the base game
is about an hour. So to have only added a half an hour to that for a randomizer is incredibly
impressive. I mean you could theoretically have a faster run. You could have a faster run but like
that's why I'm saying it's like optimizing it is just like ridiculous. Right we haven't run the
simulation on every seed that's ever been rolled. It would be maybe cool to do like a fixed seed
run. I could see that being interesting. We're like uh leaderboards as well but we would need a way to
edit the seeds a little better with the current program week we need you could
construct a pretty fast if you just like put everything in the perfect spot
this is a two-hit stagger
.
.
.
.
.
They don't like all the key items are a bit up
That is usually not usually you don't have all the key items whenever you finish you can find some way to circumvent them
But every now and then you have a run where you just kind of get on
Why would you check Elizabeth here if you've already talked to dusk
Which you have anything else
Right because I
That's that it satisfy your it's
No, I'm just curious. Maybe there's something I didn't know. I just yeah
Usually I don't check dusk so because I usually don't go to that black night
Just muscle memory kind of taking over on a seat
This is like one of the worst chests in the game you don't have like hidden body
I think we have the power of quidouts.
This is worse than the chest with the mushrooms.
Yeah, no, it's this is like maybe the this is either full on ambush.
This is like maybe the second worst church
Another instance of air rolls where we're trying to achieve a specific quick blow to allow us to roll
not endlessly, but near endlessly. Their drops definitely too high where you will not be able to continue to fall in the air and just abusing the
eye frames of a roll as you hit the ground. You dodge the fall. Out of that alive. Yes.
I guess you can check Chester on the way back up to see. Maybe.
Are you gonna do any checks down here or are you just gonna activate? I'm gonna grab the, there's a chest and Calamity.
And you can grab it right before Calamity melts you.
The dog's trying to jump down looking.
Don't make it make it.
Poor dogs.
We should be able to get this chest and quit out just as Cal meet like tries to
Shoot us with this fire and since this is unstable ground
We'll actually respawn all the way back
Where we first entered see all the way back because our stable ground was not being up there
Now Calamity is activated, so we will be able to have the Goth NPC shoot him down.
We have the Presky, which is necessary to open the door to Calamity.
Don't forget Chester, a dog is hot on your heels.
I think I could cast this before he hits me.
of
the
You were freely weaving through Artorias there.
That was really smooth.
I would say the only part of that that was familiar to my playthroughs of this game was screaming,
just die at Artorias.
That part I was familiar with.
Stop.
Yeah.
That boss is fan favorite, but I don't know.
He's kind of annoying to fight as a speaker.
Actually, honestly, all the DLC bosses are annoying.
I really like Manus, though.
Manus is my favorite boss in the game.
The other DLC bosses?
All right, out of the cave.
I mean, Trace is definitely up there for most memorable, I don't know about the favorite.
I'm not really going to be using a lot of the DS1 bosses are not that great.
No, no, I mean like Moonlight Butterfly is probably up there just for being like, memorably
different from a lot of the other bosses and then maybe K-Lag for being like, alright
I'm finally ready to be done with playtown.
I just a sense of relief.
I think we like is the best.
Like, I mean, I as someone that has played the game a lot, I end up
inevitably judging the bosses based off your gameplay vibes.
And play a lot.
I would say is my best.
For sure.
There's also some just kind of sentimental
favoritism there for me, because I feel like Quailug is the fight
where the combat is kind of locked in and started genuinely making sense for me.
That was kind of like the first serious skill check.
Chad also showing favoritism for Oran's Seaman's Smo, which is understandable, very iconic.
Yeah, that's one of the ones I don't like.
They are like an RNG nightmare, you know?
No, that's funny.
A lot of my experience is colored by speedrunning.
I will say, even if they are an RNG nightmare,
there's just something so cool about being able to expertly weave through them
and just demolish them.
Once you figure out how to handle and divide and conquer comes to them.
It's skill checks in all sorts of fashions, large and small,
knowing how to handle your stamina,
knowing how much you have and what that lets you do, understanding where the hitboxes on your
characters are and aren't, and just doing that dance of being right up on an enemy. You see it
and you hear Sekiro players talk about it all the time, but it's true with all sorts of Soulsborns.
It's actually less dangerous on average to be right up on top of your foe.
I agree with you. It's just like that dance of like figuring out the perfect everything
That just makes it like, oh, it's clicking.
And like Regal said earlier, your button presses, your reflexes are locked into that same kind of
golden route every time you're doing a standard speedrun, but doing a randomizer,
you're doing all those sorts of calculations and kind of getting the game feel in real time
as your weapon choices change as you choose what to level up, all that kind of stuff.
So, follow me down onto Manus, but we'll still have to do some key items.
I don't have the items we need.
Yes, yeah, I was kidding.
So, remember we said that we definitely need some version of a light source?
This is where it actually comes into play.
Well, yes, but when you do a randomizer like this, it's when you find your first light source,
purchase it because you want to have it as a backup in eventuality. We'll need to come to this key item check for example and
reveal a hidden pathway to access this chest. Sometimes you're lucky and never
have to use any sort of light source. Yeah it's just good to have one just in case.
There's another light door as well that you can actually do a skip to avoid
having to use a light source. If that one you you 100%
There's a lot that Regal does in this run that it was kind of hard to like explain because there's
just so many things happening. Um
It's all right. I intentionally did it. Yes, um that he made like extra purchases when he was
with the NPC merchants to be able to,
in case like he needed the wrong work,
he had an item for that.
You know, in case he got a weapon of this variety,
he picked up the resource material for it,
especially if he had the spending power to do so.
Backup weapons in case he couldn't find something else.
So just a lot of that like, I may need this,
so I'm going to pick it up if I can.
It's not like something that would take too much of his time.
He doesn't wanna add like,
Love time to just pick up like backups that are never really gonna be in any
Realistic like usage, but if it's quick and it's there he will get it
It's the fastest way through usually it works out
Well, that is like the one place that will happen.
We don't have hidden body.
This place sucks without hidden body and these enemies are incredibly aggressive.
Yeah, like so I was dodging and he was hoping that paid off.
I dodged all the incoming hits from these bloated warriors and then just got caught by a dark
bead which then got caught by a second one and then staggered into another one.
There's a lot of stuff going at you in that room at the same time.
Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, no, we lost 10 million.
Hey, we're done.
Hey. All right, let's get out of here.
We I think we ended up doing I think that was at the last check.
No, because there's the miniature.
We skipped one check, let's go.
It's perfect.
We went better than the last section where it was, literally the last check.
Look, almost every check in the whole, I guess Manus is the check as well.
Usually they call it the last place you look because you stop looking after that.
In this case, in both legs of our trip here, it was because we ran out of other places
It's um not lucky to have to check everything and we ended up having to check it which
has made it to where we're going to probably be a little bit overestimated.
Yeah no worries.
What is that a react where are we at right now?
Yeah, that's...
You got time. Bring this thing home.
It will probably be like a 2-0 or 2-2-2.
Let's do it.
So, a good run where things might have played out well in RTA, I believe would have been like a 150-ish?
150 ish like a low 150 so like that's the difference between like the 30 minutes that you can spare if you just had
really good checks or found the Lord vessel early or in circumvent checking extra things.
We got this isn't the worst RNG but this is one of the worst ones.
What happened?
sometimes you find the purple stone and well sometimes it's a coward though
we did find uh we found a pendant but uh we found just the blank pendant earlier so
we found the pendant favored pendant that's always like such a feel bad and then you find that
Hey boss, it's me, the pendant. I heard you needed me.
I heard you were looking for me, huh? So we can do a cool little skip here.
Manus saves a whopping three seconds.
Excuse me.
Come on man, he's getting a little old now.
He is being very young.
So, is he gonna shotgun us?
Yeah, there you go, good boy.
Good boy.
Now that's not done, let's go.
Typically, if he jumps backwards like that, it's likely he's gonna shotgun you if you
do the right movement.
Can we get a staff slam and do it right?
I think it's time to bring it home.
Let's do it.
Do you know the actual number of key I am checked there are in the randomizer?
There's maybe like 200 in race mode.
mode so we did 199 maybe not too it's it's it's like over over a hundred with the
is bull shuffle it's like three or four hundred it feels pretty safe to say we
did somewhere between like n minus three and n minus one yeah we did more than
12. All right, so, oh, oh, before we get we got to get to go to show you how
disgusting. I'm glad you're remembered because I forgot it. I'm gonna be the
Patrick for our SpongeBob reference from earlier.
Look at him! Look at him! I want all of you to look at him!
The grossest thing you ever see this guy has like a six-pack on his back like look at that. What is that?
That's the back pack the back six pack. I don't understand it. I
Hate staring at this
Well, thank you for giving the people what they want
Yeah, so gross.
The question is, why do they want it?
I feel like Apollo is just so much more interesting to look at.
Curiosity.
Look, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Yeah, people want what they don't have.
The grass is always greener and the bones are always cleaner.
Something like that.
Yeah.
The textures are always cleaner.
I'm always, I'm always saying that.
This should be pretty easy.
I'm going to cast pursuers and it's going to totally whiff because it's too slow, I can't guarantee.
Please don't jinx yourself.
No, it's going to happen. Like if this is like famous, last, no, well actually I have, oh no, I forgot to tune dark.
No, I mean pursuers is gonna miss but we won't die
This is like such an unreliable spell
Oh my god
What in your first time ever and one remains yeah, I know
The new people we're watching, they had a job to do.
I'm so proud of you, for serious.
The human is like such a stark contrast to this world as well.
Like, it just feels like he's so out of place.
Like, why would you want to be human in such a desolate...
Dark world, such a...
It's going well.
Yeah, it's easy.
Oh my gosh, she's actually going horribly, she keeps grabbing, stop.
And that's Dark Souls.
That was awful, so we got it.
That was tremendously entertaining, even if it didn't go the way you would have liked
you for the sake of the yesterday. That's what I was hoping for anyway.
All right. Regal, thank you. Yeah, please remind the people again about how to get into
Dark Souls speedrunning. If that's something they're interested in, especially races, things
of that nature and where they can find you and what they can watch out for.
I can do those things. Absolutely. So if you want to be able to do this even better than
And what I did, which is very easy to do, join the Soul Speedrunning Discord.
You can find it at soulspeedrun.com.
There should be a link to the Discord there, or you can go to the speedrun.com page for
Dark Souls Remastered and there should be a Discord link there, tons of runners there
that are willing to help you learn how to run any of the speedruns on the leaderboards
or randomizers we do races sometimes.
So check that out.
I'm Regal.
I speedrun this game all the time on Twitch and I have a YouTube channel where I do a
a bunch of cool runs that I've been working on that a lot over the past like
year so if you want to watch some cool Dark Souls content check out my YouTube
as well but yeah that's me Ashwin would you like to say your piece no just to
reinforce that I think his YouTube channel is very cool isn't just speed
runs it's doing Dark Souls content that no one has done before it is a very
unique flavor and take and he has a lot of knowledge on there so I highly
recommend watching those videos it's extremely well edited and scripted and you will see runs you've
never seen before so definitely not the typical speed runs. Do you check them out? Yeah yeah you
haven't seen them before either you didn't even know you performed them um but no thanks for having
me it was a joy to be part of another run and that's all for me thanks everyone for watching. Yeah
watch watch more there's more runs to come to tell tell i got you thank you so much for setting me up
it's almost like you've done this before yeah i know but yeah thank you both for bringing dark souls
remastered to open up our s gdq 2026 bonus stream that was a supreme show of game knowledge of adaptation
of all sorts of incredible skills that the only a speedrunner as practice as regal could show us
on command here on the gdq hot picks if you are looking for more speedrunning fun do not go anywhere
is coming up next on our SGDQ 2026 bonus stream. It is a run of the absolute classic Cuphead
with our friend SBD Wolf. We'll be back in just a couple minutes. Don't go anywhere.
Welcome back to the game done quick hotfix.
I hope you are enjoying the SGDQ 2026 bonus stream and are proud of yourselves for raising
over $2.4 million dollars for Medecins Sans Frontier or Doctors Without Borders.
But the fun doesn't stop, in fact it goes all year round here on the GameStone Quick
Hot Fix, and what better way to show that than one of the best to ever do it showing
us a run of Cuphead any percent regular difficulty.
Svd Wolf, let's have some fun.
Alright, hello GDQ, hello everybody.
I am Svd Wolf as I was just introduced and I'm going to be running this game, Cup Pad.
Category is going to be 80% 1.1+, which is this game's main category where we just aim to beat the game as fast as possible, pretty much.
Jeremy on commentary, we have Grandius.
Hello, hello.
And we have Michael.
All right, so without any further ado, we're just going to start a new fresh file in three, two, one, go.
All righty, so thank you.
Oh, I need to pick up my controller.
All right, so first thing we're going to do.
This game is mostly like a boss thrush style running on game.
And there are platforming stages, but they are optional.
What you get from them is coins that you can use to buy more weapons.
And we are going to play one of them, which is Forest Follies, because we want to purchase some weapons that are going to make our run faster.
So we just talked to Apple Guy here, who's gonna give us three coins for free, and then we're gonna play this stage.
Can somebody kind of give an overview of this level, because it's kind of a mess.
Oh yeah, absolutely. So, what's gonna be going on here is you'll see SPDWalk shooting the P-shooter the whole time to try to take down some of these flowers as they kind of semi-randomly spawn in.
He's also going to be, normally when you dash, there's like a little bit of a cooldown before you can dash again.
But if you jump, it resets this cooldown.
Um, yeah, Wilkja there also just got a parry skip where, normally you can't jump up and reach that coin,
but he took damage on the parryable object to reach up and get that.
He could have also parried it, but, uh, you'll see in the scoreboard later why we do that.
Um, so he ends up saving some time on the scoreboard.
It's a little bit scary through here. Wolf did go for a frame perfect cliff to try to get under the machine, but unfortunately didn't get it, so he had to play it out the normal way.
Yeah, but yeah, here's that parry skip time save. BAM! Look how fast it just went over that parry. Speaking of scoreboard time saves, Wolf also just hit a frame perfect trick, which actually triggered both of those stars.
Yeah, triggered both stars to appear at the same time, saving roughly a second.
maybe more about it later but here we're going to be buying our weapons which is going to be spread
and I'm going to be pressing A and B at the same time to buy the atom and leave at the same time
and also buy the lover while leaving. We're going to equip them during this kind of tutorial moment
and then we're going to be fighting our first boss. We are going to be making pretty heavy use
of the Lover. The Lover has, it's a very interesting weapon. It has some pretty complex
mechanic that helps us a lot. First of all we are going to be using it here on the onion.
There's a big thing that allows us to do is kind of prepare traps. So it basically like lingers on
streams that bounces like that. And while you're waiting for a boss to spawn, we're going to do
it again on the gate right here. You can kind of just prepare a few lovers that are going to hit the
boss once it finally appears. So we can save a bunch of time by having this weapon and just kind
of using it during bad periods. One more round of things and then we're going to kill the cat.
There we go. Not a bad fight.
I'd love to make sure that we're not too high on HP or parries or anything like that,
just to save a tiny little bit of extra time here in the results screen.
Yeah, this is a very optimized run, so it's a very high RNG run.
So you're going to have a lot of variance that comes from luck,
but there's a lot of variance that comes from skill,
and so anything that you can do to affect your time, you definitely want to do.
So all the small little time saves built up.
You know, ribbon crooks, we get flies.
We get a possibility to put the main patterns here.
And I'll be making use of these library access
to kind of kill them as they arrive.
And I'm gonna try to do face to skip here.
Hopefully we get enough damage.
We get one of the harder patterns for it.
All right, nice.
That's one of the, that's the shortest face one pattern.
So that is the highest that you have it.
And there is a one meaning my library access on the ground
instead of directly embosses is because
when the LB reacts, these are special moves that you can perform once you have an off-supermeter.
If it hits the ground instead of a boss directly, it'll explode twice, so it essentially deals
double damage.
So that's why I'm doing that here, instead of hitting Gribby directly once again, and
that was Final Phase.
So yeah, we mentioned Starskips a bit earlier.
There's a frame perfect trick you can do in the skill level section.
There's literally just one thing to lock them in, and I got the damage.
So that saves one second per result screen that you do it on, which is kind of silly.
Result screen ends up being a pretty significant part of the runner's result between all the
optimizations that you can do on the level itself to optimize the different sections,
as well as that Starscape over there.
There's generally a lot of time that has gone from me and other runners of this game into
practicing those Starships and making sure that we're maximizing how many we get.
Can somebody talk about the goopy mechanic here?
Yeah, so right here, we're gonna grab some parries,
and then we're gonna bump into Goopy.
Or at least try to.
Okay, okay, so what we saw there,
he did an up and down Lover EX,
and he's trying to go for a six frame sprite swap,
which hits both Goopies.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of hard to-
So essentially, if you do it on the phase transition,
you're hitting the phase that was there before and the new phase since there are two of that
boxes.
That's exactly it.
So like the second phase is basically just a sprite that is stored off-screen, off-camera,
and when phase two starts it gets teleported on-screen.
So if you aim a Library X, right before that sprite teleport happens, you can hit both a
new deal.
You're already dealing double damage from the Library X, so with that teleport you're
dealing quadruple damage.
It's a six frame window because the Library X explosion itself lasts for six frames.
Here we got the first plane fight of the run, which is Hilda Bird.
We just have our basic machine gun here, so we're basically just gonna shoot her down
with this.
We also have an X move that hits for more damage, the longer it goes for a hitbox.
So here we take damage and we use a Plane X to chase her once she goes back to the right.
So that deals up to, I think, 11 ticks of damage, which is very significant.
We're gonna try to skip a lap here and we're gonna get a second transformation.
We're getting Sagittarius here, which is the slower of the two, but also technically the
easier to deal with, because we can just aim up any axe here and destroy all of the stars
ideally.
Final bling phase, hopefully we don't get a tornado here.
Okay, we did get it.
This is gonna force us to jump.
She can go below.
This is about a second.
Then we're gonna go into final phase.
During this period of time, she's invincible, but I'm still gonna shoot her to build my
Super meter in the bottom left and right before she starts being vulnerable again. I am a Planiacs
That's going to keep her as soon as that happens and then here in final phase
I'm aiming some Planiacs to hit in between her and the UFOs
She spawned because they can kind of get stuck on them and they can deal more damage by
Getting these clips. So that's gonna speed up that final phase significantly. That's a 106, which is not too great
But it works. I know these times in advance because I've life-spirit open on the side
just to kind of see what the time for this run, the loadless time for this run is going to be
because that's this game's official timing method to make like competition fair across
different PCs that might have different performance and that also gives me the accurate IGT for each boss.
As someone who played this game enough to get all the achievements but never really tried to speedrun,
watching some of the speedrun specific optimizations, you know, I was so used to being able to lean on
coffee and other things to have a special meter ready when I needed it. So having to find other
ways to generate that is just one more thing to have to juggle on top of everything else.
Yeah, this is a very multi-layered game. There's generally a lot of complexities involved in like
just having to juggle so many different mechanics. We're getting really bad cagney patterns, so that's
gonna make Final Phase shorter, which is not what we want. First phase is the... oh, okay. Okay,
Okay, so that's gonna force me to do a different strat.
Okay, we're gonna watch that.
Just stay here on as long as possible
and then hopefully kill him here.
No!
All right.
How much health did he have left out of curiosity?
He was basically bad.
Well, what happened there was
when he's about to do his speed attack
or like when he's about to spit out his projectile,
he becomes invulnerable
for those lobby attacks in the ground.
So he just ended up dying right inside of him
which is pretty unlucky.
Yeah, of course you can't see the game.
Should I use that?
I'm doing that wrong.
So it might look weird that I'm doing those library accesses in the first place.
That's actually because you can get double or even triple damage by doing precisely
that.
I haven't talked about triple damage, but that is a 50-50 chance that you can have when
When you hit a log reacts in between an enemy and a floor, depending on what collision the
game processes first, you might get a 50% chance of hitting one explosion off of the
enemy itself and two explosions off the ground.
The other 50% of the time you just get double damage.
But they're on cagney, there is a vine hitbox, those brimbles, those thorns that spawn in
final phase, they have a hitbox of their own and so by aiming a log reacts in between them,
You get a 50% chance that you can generate an explosion of photo storms, as well as the
double damage that you get off of the ground, and that's all gonna hit Tagny's face.
Barons on Bombon, we got coming up.
This is a fight where you get a random selection of minions.
She has five to choose from, and we're gonna get three.
We open up with Jawbreaker, which is the slowest one, so thanks.
See what we get next.
Yeah, if you're a Mike Tyson's Punch-Out fan, this is like the fight that reminds me most of a lot of Punch-Out bosses, because the amount of RNG, no matter how well you execute, is intense here.
Yeah, this is definitely like a prime example. I'd say most of the run is very grisly, and I think, I've not run the full game of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, but I've run some parts of the run.
And I would say they're a very similar kind of archetype of run all in all because it's their book runs that have a lot of RNG to them, but they are type of randomness that is very dynamic in nature.
So what we do as the player is you see what pattern you're getting and you have to respond accordingly.
And sometimes those responses can end up being very different and very complicated, like very different from each other.
So, I think that makes for a very interesting run, because basically it means that the strategizing
gets very complex, and you're not always like doing something that is like a pure muscle
man where you're having to actually sit there and adapt to what you're getting.
Okay, Wally Gorbals, can someone talk about Wally, because I'm talk long.
Yeah, alright.
Wally's actually pretty complex type here.
You gotta take a pattern though.
It's good to do it.
Yeah, this is not bad, down eggs.
I'm going to do an EX here and then bring to his next phase and do two more EXs.
There's one, there's another, and he's going to end pretty quickly here, nice.
Now I'm going to go way back, do a nice trap of bullets, and now I'm going to do
two more of these Luigi swaps, which are a new tech where it's a frame perfect input
But to get your bomb out during the EX animation, which is a great time to save.
Now, pretty scary pattern here.
All right, nice. Really nice.
Yeah, we actually got Left Garbage on the marathon. This is the scariest pattern from Wally.
Because if you miss any of your Luigi swaps, then you're gonna have to vouch for those projectiles that are getting sent towards you and your tight space.
Right. So, good luck.
48. Very nice.
I think you can technically always dodge everything provided you position yourself correctly.
Sometimes you're gonna have to bait some stuff in advance to be towards one of the sides and then
crink and move to the other side, but nonetheless, that's very, very scary.
So I gotta know, you mentioned those Luigi swaps being relatively new tech. First off,
how new and second off, do you feel like there are still that many more things to be discovered
in a run that's nearing a decade here?
Well, I guess for clarification, I think it was meant new as in like new in this run. This this is pretty old tech
I was wrong in like
2018 2019 something like that
First for the second part of the class done
It's always difficult to say this is definitely a game where it feels like the majors discoveries have run out
But you never truly know like another game around for example, Castlevania. That's a much older game than this one
Castlevania came out in 1986 and yet in 2021 we found a very major piece of deck that allows you
to basically manipulate level layouts if you just do very precise like back and forth movements
and it ended up saving like 45 seconds from the previous record after that run was already coming
down to the frames at top level so yeah like I would say there's never like zero chance of new
stuff getting found, which definitely always makes running these games kind of interesting
and exciting.
Yeah, and it's part of what's fun for a very active community like this one, you know,
the possibility that somebody just casually, like somebody in chat before this run started
said they'd literally just finished Cuphead for the first time, which like, there's never
a bad time to have just finished your first playthrough of Cuphead.
So congratulations on that.
Absolutely.
Do you find that this is all three of you because I know you all run you know as marathons Michael
You'll actually be joining us again later this week for more Cuphead
Yeah, but do you find that different runners kind of handle?
Especially in a marathon setting handle bosses different ways or they're kind of generally agreed upon marathon strats
That might not necessarily be the absolute fastest but are much more consistent
Can I kind of point out about the thing I'm about to do because
Yeah, we're gonna get in close to the phase transition. We're gonna prepare a trap here on the right
And then we're gonna go ham on damage now
Hopefully yeah, we're getting a long pattern to help as they made a mistake
And we did get it. I can tell from the smoke up there
So that cleared phase two within phase one and now that we start phase two again
It's going to miss the trigger to end the phase and we're basically
Yeah, we stay in phase two till we're done. Very nice. Yeah
Yeah, the last base skip on the second boss, this is much harder than that one.
Yeah.
Yeah, the very last phase is like, if it gets going, there's like going to be
penguins that are going to be throwing baseball at you while standing on a moving
platform, and it can be very, very difficult to touch those.
Very well done to both get that skip and to stay alive through the extended
phase two to take advantage.
Thank you.
Um, well, sorry, what was the question exactly? No, of course, I'm happy to refraist. We had a lot going on in between then and now
It was just like do you find all three of you collectively that
You know, there are certain more marathon friendly strats
Do any of you tend to favor more repeatable strats over the stuff that's super fast
But kind of risky like that be stuck skip there. Um, I would say Jen
Right now, I'm basically attempting as a base everything that I would do in a real run
However, there's also a matter of playstyle
So like if something is going wrong in a real PB attempt
I might take a risk that has a chance to kill the run
But the alternative would be to like lose three seconds or whatever and kill the base
So in a real run, I would take that risk once it gets to that point. Well, obviously something like this
I'm prioritizing being able to finish. So
So I would rather be able to survive the bosses that I'm fighting here.
I don't know about everyone else here, if they have different philosophies.
You can definitely approach it in several ways.
Yeah, that's generally how I approach it too.
Okay.
I might stop that fight a bit, but it's okay.
Grim is a very difficult fight here because it's kind of one of the more improvisational
bosses that like he himself has patterns but the clouds that you're
standing on they are very very random they technically have patterns but they
are extremely complicated to the point where they might as well be random so
I'm basically having to react the whole time to what clouds are ahead and which
ones I can stand on and then just kind of improv which is something that this
run has a sparing amount of which can be very interesting because it's once again
and just one more way that this run feels very adaptive.
And it's in a way that doesn't even lose that much time,
which is really crucial.
If you have RNG, that's very significant
and people go to the run,
then that can start to feel a little bit less fun.
Well, RNG in this run is mostly the kind of stuff
that doesn't impact the time too much in a vacuum.
So your skills start to feel more significant.
Okay, rumor has streaming patterns.
You're getting the harder one, orbs.
And we are not getting a, okay,
I think we're getting a three-cycle here.
Those platforms were rough.
Speaking of random platforms on bosses,
this is another one where every platform is subjected
to being just gone.
And so, it's very hard to demand it.
Did you say be gone?
Be gone.
Be.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, buzz off with those.
Oh.
But yeah, there's definitely another fight where, again, it's just very improv heavy.
At some point, I'm the main maintainer for the current practice mode for this game.
I'm developing a tool that allows you to re-inject a random platform pattern through
a tax file, and that can be used if, for example, you're doing a run and you find a platform
pattern and you don't know how you could have responded to it.
You can set up that safe, that text file so that you can get the same platform pattern again,
and then you can practice and spot new plays that you might not have been able to see otherwise.
Alright, we got another plane fight here, this is Dr. Kalzrobot,
this is one of the more technical execution wise fights in the run.
We're gonna start by one sacronage and then I got it,
and we're gonna use bombs for splash damage on this spot on two parts,
and I missed this very...
Okay, this is going downhill a bit.
Alright, hopefully we're still able to kill the cart.
To HP, I'm still taking this damage boost, because I'm crazy low.
And then start to phase 3, we're using this bomb, clip up any axe in between that and
Cal.
Two sparks, take this fairy.
Hopefully we don't get stunned by fairies, as I think that can happen in this fight.
Uh, careful because I might want HP. Normally I would have two and I would just damage boost
there. But we're gonna be safe here. Okay, cool.
Nice. Yeah, so the scamming, um, so sometimes you
can get a left ring to happen during that final phase and due to the way that that gem
is programmed, it can throw off the direction in which the parries get sent. They're supposed
to be fully consistent and so you can see them coming and just kinda parry them. But
But if you do get a latframe, which is not really something that you can notice, then
you might just try to parry something and then it turns out you cannot be parable and
you get hit.
So that's a fun thing.
Alright, we got Sally, a bit of a breather here in IELTS 3.
Definitely a bit of a complicated pattern tree for this fight as well, but at least we should
be able to somewhat easily survive this.
We got a second phase transition, which varies in length a lot.
don't fully understand the reasons. I tried to look into the code for this but it's still
eluding us. Then a track here because she's going to calm down. There's phase romancing
of Final Fantasy 6 a lot, particularly the Kafka fight.
Oh yes, very much so. You get your spell summon names on the top corner of the screen. It's
very evocative.
Very. And then final phase, we should hopefully be... there we go.
Very nice.
So I take it by virtue of the fact that we didn't see any of them, that none of the alternate routes or secret phases are faster?
Um, okay. So technically, the Jimmy's secret phase would be faster.
Actually, the solid one would be as well if you do a specific trick.
The problem is, we are running on version 1.1, which is faster than the newer versions where the secret phases were implemented, so unfortunately, even if I wanted to go for them, I couldn't because they just don't make it.
Yeah, I forgot they weren't in the game in your launch.
Yeah.
Alright, we got Werner. Does somebody want to take over? This is a very technical fight.
Yeah, sure. So in phase one here, we're just going to be going back and forth with these Lover Flicks, basically priming our Lover until we are turned around facing the boss.
And oh boy, yeah wolf is going for parry here, which is kind of a difficult strat, but playing it very well
And now he's gonna do a
Precis, oh he doesn't up and down ex. There's another sprite swap there similar to goopy
and now he's going for quads which
There's a precise spot on the floor where for some reason
the EX is hit for quadruple damage and now the fight's over.
I think at least the Atlas down, that phase 2 should have lasted a lot less.
That low play zone.
Thanks. And now we got the pirate.
So this guy has been infamously burying me to a lot of cappets, speedrunners lately,
slightly, including to me in my current PB, where he gave one of the worst possible patterns
he can get, and this is the boss with the second biggest RNG delta between best and
worst pattern. Maybe somebody can explain why.
Yeah, so there's one pattern, it's triple gun, it's a 1 in 8 chance, and you can get
up to a 36 with that, and then the worst pattern is double C dogs, which you could at the best
get like a 44 or 45 so any of the shark to speed it up a bit yeah nice another
shark we got a shark nice if you're gonna kill the shark here just slightly
speeds up the fight just a tiny bit and that's gonna do a big lava trap here very
nice gonna do some Calva swap EXes that's a low 42 that's actually really
good for that pattern yeah all right but yeah like the best time you can get is a 36 and
the worst you can get is a 47 it's ridiculous with maximum dogfish delays yeah you just
like get double dogfish dogfish in itself has a lot of micro rng within it because he
basically summons for dogfish and each dogfish has its own delay that with some randomness
if you get max delays on everything and you get two of those attacks, you get a 47.
Alright, Calamari is going to be the last playing boss of the run.
Also want to be easier fights in aisle 3, but definitely still pretty scary because some patterns I'm going to be going down to 1 HP relatively early.
Like this one?
Yeah, like this one.
Now she's going to go down and grab a fish.
I can know a lot of these patterns in advance because their base basically programmed as
a list.
Right-fishing to turtle is one of the easier ones to dodge, one more Kleenex here and
dropping many mini-bombs.
Now in phase two I'm going to be doing a trick where I'm going to be doing a Luigi Swap
and then letting go of the shoot button which counterintuitively makes me continue to shoot
and it allows me to continue to shoot while petrify and then I can press buttons to petrify
and that was a bit scary.
I have to stop my sentence for a second, alright then for this final phase I can just stay close,
I will never get hit by a rataxe but I need to watch out about the spike pillars from the right,
I have to watch for, there's a gap between her head and the right side of the screen,
I'm lesser focused on that part of the screen so that if I see any spike pillars incoming I can dodge out of the way.
Alright and then we got another very technical fight in Phantom Express, this is going to be the last fight of I03,
Um, hopefully it doesn't do any ill.
All right, so to say more about that fight, um,
basically, uh, there are four phases that are kind of separate with each other.
They all have their own separate health bar, but they aren't connected because of, you know,
all the different yaks moves that you use and also the pumpkins that run on screen on a global
timer. So the speed at which I killed this phase one really matters because I'm going to be
be affected by... Oh, I think I hit a triple, this is gonna mess up.
This is a whole point.
Yeah, I don't think I'm getting this one cycle.
I didn't even kill the pumpkin.
Yeah, it's choked.
Shut up, this is a good word.
Yeah, we probably should explain that one.
Okay.
So that's a fusion.
Go for it, you can do it.
Yeah, choked is a fusion of chopped and... what is it, putt?
Yes
Don't worry it makes sense. Yeah
All right, we're gonna have to look a little bit of a ghost
Little really nearly a phantom here
Just just because of that triple in phase one see just like what was talking about like very
Cycle-dependent fight like if one thing goes wrong, you just have to win yet, but making good work of it
nice yeah we did finish it off okay and then we're finally heading into inkwell howl
oh boy inkwell howl yeah this is definitely one of the more important parts of the run
parts of the runner because we got we only got two bosses one of them is king dice and the other
one is table but they are both uh very difficult very complex and very rng heading uh king dice is
Let's start with Kintas of course, because that's who we're going to be fighting first.
So this is a long fight. We are going to be running along a board and we're going to be rolling a die to land in different spots.
And all the spots with a number are going to respond to a mini-boss.
We got hearts on fight and seven. This is perfect RNG.
Nice.
So since our die can only roll numbers between one and three, we are forced to fight at least one boss in each set of numbers.
We're doing a rock through the board that minimizes the amount of dice rolls that we have to perform.
So this is number three.
I'll be waiting for it to get on the left side.
I'm preparing a rubber trap.
Moving out of the way and then doing rubbery axes.
Yeah, so standing on the left side of the platform causes the cigar to face the opposite direction,
allowing us to stand on the edge of the platform there and do a few triple or double axes.
So the super meter you end any minibus on, Astro by the way, carries over into the next minibus,
so that makes it like a particularly difficult fight in front of you of routing.
I'm going to be minimizing the amount of EX cards I'm going to be using of Rapid, which
by the way I'm fighting in a bit of an interesting way as you can see.
But yeah, because all these EXs would just be doing single damage, and I want to keep them for
the next fight where I'm going to be able to make them explode up on the ground instead,
which is going to be overfetched. The reason why hearts are important is because there's
a complicated mechanic where if you take damage, go down to like 2 HP and then get up the heart,
you can, if you from there then go down to 1 HP, you can get 0 of 3 HP bonus on the result screen
and that saves 0.8 seconds, on top of the hearts being useful for damage boosts.
And we're gonna be making short work of Pyrrolata, hopefully. That looks pretty good.
Yeah, that's pretty fast. Wow. All right, there should be a pretty good King Dice fight.
We do still have King Dice himself at the end, so you're gonna be needing to land on that thin tile.
So roll a three. The Dice roll mechanics are a bit complicated, but like basically sometimes
you're gated and sometimes you have to like roll the dice faster. All right we're gonna be trying
to use some credit axes so use that there then pick damage, damage boost, another Stradiacs.
There we go. I should have gotten one more pay-per-se, but I couldn't use that card
either well. Not a bad fight. And then we got Daval and now this this one's a doozy.
Dabble is the boss with the most RNG variance between best and worst, and it has, I think,
the most complicated pattern tree in the entire game. So definitely the most difficult, the most
complex, the most important boss in the entire run. It's really complicated to explain all the
different patterns and which ones are good or bad, but main thing to look up for in phase one,
we probably want, we're gonna be faced with a previous Kinefying 50-50 of him either doing the
the dragon attack or the spider? We want dragon. They're starting with clap. Let's see what
we get next. Spider! Fantastic, thanks.
I'd love to see it.
50, 150, then minus 300. Nope, never mind, that was wrong. You can read his offsets and
know where he lands so you can prepare the lava traps in optimal spots, but there's
like 20 different offsets. I don't exactly remember all of them at the top of my head
right now pretty good though yeah that was some bad we're gonna be in two phase
two if we had a better pattern we could have done a cool trick here where we
could have frozen him and on some really powerful love reacts but inside we're
gonna have to fight him legit we're gonna be using the love reacts is on his eye
as it shifts away so that the longering explosion hits the other eye we're gonna
hit the sides of the eye here too and time is coming up
Hi, GGs.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Like, I genuinely didn't have a chance to say anything to the people to last like 8 or 10 minutes, but I also didn't need to.
We were just flying through Isles 3 and 4 there.
Yeah, this is a very, very action-packed run.
There's a ton of different details that I just did not have time to get into.
Very, very technical run, very cool run, I think.
I think. I talked a little bit about the impacts of randomness on this game and why I think it actually
contributes to making this a more interesting run. But regardless, I hope you enjoyed Cuphead.
We're gonna be seeing another run of this here on this channel on GameStopQuick in two days by
Mako who was here in commentary just earlier. So if you want to see another run of this,
then make sure to stop by, stop back by, so I guess I can give a few shoutouts here before I'm going to be ending my part.
First of all, if you want to run this game yourself, head on to speedrun.com, there is a link to the Discord server with all the speedrunners, we like to hang out there a lot.
a lot. So feel free to join and just ask questions if you happen to have them. On
speed.com there's also a guide section. There's gonna be a beginner tutorial by
Gronius that's gonna get you started if you want to run this category. We also
have Michael.com which is a somewhat recent addition. This is more for
like more advanced strats but we basically have a database of all the
best IELTS that we have so if you want to see the very top strats for
each individual pattern of each boss, then you can go on there and check out how we play each
and every one of them. We also have the Run Recap tool where you can install a component on
Lifesplit, although you can also do this with a save file, it's just going to give you less
information, but it's going to kind of collect information about how a run went, all the individual
times for each segment, all the different things that happened during the run, like amounts of
of Starskips and so on.
And then you can upload that file to the website
and it's going to give you a full breakdown of your run
and how it compares to different runners
and different averages and so on.
Generally a very, very cool and very useful tool
that's been just an invaluable reference, I think.
And if you want to follow me right now,
I'm not running Cuphead,
although I would like to make my return to it
before too long.
I've actually been running MinotaurWare,
which is a new game that came out at the end of May this year
by the same developers as Shovel Knight.
So if you want to, if that sounds interesting to you,
feel free to give me a follow.
And with that, I think I don't have anything else to say.
Do you all have other things you wanted to say, maybe?
Yeah, definitely join our vibrant community.
It's like we have a ton of amazing people
who are just willing to help any new player.
very very bright group and yeah shout out micah.com again wmicah.com and yeah nice job wolf
thank you thank you very much and brandia says uh that they're sorry they had to
pop up because uh like that in the way and sometimes that happens so yeah thank you uh
michael and spd for taking care of the comms uh they appreciate you and so do i
So yeah, that was an amazing run of Cuphead from An Amazing Runner and Combs.
Thank you very much for joining us.
I hope you have enjoyed everything we've had to show you so far on this day after SGDQ
2026.
Don't go anywhere, there'll be a lot more speedrunning action coming up very soon.
Take the next few minutes to take care of yourselves and each other.
Get yourself some water, a snack if you need it, and come right on back for more action.
You're made of
I'm your
Me
I'm your
Me
I'm your
Me
I'm your
Me
Me
I'm your
Me
I'm your
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Welcome to the 30th anniversary of Mud Hole Slug, celebrating the arcade game released
in 1996 and the franchise it has spawned over the last 30 years.
The classic run and gun series features comically expressive soldiers, war machines, and more,
simple intuitive controls and fast-paced gameplay. If you want to keep up with all things Metal Slug,
you can scan the QR codes that will show up on screen or use exclamation point SNK in Twitch
chat to learn more. Come celebrate the 30th anniversary of Metal Slug, the classic arcade game
series with this full day of speedruns starting with the very first Metal Slug from a friend
and running out of Sude Juarez in Mexico friend and bae and now it's time for Metal Slug.
I'm sorry.
I was just kidding.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Hi.
Hey, Mammy.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Let's go.
I'm sorry.
Show me, amigo.
Yes, the SNK community and especially the Metal Slug community is a worldwide one.
Especially Latin America is a big place for it.
Fran is from Mexico.
We will also have runners later today from Argentina and Chile.
This is the very first Metal Slug, arguably the most straightforward of the Metal Slug
games and the one that introduced the action.
It is extremely high-paced all the way through, especially in a speedrun context.
This is one of those games that, um, if you ever had a family fun center, an entertainment
center, something like that in your area, there were lots of games like this.
A lot of them were like your Area 51s, the games that were very, like, serious looking.
This is kind of, in some ways, the opposite of that.
This is a game that is like fun to look at, fun to play, and as you can tell from Friends
Reactions here, at the end of level 1 already, there's a lot going on.
Most if not all of our runners, I think everything except the last run during our 30th anniversary
celebration will actually be played on the Neo Geo 8 ES, or Arcade Entertainment System
versions of the games, which are the original versions and do introduce one notable thing
that differentiates them, which is slowdown. Slowdown is actually often very helpful in
games this high-paced. It gives you brief but predictable moments of having more time
to react to what's going on. And as you will see, especially as we get later into this,
that becomes very, very important. Yet chat already sharing reminiscences of spending
a lot to play some of these arcade versions. I had the opportunity to de-rust on the plane
to and from SGDQ to play each of these games casually. And yeah, it would have been a lot
of quarters or fifty cent plays. So much of these games, especially the first one here,
is down to just being in the right place at the right time, knowing exactly what you're doing
and which weapons because those are deterministic drops. The POWs that you rescue do have specific
drops for you so part of the run will incorporate finding the right prisoners to have weapon drops
or ammo refills when you need them. If you pick up a weapon that is different than the one you
currently have it will replace your current. It's not until later on in the series that you gain
the ability to hold multiple weapons at once but with how quick this action goes and these mini
bosses come up and down. We genuinely just don't need different weapons all that often,
friendly, very careful about which POWs get interacted with because they stop to briefly
thank you and then drop an item. Very well done, the first appearance of the SVO-001,
the super vehicle or the name sake of the franchise, the Metal Slug itself.
So we briefly saw that and then we also saw the use of the frontal attack.
There is a specific thing you can do when your Metal Slug still has some HP.
You can actually fire it off as kind of a desperation attack that does a large amount
of damage in an AoE and then jettisons you out of it.
Our first opportunity to see the recurring antagonist or one of the recurring antagonists
of the Metal Slug series.
Donald Morden. We are through our next level with only one life used so far, so it's not
like there are inherently different categories for one credit clears in this game, but naturally
you saw the respawn in from the life lost in this game that doing it on a single life
or at least a single credit is just genuinely fastest.
And for those of you already excited about sharing your reminiscences in the chat,
there are things happening for the Metal Slug 30th anniversary.
There is a new game recently announced, so
looking forward to hearing more about that myself as I know all of you are.
And there are also a lot of recent games. Metal Slug Attack Reloaded is a tower defense take on the franchise.
And I think there's also a game available on mobile devices right now.
But there should be more to come, and I can't disagree with you about the idea of 8th selection.
It would be a very fun way to get to experience these again.
Because like I said, the speedrun preferred way is frequently the arcade versions.
All right, Alan O'Neill, Key of, yep, very close up swipes.
You will often find, as we did in Dark Souls, if you were watching earlier, that one of
the most useful strategies is being very, very close to your enemies, but we don't have
a health bar here, so any hit is completely lethal, unless you happen to be in a vehicle.
It's the only time you get a health bar.
Friend making extremely quick work of some of these...
You know, there are pillboxes on the ground, and I would consider some of these screens essentially pillboxes if you're playing them casually.
Love the effect of the soldier flying towards the screen there.
But, yeah, these are screens that are meant to box you in, and a very talented player like friend can just charge ahead and know exactly where they're going.
With people asking in the chat what consoles these have been available on, the Metal Slug
series was principally available on the Neo Geo, both the AES, the arcade system, and
the MBS, which is the home Neo Geo.
Not surprised if a lot of English speaking and US based players are not super familiar
with those consoles.
They weren't the most common, they did have a relatively high asking price, especially
compared to the likes of the SNES and the Genesis in their time.
But if you were lucky like some of us to have a Metal Slug game, for me I think it was three
and four in a local arcade.
Those were some really terrific introductions to the franchise.
We are done with mission three.
This is arguably most straightforward in the franchise as far as every game or every mission
just has a really quick start and stop kind of follows each other with similar environments
and I like that we got to have a vertical stage.
I was actually talking to one of our other runners just last night about how verticality
is relatively uncommon in the series because you know it also adds the additional difficulty
of precision platforming. If you fall down, the bottom of the screen is an immediate kill
playing. So I also love that Fran is proceeding here without the metal slug because it is that
much faster with the amount of extra bombs that we have and the shotgun. Shotgun, one of the very
strongest weapons in the series and one that has maintained a lot of its major properties throughout
the series. The flank thrower here is actually kind of some my liking better in this game. I like
it better in this game when it is kind of the fireball that is a projectile in some of the later
game that we'll see today when you pick up the flamethrower it is a close range projectile around
your weapon so it's nice for coverage and things close to you but if you're like me and you're not
quite confident enough to stay super close to your enemies the flamethrower in this game is possibly the best
Yeah, as mentioned in chat, the kind of inflection point was the arcade system was the hardware
was super difficult to get a hold of, but the games were less expensive because it was
meant for arcade operators, whereas the home console was kind of the opposite.
There are a lot of amazing SNK games and franchises.
King of Fighters is one that's still out there right now, and thankfully those series
are continuing to get more accessible over time, and I hope the same will be true of
metal slug here on the occasion of the 30th anniversary.
I love the bottom turret on this boss. Basically waiting just a moment so you
might have tried to walk under it and start fighting from down there
before discouraging a very dark souls-like trap.
Oh and the game knowledge and reactions from Fran here to stay out of the way of
the enemies. Question about character choice in the run. I don't believe it makes a big difference
in Metal Slug 1. You will see character choice on our categories if you take a look between runs,
that there are some differences in who's being played as as we go on, because there are some
differences in how large the weapon pickups are depending on character as the series goes on.
so there are some characters like Theo and Ari who tend to get more ammo each time they pick up a weapon
and have some slight downsides to compensate.
We are in fact already almost done with Metal Slug here, with just one or two slugs put into the
machine, an extremely, extremely hectic play here on the final level from Fram, but incredibly talented.
Yes, I do believe, as for a follow-up comment and chat, that the hitboxes on the characters
are slightly different, so that is part of what compensates for the differences in pick-ups
that players get.
And a classic, what would become an ongoing trademark of the series in that you get to
see a final boss you get to feel like you're very close to it if you're not
quite done just yet get one of our few in place weapons here at the end of the
first game but as you can see even getting over to the turret much less
using it is very very dangerous the fact that we have the shotgun have
potentially another shotgun waiting for us on the left side of the screen that
we won't pick up just yet because if you lose a life you will lose any excess
bombs and weapons available to you, so I think Fran is being very deliberate in making sure
that we get our weapon pickups lined up with the POWs that are dropped off here, extra grenades.
We may just not need the extra ammo.
Still a question about progression and how those sorts of things work.
Oh, oh, riding on missiles!
Just effortlessly cool.
Um, yeah, if you lose all your lives, you're gonna continue and you put in another credit
to the machine, you will continue from where you're at, otherwise the game would restart entirely.
You know, you get sent to a game over where you have one last chance to put a credit in.
Using that frontal attack very, very skillfully. And there we go, now it's time for a Shotgun ammo.
And the extra pickups in the water, the Intan, are primate friends who will actually become
a companion item later on in the series.
The monkey goes from being a pickup to actually when you collect him.
There's a couple of different items later on in Metal Slug 3 and 4 that actually give
you a companion fighter when you pick them up.
And it's time for the final boss of the original Metal Slug.
Thankfully Morton is less fearsome than his reputation would be to believe in that you
can easily stagger him especially when you have as many grenades and shotgun shells as
friend does.
into the second phase made apparent by the change up in attacks and the damage
sustained by the helicarrier itself and that's time.
GG is my friend, well done.
Muy muy bien hecho.
Anything you want to tell the people friend?
with this with just a single continue a full play through a metal slug in under
13 minutes. Thank you, thank you, thanks.
GG's, Viva Mexico and Viva Metal Slug.
Yeah, Bren and I have had the opportunity to talk a lot over the last few weeks and he
shared with me his passion for Metal Slug. He shared with me the many things that he's
done in speedrunning over the years. He's also a runner of many retro games.
Thanks for the stream.
What's the voice though?
Thank you for playing.
Yeah, I think this is the story that you will hear from many people who run older franchises.
One Twitter held up by passion is that one of the things that kept Fran playing Metal Slug in particular is having played it in arcades with his father from a very young age.
a young age and he told me a story about when he was practicing for this run his father came in
and said uh oh you know you you used to play this and have such a hard time but now i'm watching
you run it without needing to continue at all it's very impressive and uh you know that that's the
story of speed running on a show. I remember the speed at least it was able to turn it into a run.
Oh my god.
So, very very well, and that is the first Metal Slug.
But do not go anywhere during this Metal Slug 30th anniversary.
We will be showing many more games from the franchise.
Coming up next is Metal Slug X, the revised version of Metal Slug 2.
Stay tuned for more fast-paced run-and-gun action here on the GDQ Hotbass.
Thank you for watching, I keep improving, cheer up my growths.
I
Thanks for your patience and welcome back to the 30th anniversary of Metal Slug, celebrating
the arcade game and the series starting in 1996. This run-and-gun series features comically
stress of soldiers, war machines, and more highlighting simple intuitive controls and
fast-paced action. If you'd like to keep up with all things Metal Slug including upcoming
announcements, get on the QR codes on-screen or use exclamation point SNK and Twitch chat
to learn more. We just had the good fortune of seeing the
extremely fast-paced iconic debut title in the series and coming up next is a run of
Metal Slug X, a remix which added a variety of gameplay changes to Metal Slug 2's exciting
core offering up new ways to play the game everyone knows from playing Metal Slug 2.
And this will be from a long time GDQ runner and one of my friends, Sonicoo Star, based
out of the United States, the Sonicoo Star.
Whenever you are ready, let's get some Metal Slug action.
Hello! Thank you, T-Tree, for that fabulous introduction.
Hi! For those who are meeting for the first time, my name is Sonic a Star, and I will
attempt to try and show off the best of Metal Slug X speedrunning here.
So much like what T-Tree mentioned, this is actually not the immediate sequel. This is
a remake of the sequel. It gives you new guns, new enemies, completely different layout.
Probably the most notable thing is that compared to Metal Slug 2, X does not have nearly as much
slowdown, so it should be just as much of a fast-paced run as any of these other fabulous
metal slugs that you will kindly see here. So enough of an introduction here. Let's get
things started. Alright, whenever you're ready. Alright, let's keep things simple here. 3, 2, 1,
one. Oh, Marko. Thank you. I
appreciate not being the only
one of your doing the
impressions. So much like the
previous run this this run
there's there's not really much
that is that's different. It's a
lot of the same sort of
strategies of just being
mindful of your weapons being
is just doing your best to try and navigate through all of the impending enemies and whatnot here.
So coming up, I believe we have the first of many new-ish weapons to X the enemy chaser. So
I probably should have mentioned this before, but there are a lot of, quite a lot of flashing
lights here so if for those who have epilepsy do do try to be mindful here so
all right we're just going to make our way to the end here uh this first stage is pretty
straightforward it's just a matter of um making sure you can save up all of your bombs and making
your way with the slug all the way to the end here. Your grenades do, I believe, 100 damage,
whereas the cannon does 300, so I usually try to save up my cannon shots as much as I can.
so and that's the first stage and so again it's it's very much more or more
of the same more of the of the hectic running and gunning and jumping and
shooting all that fun stuff so coming up we're going to see the first little
teaser of another brand new weapon here the laser it's a lot like the machine
gun it does damage every frame it does damage for every frame of contact but it doesn't have as
much like flexibility as like the machine gun so you got to be a little bit careful with how you aim
it just got to use the iron lizard the ground water yeah yeah just to try and help with some
crowd control here. Oh, there's a stray dog. Oh, nope, never mind. Unfortunately, we are
not petting the doggos here. They will try and kill us.
Right, well, and it's something a little worse than, especially for the sake of speedrunning,
because if you get hit by most of the enemies in this stage, you become a zombie, which
doesn't stop you from playing, but it does make playing the game significantly harder.
Right, you definitely do not want to become a zombie in this section, especially in this
second half of the stage, since this is the only vertical section in the game.
So you're going to see a lot more emphasis on just good platforming all around.
So far this is going pretty good.
So, yeah, there are definitely quite a few close calls I'm going to make here, so I'm
I'm just gonna take care of this guy and these mommies.
I usually try to wait until I jump on that ledge there, just for a little bit of safety.
Here we got another few waves of a wave of dogs just to take care of, beautifully done,
be gone back.
And now we're gonna actually grab this vehicle, get a heavy machine gun.
this gives us an interesting property. It allows us to be completely
invulnerable. So I could just duck and just help grenade at the boss and just
take care of it real nice and simple. So for the longest time I didn't really
understand how that trick worked but it's really just as simple as just
grabbing the heavy machine gun on your way up. So very neat trick. And on our way
stage three. I usually like to pick up a round of fire bombs just for safety. And also, I just,
I kind of like the fire bombs in this, in this game. It's, it's kind of neat. Something different,
you know? All right, we're just gonna take our newly-amounted shotgun here.
Oh, oh, no, no, no, no, I see... no, no, you stay... thank you.
Sometimes, enemies will not play nice.
I do have this super shotgun, which will help with crowd control, but I do want to try and
save the shotgun rounds for the mini-boss that's coming up, so...
Yeah, we got a few rounds of boats, one, two.
And in the midst, I'm just gonna stock up on grenades, so gotta grab the stone grenades.
They do slightly less damage, but I believe their throwing arc is a little bit higher,
so that's actually gonna be real nice in the next stage when you start dealing with a lot
of the uh the flying enemies here we got our mini boss uh destroying the turbines on each of either
end does uh extra damage so try to take care of those the first thing i can and this is just another
little bit of safety here no no no you sit no okay all right we're good all right there is a
possibility that you will get double KO'd by some of the soldiers there. So I try to take my time
to make sure that doesn't happen. Thankfully, for the rest of this stage, we're going to be using
the Golden Slug here. So it's not too much of a time loss if you get a hit there. But yeah,
the Golden Slug has a few interesting properties here. So you get the choice of either this or
or the plane. I choose the slug because its cannons do more damage than the missiles on
the plane, so definitely want to make sure I don't accidentally crash my slug here.
Yeah, there we go. Beautiful fight. Oh man, I just want to say I'm one of the two I admire
the artwork in this game this is a this is a 2001 sprite game or game with like pixel art and it
looks absolutely glorious yep absolutely true all right mission four just gotta grab this heavy
machine gun again this is more so for my sake of just crowd control
And oh, no, no, you do not want to get too close to that tank there.
It will kill you if you're not careful.
Just got to grab this super heavy machine gun there.
Sometimes you'll see weapon drops where the letters are pulsating.
That's like a super version of that weapon.
It does slightly more damage.
It doesn't really make much of a difference, so...
Alright.
Shout out to HadookinGuy, or I believe Kyoken.
I'm not super well-versed in Street Fighter, so don't quote me on that.
Alright, and this area I like to call Alien Alley, because it can be very hectic.
And that mainly just comes down to the fact that these houses have a hitbox, so you can't...
as easily like destroy these aliens as as you would want so we made it through
just fine and in just a little bit we are gonna be making our way to the boss so
normally what you have to do is destroy all of these turrets before the big
cannon comes out at the end, but if you position the tank just right like that, the cannon
just immediately comes out. So, very nice time save.
Alright, that was very nice. Okay, and now we have probably one of the hardest stages
in the run. I'm actually very nervous about this one because a lot happens. So, first we go to the
left, get a handy-dandy rocket launcher, and this is just for crowd control.
A lot of other runners tend to forgo the slug here.
Unfortunately I am just not that good to be honest.
It helps with taking care of these helicopters pretty quick and also with all of the soldiers
here trying to destroy you with grenades and whatnot. No, no, no, no. Oh, that was very
close. Alright, we should be good for the time being. Okay, and now we have what I call
the Turbo Tunnel, which is the reintroduction of our handy laser.
And you're going to really see it at work here.
So come on.
Okay, we're good.
Alright, so with the laser, there's an interesting property where...
If you don't mash and just lightly tap like this, the ammo count for it stops decreasing,
but the laser is still active.
You can use that to get a little bit more laser shots.
So it helps with conserving ammo.
And speaking of, I'm going to try and line myself up in such a way...
Okay, not entirely intended, but yeah, it's a little bit hard to notice, but these bombs,
the smoke from the bomb actually also has a hitbox, and you can use that to damage enemies
as well.
So that's what I was trying to do there with the helicopters.
Alright, I'm just gonna take this a little bit safe.
We got a sequence of three runaway trains here.
Okay, this should be pretty good.
There's usually a knife guy that jumps out the moment you destroy another knife guy, so...
I try to delay it a little bit so that I don't have to deal with them and the train at the same time
But yeah, that is what I like to call the turbo tunnel. So
The laser is just fundamentally changes the shape of how that level proceeds without it. It is very very different. Oh
Apps absolutely the laser is very much the backbone to this level
No, no, no, no, no, no, stay, no, stay, no, stop it, no, no, oh.
These guys are so picky.
But I got the flamethrower, so we should be able to make it through the end just fine.
Alright.
All the weird, assorted zombie enemies self-destruct the moment you go to the right side of the
screen.
It's just the neat little safety net, so to speak, in that section.
with that. It's time for another boss. Gonna try and use the flamethrower here to score
a few extra hits. You kinda have to shoot like really low to the ground. Okay, that is not
Not exactly what I had in mind.
Okay, Plan B. Guess we're using this.
Alright, come on.
There we go.
That's beautiful.
Alrighty.
Yeah, ideally you want to use the flame shot to score as much damage as you can since that
also does damage per frame of contact.
However, the hitbox is much more narrow to work with.
Alright, final mission.
This is the other big scary level for me.
So there's a lot that happens in this stage.
Essentially you are going to want to try and stockpile all sorts of grenades for the very
end.
So I'm going to try and make my way through as much as we can.
Here we got the what I call the Whirly Bridge.
It usually acts up quite a bit, although it's been giving me pretty good patterns.
I will certainly take that.
Hello Alan O'Neill.
Will you be nice?
Come on.
Come on.
Come on.
Nope.
Nope.
Nope.
Yeah, there we go.
Okay.
Alan can be very scary if you don't know how to manipulate him.
Believe it or not, that was not in fact lethal despite the bones.
He'll be back.
Oh yeah, he gets better.
Alright, and this is the part of the level where you really want to make sure you can serve your ammo.
And especially your grenades for the final boss.
That being said...
Let's just get that guy out of the way there.
Alright.
First off, gotta hit this for some more grenades, gotta try and destroy the submarines here
for crowd control, gotta get this EOW-ahhh that was-oh man, yeah that section can be
a little bit rough for me.
But here, it's revealed the aliens are the evil ones all along.
So this is our first real encounter with them.
I'm going to try and use the same laser trick of just not mashing entirely to concert a
a little bit of laser ammo. More grenades. Gonna get to try out. Yeah, there we go. Usually
there's another wave of like, gray ailing you have to fight. That jump makes me skip that,
So nice little time savers there.
Okay, alright, we're good.
Alright.
Now you stay over there, soldiers.
That's unfortunate.
Okay that was on me.
Yeah this stage can get a little bit gnarly if you don't know what you're doing.
That's the nature of games like these, like mistakes just kind of compile one on top of
another finding yourself without the
weapons you're hoping for going into a
difficult section make it really really
difficult
okay thankfully I should be able to
recover from this
Okay, just gotta grab this shotgun here.
Okay, and then we're gonna have two tanks come out and just gotta wait for them to go
into the middle of the screen here. And then after that it's just sniping these guys. Okay.
Having the shotgun here isn't too bad. Ideally you want the flamethrower since you have
more ammo, but the shotgun I believe does 400 damage per shot, so you should be able
to do some decent damage. All that being said, I'm gonna try to manipulate more ammo
at least for this boss. So every now and then this big UFO will spit out smaller
UFOs and sometimes they will drop different weapons like a laser machine
gun or sometimes bombs. So I'm gonna see what I can work with here.
Alright, come on, come on, come on, no, oh, don't do this.
Okay, so here you can actually do damage when he does this attack.
So, okay.
Oh, are you serious?
Alright, do your lightning thing.
That wasn't even a pattern, it was literally just time wasting.
It knew what my plan was, so... the aliens are evolving.
Oh, yes!
I can work with this.
Oh, I can't work with this. Come on. Alright, do your laser. Do your lightning thing. Come on.
Okay.
you
you
All right, we back.
Awesome! Alright, so apologies for the technical difficulties, but we are in the midst of the
final boss here. At this point it's just a damaged race. I will take that.
Come on. Yeah, time, by the way. Sorry, that came a little unexpected.
No worries, that's the nature of bosses in this series especially. Especially when one
life goes down, it's all down to like, what weapons do you have available to you in trying
to make it work. All right and yeah that is that is Metal Slug X so at least to
the best that I can do for the time being. First off I just want to give a
they shout out to Topang and Tsukimose. They have done so much work for Metal Slug Speedrunning
in general, from a lot of the strats to just really pushing these games to their absolute
limit. So big shout out to them, also big kudos to everybody else who is a part of the Metal
Slug Celebration here. Frondambe, Paul Knives, and Vangna, who are up next with Metal Slug 3.
And also big shoutouts to the task community as well. They have also discovered
a handful of different strats and also just really data mining this game. So big shoutouts to them.
And yeah, that's pretty much all I have.
I am not the best at this game, but this is the way that I have learned this game.
I have always been wanting to learn this game and run it in a big capacity for the longest time.
time and so being able to do so on at least on the gdq stream has been so fulfilling so
thank you so much for this opportunity and yeah hopefully more people will get to run this game
in the future or any of the other metal slugs for that matter so yeah my pleasure thank you for
being willing to bring this out of the run list knowing this is the series that you enjoy
and I've been running for a long time so thank you very much for showing this off for us.
Hey if people want to find you and follow more things you do you do a lot of retro video game runs.
Yes so um the main you so you can mainly find me on Twitch um my name is exactly how it's spelled
on screen. I mainly stream Fridays to Saturdays nowadays. I have life obligations, you know,
so I don't have nearly as much of an opportunity to run as I used to, but I do try to squeeze
a few speedruns every now and then. So you can also find me on Blue Sky as well, as well
this YouTube so that's that's pretty much it so all right fair enough well
you've seen Metal Slug 1 and 2 but there are still more games to come coming
up next we have a set of runs from some amazing co-op runners from Chile and
Argentina as we continue to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Metal Slug
series here on GD2. I'm going to where we'll be right back with more.
You
Thank you!
return of the millennium. Metal Slug 3 featured popular gameplay that cemented
legacy as one of the best run-on-gun series ever made. This game didn't slow down
either and neither will our runners. After this we'll be seeing Metal Slug 4
just a little bit later on featuring the Metal Rush system. Metal Slug 3 is a
game that said, alright so people know what Metal Slug is about right? What if we
just made that a little bit different? And a little bit different it certainly is
with our friends Paul knives and Ben has they'll be showing us a co-op run of this fantastic game
I do believe this was my first metal slug
So something that is near and dear to my heart. This is a co-op medium run of a metal slug three. Let's go
Hey
Hi, we're gonna try to speak in English and it's fun to the same time
We know it's going to be something pretty fun, but yeah.
Hello everyone, my name is Benka and Funtilia, and my partner here Paul from Argentina.
Hello.
We play a lot, beat the maps, a lot of turn counts, a lot of different games,
and for some reason we played Metal Slug started with Metal Slug 4 and then going on to different games.
And two weeks ago, someone here, a voice that told us,
why are you going to have the opportunity to play with us here?
This is why we have Metal Slug 3 right now.
So, we're gonna start immediately.
The chat is really hyped today. Let's go.
Oh no, the game crashed.
Okay.
Let's go.
Yeah, we're gonna restart the game, sorry.
Yeah, some issues have happened.
It's kind of weird, but...
Yes, when it's very effective, I think it's...
It's short. Let's see.
Ah, yeah.
Uh-huh.
Let's go, let's go.
Oops.
No, this is a...
Okay, we find now.
Okay, let's go.
No, wait, wait, wait a little longer.
Okay, yeah, we're here for now.
Let's get it started.
I'm going to do the same in Spanish and English for the two cases, so I'm going to do the same thing with the three phones.
So the time starts in 3, 2, 1, go!
So on Twitter and YouTube, we're telling you that this is your first Metal Slot game.
yes we're we're making sure we can see you playing the game so give us just a
moment will they get that figured out
oh we're not alive or I'm double-checking them out
all right yes yeah so let's continue restart no you're good you're good
keep going. Okay, that's fine. No. Yes, so like I said, first Metal Slug game, so I thought this
was what all the games were like and imagine my surprise when I saw Metal Slug 1 and 2.
Yes, actually very different the game. You have a lot of multi routes to change the directory of
what you're going to do and what things you're going to receive for cleaning that specific area.
For example, here we're going to pick up Charka to enter to the boss earlier and we're going to obtain
right now a lot of different weapons like the machine gun and the enemy chaser.
The tank doesn't throw it badly in the tank, it throws a little bit more, right?
Yes, yes, but a little bit.
Or the difficulty.
Itadakimasu.
Okay, this fight is actually an easy one.
You just need to match in a lot of forms and then using your slugs to obtain extra damage.
What's the risk for that?
Yeah, I'm on the left.
Ready?
Okay.
Okay.
Next move?
Mission 1 already complete.
Okay, mission 2, zombies.
Yeah, here we have a different way to beat the game.
Like the first one is more like the interest page and now this is more technical.
I hear on some stage you have to avoid a lot of the transformation
I think you killed the back
Let's go
This is the first time it's been played probably nice like everyone like right now you have
the best weapon in the game the flame shot and then immediately the next player is giving
you instantly the key machine gun the developer who know the flame shot is actually for his
in this game and it's gonna immediately stealing you to avoid to destroy the stage or
yes definitely part of this game comes down to moving around like we saw it in in x where in the
put on the tunnel, Sonic the star had to move around some drops and actually have them drop
on top of each other so he had more space to move around. So right now we're going to receive the
zombie buff. This is very important, we really want to pick up an D. We're going to call the
pass through in a bomb I'm gonna jump and try to obtain the eye work here
mind it's mine it's mine it's mine perfect okay don't worry don't worry
oh perfect perfect I'm gonna stay right now here and I'm gonna support Paul
avoiding the talking
So yeah, he's right now invincible, so he's never gonna die, and he's been in a lot of damage since the zombie boss.
So that's why it's very important to have all the aggro from the boss, and moving on to cover Paul, he's doing all the damage here.
Next, third stage or third mission, we're going to stay under the sea, and then we're
going to try to use an extra path to move in a more faster to the next cross-bite.
I don't trust him.
I don't trust him.
I trust him.
I trust him.
Now?
A little bit.
Okay, let's go.
Oh, thank you.
I don't trust him.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, sometimes that superman reigns can't kill you.
you just because you just wanted to do that I thought I was never shooting I'm
never doing something
yeah
No, no, no, thank you, thank you to Kuro.
The ostrich.
Oh, oh, yeah.
Yeah, that did not happen just because that lag here is, it's, that's the opportunity actually for that.
We know.
are to close each other and
And then we say this obviously very easy to do
Onto a boss that's very much like the kind of boss you might see in the world of Kinshupiter.
The attacks here take up whole halves of the screen at a time, but we don't have to see any of those.
I didn't realize that we take down this boss so quickly.
So the boss is called Kinshupiter.
Yeah, that's a...
Also in Europe, yeah, maybe the worst of things, or one of the worst of things in the game.
If you're enjoying having a lot of good or bad energy, congrats, this is the path for you.
This picture from the dessert, the salt of rock.
But yeah, this time it feels like we're gonna play being up here.
It's gonna be good or bad, so please don't know.
And now I'm going to try to comment in Spanish. This level has a team called Tundar Rock, very well remembered by all.
One of the worst levels of this game, because it has a lot of luck and a lot of salt.
And we are going to be able to know if we are going to be the fastest, the slowest, the slowest team.
If Tundar Rock wants to do that, there is no other solution.
The good energy for this boss is only the wolves. The wolves is the best energy for this boss.
And this level.
Yeah, and the worst one is the yellow...
The yellow pieces?
Yes, the yellow pieces.
The yellow pieces are more accurate.
Oh, okay.
I'm fine.
Go.
Yeah, that's fine, but...
But don't worry, don't worry, don't worry.
And if mummies and zombies weren't bad enough, now we've got enemies who can...
Get you out of range and just instantly end you.
These plants do not mess around and neither do the spores.
The spores are also deadly.
Oh!
Nice.
Yeah, this is where I'm the position.
Oh by the way this is the only bot we don't have the opportunity to use the bomb so we're
going to look at a lot of damage just because we have it but at the same time it's going
to be actually good because we're going to save a lot of playing chat used to be to
do the boss.
Yeah, good.
No, uh oh.
Yeah, yeah.
Caz.
Eh, me la llevo.
Me la llevo.
Eh, what?
Te voy.
Te voy.
Ok.
Cómo te haces?
Cuéntanos tu veneno, solda rock.
Tu veneno te churras.
Oh.
Oh
Okay
You know
No, oh back. Yeah, we can do anything here
later it's actually not a pretty good weapon in here
ok well, finally
no no no, de par a seguir
it's terrifying this one because sometimes it's gonna kill you just because it's bad
is bad and it's going to give you like the direct pieces. It's actually pretty fast and
you don't have the opportunity to do that too.
Yeah, this is good. I know. The only part I don't like this game to be honest. I don't
know, the final mission is good. Have a lot of lore here. You have a lot of things to do
but why is this pretty long? Why is this so long?
See, I was wondering if you'd say that yet because I wanted to be able to say as we get
as we get to the end of each section, but it's not over yet.
Yes, the final mission in the in MetalSog3 is, you could see we're only 10 minutes into
the timer and we're on the final mission, so there might be something going on.
It's very important to have these logs right now, the boss here is going to be actually very difficult if you don't have these logs.
Another flink up?
Yeah, perfect.
Yeah, I'm moving to the back right now because Paul is gonna get in some extra bombs, so I don't really want to take it.
So this is part of the full setup.
This take seems it's too long.
We're gonna try to save a lot of ammo, a lot of resource management here.
So yeah, it's very important to not die sometimes.
And if we're gonna die, we must do it in good positions.
I think we saw it about an hour ago.
I don't want to say the same.
Please, more drink is having a bad time before.
Yeah, this side just bollocks in a lot.
It doesn't seem that way.
Ok, the next one is done.
She's running.
Ok, nice.
It was fine.
But is it like I tried to say, this is not over yet?
No.
Because the plot is to start now.
Goodbye Marco.
It is there only watching
Without dying you're forced to change the character
Okay.
I sent you the capsule and moving on.
And this is actually the best part in the game.
Again, another auto-scroller.
The fun part.
Yeah, just one auto-scroller is not enough.
Why not to have two auto-scorchers?
Sure.
Obviously, all the people from the autoscroller are going to have a lot of fun because they're going to have two autoscrollers.
Obviously, there were two of them, and one of them was only going to have another one.
Move, move, move
I'm fine, I'm fine
Nice
Still fine
Ok, nice
Ah, I never stop
I think you're gonna get here.
No, it was me.
Oh, it was you, it was you and it was me.
I don't care, I don't care.
There's another one in front of me.
Oh, but...
When you get out, you have to pay for everything.
Ah, ah, ah.
Really?
Yes.
Is it time to improvise?
Why not?
I can't sacrifice shield so I link it.
try to just kick it
no!
ok, I'm going to do a part of the...
...push to the right
no, no, no, no, keep it there, keep it there, just run
just like that
now, yes
it's ok, to the maximum
no, no, no, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good
I'm in this field
here it is
have an earth of this corner
yeah I said it's gonna cut cooking in loss here like you know what now it is
not enough why not one more and one more and one more
That's my car, it's not in front.
There it is.
I'm going to go to the next one.
the
to be honest this is funny because it's just an enemy sentence to drop my my
slug this game have the old system like when you're pressing jump and shooting
you're immediately destroyed your slug this is not happening in the next the
next games so yeah you just really want to move fast and then shoot it out and
I didn't call you because we're doing the same on Mirro.
Usually Paul is doing my part right now,
and I'm doing the Paul's part.
Time.
Oh.
Time.
Yeah, see, I can't water them.
Coco, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.
I'll go up.
No.
Okay.
Hello? Nice.
Doctor Liu?
Yeah, please.
How long have you been waiting?
Okay.
This one was better, right?
Careful, careful, careful.
I can't tell you what to do.
Okay.
Okay.
Ok, we'll check soon.
Ok.
And we're finally taking control of this game and we're gonna play actually Metal Slash without Outstores.
Finally, without the Spurs are done.
No doubt.
Ok.
So now that they are different, Paul is gonna dance in this part of the stage, so he's gonna
try to load some enemies and yeah, I'm just gonna wait here.
Yeah, I know, I'm gonna chillin' around.
It is not like the Earth Soul is gonna be on the air or something like that, no.
Oh, what a...
Oh, I'm going to wait here a little bit because the procedure is going to give us some bonds.
I'm going to read it.
Yeah, I can answer.
Nothing else.
No difference.
Yeah.
And now this important part to playing in cove mode in normal you're using an a different structure right now
So in cooperative, I'm gonna try to save
The maximum flame I came to the boss and Paul is gonna do a lot of the up here a lot of the work
I'm not gonna try to jump when I wait
Face it. Okay
That's gonna be an enemy chaser drop shot or laser
Here
Later, of course, is the best one
Oh, no
I'm going to wait
Careful
No problem
I'm going to finish
Bat
Bat
I wanted to attack, but...
Yeah, yeah, you can do it
I was wondering how those were going to go, those rings and the fact that the patterns
later on move around are genuinely one of the most frustrating things about this portion
of the game.
Okay.
Okay
Yeah, come on
Okay
Come on
Oh, that's...
Nice, so now it's time for another RNG stuff, these balls are going to drop some energy
balls and in the probe there are some possibilities to drop some extra weapons, so it's time to
No, nothing, nothing, nothing, okay.
Follow me, follow me, follow me.
Getting separated on this, I can see being both necessary and very difficult.
Look how close those hitboxes are to these giant lasers.
Okay, yeah, yeah, we're fine, we're fine, we're fine.
And without any special weapon ammo either.
So now I've come for the block twist, now it's going to happen to quite a lot of marcos
Or the chapter to lose to the... to lose previously.
Oh, okay.
Watch out.
Watch out.
No, I'm gonna push here, I'm gonna push here.
Okay, I got it.
Got it, top.
We tend to farm from ex weapons, so...
Okay, rocket launcher?
Rocket again. Give us a turn, please.
Heavy, final.
Oh, thank you.
No!
No!
Change, come here.
you rolled it
mhm
the gas was given to the guy
wait, the flame?
there it is
ok, that's my fault
no, no, no, no
I'm going to fix it
as you said, we are always going to fix it
I'm not doing anything because
she needs to defend me
Oh
Okay
Oh, yeah, this is another annoying part
Usually you're gonna have some good weapons like shotgun or heavy machine
No, I mean shotgun or flamethrower and a lot of time every Marco is going to give you
Helmachinedan on purpose to just to kill your weapon.
But yeah, this is actually good, I have 999 Helmachinedan power out.
But yes, it's going to be something.
99.
Yeah, it's going to be really good.
Why not?
Unfortunately, even though we've rescued Marco, well, some Marco clones still remain.
In your casual playthrough, you'll probably be able to do what the zombies themselves
you're doing right now in the early stage your grenade turns into that gigantic uh let's just be
nice and safe out but yeah now you have to avoid those and that's what happens when you don't
No.
There you go, but...
I think I have an arrow up there.
I'd like to remind you that it's 17 minutes later than the last one.
I'd like to remind you that it's 17 minutes later and we're still in the final level.
We are.
No, it always passes the last one.
Okay, fine.
21 frameshot is good.
Yeah, that's really great. We're still at 29, 30, yeah.
Now the final boss, Frutmars.
Yes, now it's actually time for the final boss.
And it's actually, and again, another part to praise God, giving us some good drops.
Another one, this boss is actually giving us some spheres and the orange one has the
probability to drop good weapons or bombs, so hopefully it's gonna be good.
Okay, a frog.
Okay, a frog, why not?
Why not?
It's not at all
No
I want that I want that I really need this
Now you're not gonna
I don't know what to do with this one.
Wow, you're taking it. Let's go.
I need another one.
I don't want to run. Nooo, that bomb.
Nice, time!
Okay, time!
GG!
GG!
GG!
GG!
GG, nice.
Go there and chill the flamethrower.
Nice.
Yeah?
Yeah, not gonna lie.
It's actually the first one.
The first one we ever get with good RNG.
We never obtain runes in practice or everything, like good drops.
only 3-mattine or some stuff to play score instead of good drops, but yeah, it's probably a really good one.
Look at that, at 25 cents it continued less than a dollar between the two of you.
Very, very well done, and this was the run you picked up most recently.
I originally reached out to you two about Metal Slug 5, that we'll see a little later on.
It's funny, we just learned this game a week ago.
I'm gonna try...
Incredible.
Alright, well that's it.
I mean, for really with ball...
Yep.
For really with ball, we really want to play every single middle slot in Martin.
Like, this one.
And... I think it's a good opportunity.
I mean...
31-30 in one week is actually pretty good for us.
Is that not a good team?
Oh yeah, no, no.
quickly YouTube picked things up. I've seen you play many games together. First met you
during a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles run that I commentated four years ago and just
how YouTube were on another level from everyone else playing the game at that time. It was
incredible. So looking forward to seeing more of it from YouTube as we move from Metal Slug
3 into Metal Slug 4 coming up just next. Take a few moments to take care of yourselves,
drink, get a snack, take your medications if you need to. I'm gonna take some hydration myself
and we'll be right back with more Metal Slug Co-op action with Metal Slug 4.
I'm
I'm
I'm
I'm
I'm
Welcome on back to the hotfix, my name is Etitri and I hope you are ready for more exciting
action like the run you just saw from the dynamic duo of Paul Knives and Ben Kahn.
Because it's time for another co-op run. This time it's Metal Slug 4. Gentlemen, let's go.
Okay, we're gonna present each other because we're gonna start immediately. Yeah, we're gonna start immediately.
The other thing I'm going to say, never play Trevor, Trevor is on the bottom tier in this game for some reason, nice socks.
This guy has some issues, so this is the only character we're never going to see in this game.
Not yet, actually it's actually another good character, but she's trapping in Melos.
So we're going to start in 3, 2, 1, go!
go. In trilogy meadow 4 we have the first new mechanic, new guns. This is the first
one interacting one, the two machine guns. Two machine guns is actually one of the
most strongest weapon in game and we're going to use them often.
And of course there is some new stuff with enemies like the scientists right now.
They have some specific shots and they come to inform me in Proa Mountain.
Of course we really don't want that.
Wait for the delay.
Okay, nice.
Okay, got it.
We need to fix.
To be honest.
Yeah, we don't have time to explain anything.
We need to fix it like one or two minutes.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, we don't have time to explain anything. This is like one or two minutes.
Yeah, this is a faster state in this name.
So you're going to see immediately.
Okay, I hear the first part.
Thanks.
That's the second one.
Hey friends, we can't hear the game audio, can we take a quick pause?
Oh, oh, oh, right, right, I changed to the game, so yeah, give me a second, I can fix it immediately.
Oh, that's good, fine, that's good, fine.
and we're gonna turn the stage one, this isn't just a few minutes, so don't worry
oh
yeah, that's one of the bad energy in this stage, that's older with the shield
if it's almost up the screen, there is an FH chain, so he's gonna tank a lot
and you're gonna go slower than the usual in the first part
the rest is gonna be the same, we're gonna try to avoid this scientist
Watch out!
I did it!
I didn't heal
I didn't heal
I'm going to heal
Here
Oh, thanks
Okay, this is a rare part
So why not to check in us?
Wait a minute.
Oh, come back here.
Yeah, here we are doing that, I guess.
No, we're not doing that for much in like 30 seconds, it's not a big deal.
So, and again, this boss is actually perfect and easy to kill.
Perfect.
So now it's time to continue the game, just for the beginning of two minutes.
And now we're going to play like a more standard stages, and stage two, one of the best stone
crack in the third game.
We're going to try to use a lot of resource management here.
And of course, they didn't actually immediately give us, and again, to machine gun, like trying
us the insane power the weapons have.
And this is also new slugs.
Both of them have a different purpose.
The ring one is more like an anti-air slug, meanwhile the blue one is more like an anti-ground
units let them a little bit that this ornament is actually very important to
let him keep being on screen the main issue here is if he is out of print
it's gonna tank more than the usual damage so it's gonna be a risk here
and there is a fight chance to lose your slug instead of higher than a good position.
So yeah, have to say bye bye to the slug and continue.
Nope.
Again, 4-6? Is that a good time?
I'd like that with the 3rd time now.
So long here.
Fine.
Okay, so.
A bit of classic arcade banter there. Power up comes on, fine.
Yeah.
Oh!
So now it's time for the hard part in this state, we're going to try to manipulate the
next two tanks and you have the possibility to deal more damage instead of losing one
it's time so he's gonna be an actual kills in the early
they go to reji, thank you
oh well
go to the gantry, right in front of the truck
Yeah, and now it's time for the corner part of the stage, we're gonna try to climb this and I'm gonna take some bombs.
This boss is actually pretty long in curve mode, but the normal is actually more manageable since you have a lot of extra damage.
There is a glitch important here, Paul is right now in the tank slot, he is going to
try to flank later and I am going to stay right here in the bottom and for some reason
I can't just deal damage to the top part of the screen.
So Paul is going to deal some extra damage to kill some soldiers, deal more damage in
general to the structure and then I am going to just deal more damage to the top part and
And then I'm gonna destroy the bottom part.
And even without weapons, okay, this is actually very good.
I'm gonna throw some bombs here.
I'm gonna try to move top part.
A ball is gonna change the slump.
I'm gonna move here.
I'm gonna throw all the bombs.
I'm gonna try to tank a little bit.
Uh, get a turn.
Uh, for some reason, you have the possibility to give the slump and also destroy it.
There is a high chance, for some reason, to deal the damage to the bottom part instead of the top part, so it's not actually really rewarded.
Mostly the damage is better to cover your partner instead of dealing an extra damage to 7 around 1 second.
I'm gonna change my weapon and it's gonna be like weird why you're gonna have the enemy
tether this weapon instead of the shotgun since it's better but in this part I really
want to support Paul instead of being like gonna hide down at the... wait wait wait this
way here it's actually very annoying this one is mine
the weapon correctly so yeah this is like in a backup. So I'm gonna throw all the
bombs, one jump back and then we're gonna wait a little bit and boss is done.
Flagship here is actually very powerful and since we're coming around 25 28 bombs
yeah the boss is actually pretty melted. With Flagship it's different here it's
like this second so yeah it's it's worth it for the war recoverance but for
it so it's now I'm here there is a little bit of setup we're gonna wait with
balker three jumps delay we're gonna move jump and then we're gonna body all
these bombs
the wheel
Wait, no?
Still fine, still fine, still fine.
I'm going to wait for the next one.
Yes, yes, I'll wait for the next one.
Thank you.
All the movement.
Oh no, we're going to do it normally
No
It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter
There's a chee, there's a chee
I think we're going to have to give it to the camera
Shoot one, shoot one, it's going to be easier
Let it go, let it go, let it go
I got it, I got it
No, fuck
We improvised this with
Oh fuck
Yeah!
Yeah, let's go to the prison with an extra bomb, yeah?
No, I'm going to the back.
Ooh!
Okay, that works too!
I'm going to be the one who's going to go in front of you.
No, I'm going to go in front of you, I'm going to go in front of you.
Wait.
Define me, sir.
Oh, thank you.
It's fine, it's fine.
Okay.
You know what, I'm gonna wait for that.
Yeah.
Do it!
No!
Hahaha!
The drop is good, actually?
No, okay.
Okay.
And then we have to set up the giant's work right now.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Nice save.
Oof.
Okay, next stage is gonna be this chip.
I love this music.
It's gonna have a lot of different...
I love this music.
It's gonna have a lot of ways to beat this stage.
The first one, I'm gonna tape right here and we're gonna kill this tank.
The reason is we're gonna try to about trigger some enemies here,
and if you do that, the enemy is gonna still appear,
but the trigger is not gonna be activated.
activated so it's going to be really good for us
okay this elevator is it's just more like a script but it's important to keep
in mind, we really want to finish this part of the stage with a specific weapon. It's
going to be really really important to be the red part. Oh, I forgot the tag.
Yeah, for some reason, that enemy in specific is not coming in a naked kitbox,
But you can just move it around and try to avoid it to appear on the phone screen and
it's just going to try to keep moving instead of doing something.
Yes.
Three bombs for each and now this is my time to just shut it around.
Moving on to the last part of the stage and this is the most important one.
really will fall, stick some extra weapon to deal more damage to parts of the
We can move it around, we're going to take this Kemi-Machinga, Paul is going to use the
last two parts of the weapon, and he's going to change to a Kemi-Machinga right now.
And it's time to complete the final boss pretty to the last stage, and of course it's
Let's go to a good place, Japan, let's go to...
340
And this is one of the most infamous final niches in the third series, this is actually
one of the most hardest ones, there is a lot of things here, we are going to start
immediately like, divide the job, like what things we are going to need to do and what
things not, the ball is going to grab that enemy tater that is actually very important,
Now this one, we're gonna buy it
Shut the fiend up
I'm gonna take that blue launcher
Yeah, it's not
Take the shotgun
Shotgun, it's mine
I'm gonna take the...
...the bullets
And the bullet gonna...
Come on, I'm gonna chase her
Okay, it's mine
I take it, I take it, I take it, I don't care
I love this music too it's the best for MS4
it's one of the best one yes it's one of the best okay please come on thank you
be careful
don't jump
yep
don't look
your turn
gonna keep moving and then I'm gonna try to kill these cameras
they're so annoying sometimes
NO!
okay it's gonna try to
improvise that mistake
in fact you're gonna have a pretty big one
H oh listen demo here or losing some extra bombs is changing a lot this level
Like the factor nice. Yeah, I'll give you the space. Yeah, it's gonna give me enough space to kill this guy
Paul is gonna take more bombs
I'm going to wait a little bit here and then I'm going to try to move slowly.
But this part is actually very important, it's going to drop another bomb and the next attack in my team is going to be important here.
Paul right now is going to try to do the hardest trick in the game.
So I'm going to try to let him keep the focus.
More and more and more and more and more.
Okay, that trick is actually pretty difficult. Paul is trying to synchronize with this enemy when he's going to try to kill him.
And at the same time, he only has one frame to drop a bomb to the tank and adjust the load to the screen.
That takes a lot of time.
Yeah, I'm going to move like this. I'm going to wait.
In these guys, I'm gonna stay here in the bottom.
I'm gonna wait for Paul. I'm gonna try to manipulate this guy a little bit.
Yeah, Paul is gonna keep moving.
I'm gonna wait for Paul, and I'm gonna power him to the back.
Yeah, that came at him and it's mine.
Uh, I'm just need to wait here for now.
Oh, well, thank you.
Yeah.
And right now, the club is useless, so he's going to destroy it.
I need the bomb. I need ammo.
Oh, okay.
I feel like this is the fight to the player before I'm playing this game.
At the barium.
Oh
I'll shoot you from the right
Wait wait wait, I'll try to shoot it
Alright
I'll shoot you, you're just going to keep shooting
Wait wait wait
Nice
It only works on a cop
If you have sci-fi back at the boss
The boss doesn't know what to do
And it's just gonna make things like this
This is gonna be pretty good
It's all under control guys
But now this is one of the longest fight with no reason
I want too much laser
So yeah, I'm gonna stay here waiting with both
I'm not gonna shoot him because for some reason when you shoot the laser and
Of the game actually down in this specific part
One of the women is gonna hit the boss and the other is not gonna do anything
So you're gonna lose ammo instead of doing exit damage.
No.
I'm very late.
Eh, a little bit more.
There.
Damn, I'm now synchronized with pole position
to stay in a specific spot and the pride is gonna be like this.
And I'm gonna not do that with too many damage, a ball of course either.
And I'm going to throw more exit damage.
And now it's time for the RNG, bingo time.
So there it is. What's going to drop? Oh, I'm going to... oh, I'm going to... oh, I'm going to...
Oh, I'm going to...
Very fast.
Okay, with those passed, we never, ever be comfortable to be able to... to climb some drops.
Okay, more, more, more.
Oh, fine.
And now, it's time to just spam bombs.
Let's gooo!
They always say cool people don't look at explosions.
Haha!
Haha!
Haha!
No, no, no, this is not fair!
Hi, hi, lady!
So fast!
So that's our fair sign!
I guess this was like one of them team?
This is what's like when you continue?
For me, yes, it's one coin, for you it's only one.
Yeah, one coin, yeah.
Oh, Benha, after a couple amazing runs here, would you tell people where they can find you, what kind of content you like to stream, all that good stuff?
Oh, uh, Chern, you can find me on Twitch.pge, BenjaS4, I'm mostly streaming some part of
the feed running, the course of stuff, set trigger function, and Mega Man Battle Network, some PED.
And also you can find me with the same on YouTube, youtube.com, BenjaSport, I'm going to try to
organize with some CEOs from Mexico to do some extra stuff, so it's a thing for that.
And of course, a lot for me, but Paul, where we can find you?
Honestly, I'm streaming on TikTok now.
You can find me as usual, Paul Knights, or Twitch, because I'm doing multi-stream.
But all the time, I'm on TikTok.
I'm streaming on Twitch too.
Any of the options.
very good
as I can't play with a pizza, so I'm going to play with a pizza
and on the other side of the screen, I'm going to play with something else
like a beer and something with a musume
when it appears, why not?
But yeah, we're going back to English and now it's time to wait a little bit again
because as you can see this is our first Metal Slap, Metal Slap 4 was the first game we played with Paul
and then Metal Slap 3 was the last one just for this event
Now, this is the most important one, Metal Slug 5 is all a strong game, you're gonna see it very soon.
Little friends, you're gonna realize that you're gonna see it.
Not actually, you may need to wait for another day, but you want to, because you love Metal Slug so much and because I care about the series as well,
do want to have you on another time.
What I did hear from GDQ, and I do want to read something, which is that you do ongoing concerns and the statements of people watching,
We do plan to rain check the rest of the runs for tonight.
We thank you all very much for watching.
Please be good to yourselves and each other.
Take care.