Issue #414: Kazuhiko "Monkey Punch" Katō vs. Michelangelo (& more AGDQ)

Jan 13, 2026

What is there to say about the Golden Globes? Prediction markets are among our great national shames. Nikki Glaser is good as a host. The video below should start at my favorite gag from her monologue:

I’ve said enough times I watch these award shows like sporting events. Why not let myself get a little riled up for the fun of it? And I’m willing to take the wins for Wagner Moura1, Rose Byrne2, and Stellan Skarsgård3 as great recognition for independent filmmaking.

The director of Rose Byrne’s winning performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) has a hell of a Movies That Made Me episode.

Music League coverage is done, for a while.

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube Music

We ended with a bit of a whimper rather than a bang, just like our last season. Again, this is my fault. Like the Subway meme, I’m the one who made the categories, I’m the one who ordered them, etc, etc. I will never do a category about comedy again without some very descriptive constraints.

I did not like most of the songs on this playlist. I did not find most of them funny. Some, like the “song” by the allegedly comedic, allegedly musical group Jud Jud, I actively despise. There were glaring omissions that reflect badly on the group as a whole. I take responsibility here, I thought we would be fighting to submit Strongbad, Weird Al, Monty Python, and They Might Be Giants, thus I had to pick something esoteric and unexpected.

But let’s talk about the high points. Wesley Willis and RXKNephew are musical geniuses, far beyond novelty music. The Gene Moss & Fred Rice Halloween Beatles cover is queued up and ready for October next year. Body Count’s version of “Institutionalized” had me in stitches — I don’t think that was on purpose. And “Man’s Not Hot” is way funnier than I remembered, and I remembered it being pretty funny.

For my own shame, I submitted Skepta, “Too Many Man.” A great song. Funny enough, I thought, in the context of the many collectively agreed upon great musical humorists. Instead, people went subterranean with their picks. What did I expect?

Paradox Music League runs again in March. More info to come.

The Grip of Nostalgia in Streamed Speedrunning

AGDQ 2026 is in the books. As I did last week, I am highlighting my favorite runs across the marathon. I had a blast as a viewer and continue to want to think deeply about how we derive enjoyment from playing, and watching, video games.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (2025)

Pipistrello was a sleeper run for me. I’ve never heard of the game and just happened to be watching when it came on. Like Rush Hour 2 (2001) on TNT, it made me stop what I am doing, sit down, and pay attention.

Speedrunning can be a lot of things. Following a general gag about video game genres, fans sometimes jokingly split runs along the dichotomy of “menu” or “parkour.”

What's a menu and parkour? : r/ExplainTheJoke

“Parkour” runs involve precise, largely unrestricted, movement of a player character through an environment instead of “menus” which entail (also precise) restricted movement, more accommodating of memorization. While I appreciate both, “parkour” style games are usually the type of game where a developer might have speedrunners in mind while designing.

Pipistrello, a top-down Zelda influenced indie game, captures all the visual splendor of a great “parkour” speedrun. Even if you don’t know what’s going on (I didn’t) what happens on the screen looks really impressive and cool. There’s also the heartwarming story of the runner, MHFsilver, who has submitted to GDQ events for eleven years. This was his first acceptance. That’s gotta feel good.

Mario Kart 64 (1996) 4 Player VS Mode

While this Mario Kart 64 race is not strictly a speedrun, one might argue that all racing games are speedruns in some sense. There’s a disjunction that arises in this case where the game itself already requires “going fast,” without some significant concession, constraint, or contortion to one’s gameplay. The games that would ostensibly be best suited to speedrunning are actually somewhat confusing without the outer layer of meta-explanation to define how the gameplay deviates from what the game encourages. Nonetheless, this was an exciting race. And I learned something: I had no idea people are getting together to play Mario Kart 64 at a competitive level.

But compete they did. These races were clean. I loved the item management and strategy. For me, this was another magic display that both seemed exceptionally impressive but was totally legible to me. It probably helps that I played a ton of Mario Kart 64 growing up. That nostalgic return to a familiar game was more important in my enjoyment of GDQ this year compared to others, I think.

Doom Eternal (2020)

I don’t have any connection to Doom Eternal. I’ve never played it and I almost never play single-player FPS games. But, wow. This is another visual feast. The gameplay speaks for itself. The runner, KovaaK, is an accomplished Quake tournament player from the early 2000s and the developer of some popular FPS gameplay utilities.

I love an OG getting some shine on the main stage of an event like this, and KovaaK is definitely that. I asked him what games he likes to play non-competitively:

My wife and I always jump into various coop games, and Windblown has been our biggest staple over the last year - Looking forward to that coming out of early access. Big shoutouts to Children of Morta too.
And I’m always a sucker for playing Guacamelee with friends. I’ve probably played that more than a dozen times casually now, and these days I use a b0xx shaped controller called the Superslab to play it. Hitboxes are so fun with 2d platformers.

Kinda expected him to say he doesn’t have any time for other games. I’ll have to check out Windblown (2024) on the recommendation here.

maimai DX PRiSM PLUS (2025)

Another year, another rhythm game showcase. Raveille, who was part of a CHUNITHM LUMINOUS PLUS (2024) showcase streamed from Singapore to the event last year, commentated in person for maimai. Good stuff.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000) Blindfolded

Playing blindfolded is a whole other plane of engagement with video gaming. Bubzia is a specialist, best known for his runs of Super Mario 64 (1996). Watching someone play by listening to a game instead of seeing it creates a unique visual experience for the viewers. You can see the shortcuts and the way the player navigates the environment to get “guaranteed” movement. Each backflip, target, and side hop is meticulously planned to place Link in a precise position relative to something else. Between my experience watching Bubzia’s runs in the past and my many hours of Majora’s Mask play, I found even the most repetitive attempts at a trick to be riveting.

This Bubzia interview, from SGDQ 2024, delivers a great primer about what’s important for blindfolded speedrunning:

He announced during the Majora’s Mask run he just went full time as a streamer. I guess that means this dude was rocking a 9-5 while speedrunning games blindfolded for the last eight years. Wild stuff.

Final Fantasy Tactics — The Ivalice Chronicles (2025)

I am ~~not~~ proud to admit I have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 hours playing Final Fantasy Tactics. I have already logged about 40 hours into The Ivalice Chronicles remake and this playthrough, nearly done, is going by pretty fast. As a kid, I played the original (1998), including getting sniped by chemists like 400 times trying to unlock Cloud from printed GameFAQs instructions. And I also played the War of the Lions (2007) version on PSP a lot. Despite this, nothing that occurred during this speedrun by ChessJerk looked even remotely familiar to me.

My jaw was constantly on the floor. What is even more surprising is that somehow, across those 300 (give or take) hours logged in three different versions of the game, I’ve never used the Arithmetician class. There’s a lot from this run I’ll be bringing into the next time I turn on FFT.

Because this run is consistent, and thus a bit repetitive, there is also an “Any% No Math” category which does not allow the use of the Arithmetician’s class skill. But it seems like the latter category is less popular — at least judging by how many entries are on the leaderboard. Examining the gameplay experience of both categories would be another great case study for the tension between speedrunning for the player and speedrunning for the viewer.

Super Mario 64 Seventy Runner Relay

There was Mario Kart 64, there was Majora’s Mask, and then there was Super Mario 64. This is just a remarkable, beautiful game so evocative of a time in my life. I remember playing Mario 64 on the Wal-Mart promotional displays before I owned the console myself. It is so good. It has been randomized, run blindfolded, tackled in every way one could imagine — except by seventy people in a 70 Star relay.

Yes, maybe one could argue having one of seventy different speedrunners tackle each star is a little gimmicky. But they even discovered new tech during the preparation for the run: air strafing. Watch for it.

Pokemon Emerald (2004)

I have to end on a note of controversy, inevitably, when it comes to GDQ. adef, one of the faces and employees of GDQ, closed out the event with a supremely entertaining run of Pokemon Emerald. In the course of the run, its incentives — to change adef’s Pokemon with each successive gym battle — made something in the neighborhood of $300,000 for charity. I was glued to my seat as each Pokemon, usually worse than the last, presented unique challenges for progressing through each fight.

It was also not a speedrun. I think this is good, even great. GDQ has become more entertaining as it has expanded to include other kinds of challenge runs. In a Pokemon speedrun, firmly in the “menu” category, there are plenty of periods where the runner performs important and impressive feats that are totally illegible to the viewer. Usually those involve highly choreographed and memorized shopping trips where the runner buys and sells the essential items for the run. I felt a sense of calm wash over me as adef lingered on the menus and moved at a place comprehensible to the human eye. Truly, this was something different.

A certain segment of GDQ viewers have taken issue with the runs for a few reasons. The first, posed and dismissed (by me): “it’s not a speedrun.” The second come from those more enfranchised as a player of the broader category of Pokemon challenge runs, like Ironmon and Nuzlocke. The “Pick-My-Main” category was invented by adef. As far as I know, he’s the only one who has ever attempted it. It does not spotlight the battle-tested category definitions or gameplay style of a toiling community of runners. Like I said, something different.

This was a run that prioritized entertainment over community recognition and engagement. adef played on a heavily modified version of Pokemon Emerald that offered him a number of concessions outside of the ability to arbitrarily change his Pokemon according to the viewer’s donations. He had an Eviolite in his inventory along with an item that would bring his current Pokemon up to the level of the next gym leader’s strongest Pokemon. He also used a custom designed move called Safety Blast, intended to give Pokemon without offensive abilities a possibility to progress. I think it may reflect too much of a thumb on the scale, though. Safety Blast has the same power as Slash, for instance, uses the attack stat (attack or special attack) which is highest for the Pokemon in question, and also always has STAB which increases the move’s damage by x1.5.

So, was I not entertained? I was entertained. I think you will be too, if you like this sort of thing. But the “Pick-My-Main” category offers less of the pleasures of the exacting, precise speedrun with minimal margin for error. adef was never in any danger of not being able to finish. With some refinement, I think the rules set could provide that kind of thrill to the audience. And I hope it is so refined. Raking in 300 grand, we’re definitely going to see it again.

Some of the Greatest Art of All Time Has Been Sold at Japanese Convenience Stores

Manga artists sit poised over a page for hours to produce an illustration within the gutters of a page that people will look at for five minutes. Cumulatively, though, the ratio of “hours of looking” by a reader to “hours of drawing” for Monkey Punch’s Lupin III (1967) must be like 1,000:1. Individually, we should take it upon ourself to study these great works. Especially his landscapes and ambient drawings. Just look at these: