Extended year-by-year details/justifications that nobody should care about
2013: I was knee-deep in my SGnG grind when I got partner on Twitch. I spent ~3 years exhaustively testing and routing this game essentially from scratch, and without the numbers that the grind brought to my channel I wouldn’t have gotten partner. Even though petty speedrunning drama pushed me away from the community since then, I still love the game and owe much of my success to it.
2014: This year sucked for me personally. I was forced out of my first job and had to move back with my parents while I looked for work, so I didn’t do much on the streaming or speedrunning front. Murph and I spent a lot of time working on Gauntlet, but the main development in 2014 for me was that I was finally able to get a supergun built after 4 years of looking, so I was finally able to play and work on arcade games. I’m dedicating this day to any arcade games that I’m currently able to play, which right now seems to be limited to Ninja Baseball Batman, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, and maybe Battletoads if it feels like working that day.
2015: I was really productive in 2015, but I’ve improved many of the runs that I worked on that year. I’m kind of stretching my guidelines a bit here with selecting Robotrek, because I returned to Robotrek more fully in 2016. I wanted to dedicate some day to Robotrek and the other days had other things to focus on, so I shifted it to 2015. I did start my revisit in 2015, so I think it counts, even if most of my time was spent in 2016.
2016: This was the start of my full-time streaming, and my second week was spent entirely playing 7th Saga. This event, despite not having any widespread advertising or Twitch front page slot, ended up bringing in an enormous number of new eyes and gave my channel a big enough bump to be relatively sustainable. Honestly without the success of that week, I likely would’ve had to look for other opportunities much sooner. 7th Saga is my favorite RPG and has been a mainstay of the channel ever since then, so it is only fitting that we dedicate the 2016 day to it (even though 2016 also saw notable improvements in a lot of my other runs). The Esuna/Olvan playthrough is next in my “partner completion challenge”, so we’re doing that, but it is likely going to take too long for a single day.
2017: This is a complicated year. I bought a new PC, as my old one was having issues, but UPS broke it and wouldn’t reimburse me for the 8 months that followed. In the meantime I was running at half capacity. I spent nearly this entire year working on the Bionic Commando series and fighting UPS. Bionic Commando is the only logical fit for this year, but unfortunately I can’t really stream most of them right now. There are setup logistics that prevent me from streaming the PC BioComs (BCR1 and BC 2k9), my arcade board is incompatible with my supergun, I never want to play Elite Forces again, and I just finished a lengthy grind of BCR2. That leaves….GameBoy BioCom and NES BioCom, neither of which can occupy a full day. I’ll be finishing up the 7th Saga playthrough and then we’ll either wind down with some BioCom or a no-stakes CPU Tourney of Baseball Simulator, since those tournies were frequent in 2016-2018. I’ll decide as we get closer.
2018: 2018 started with the most improbable speedrun of my career: Dragon View’s Grand Memory Clobber. Naturally I’ll be playing Dragon View on this day, though I’ll likely just casually fudge my way through any% or follow my 100% guide or something instead of trying another Grand Memory Clobber. I spent a LOT of time on Batman Forever and Mohawk & Headphone Jack that year, too, and got some really incredible times. I also got my ActRaiser 202 PB (not going to attempt that this week) and both of my NES BioCom WR’s. I’ll likely spend this day just playing through some old “PJ Classics” since I PB’d in damn near everything in 2018. Very productive year.
2019: I started grinding Mega Man games more seriously in 2019, and had a blast with it! I mostly spent this year working on Mega Man 3, 6, and 7, in addition to completing my research on Robotrek and grinding out my current PB. 2019 was also the Classic Mega Man relay, and I spent a lot of time derusting and practicing Rockman & Forte for it , though I thankfully didn’t run it at the event. Since I already dedicated the 2015 day to Robotrek, I’ll be spending this day just having fun with Mega Man stuff.
2020: What a shitshow. The focus of 2020 has been just to survive without succumbing to despair, and my stream schedule has reflected that. I got a MM3 PB, and spent a TON of time rerouting and grinding BCR2, and lately have resumed work on Brain Lord, but otherwise mostly just played some casual stuff. Over the past few years, Nuts & Bolts has become a recurring staple of my channel, and has quickly risen to become one of my favorite games. In 2020, I added another entry to my list of dumb challenge playthroughs, and it really brightened up my month (and nearly killed me from laughter). After this playthrough, I was asked if I’d ever go back and try the DLC, L.O.G.’s Lost Challenges. I was warned that it was really awful, but I feel like I owe it to the game to give it a shot. I’ll be trying to complete this new content for both the Alphabet Challenge and the Choo-Choo Challenge if I can.
