Summer Games Done Quick showed off a wide variety of speedruns.

Some games were relatively free of skips, or else were slated to be played at 100% completion, so the runs consisted of just completing the game as usual but very quickly. Others used a lot of glitches. One Pokemon Red run from last year spent most of its time in menu-manipulation glitches to get all 151 Pokedex entries.

The former category tends to be my favorite. Glitches that skip most of the game are certainly impressive (or hilarious) but they don't always make for interesting viewing. A graceful platform traversal is usually more fun to watch.

But even better than that is when they do the blind Mario Maker races, with levels the players and spectators have never seen before. With many classic games, the speedrun is a well-worn path that everyone in the community knows by heart. The Mario Maker levels are all new; no one knows what to expect, and the chemistry in the room amplifies by a factor of about five. There's also something very entertaining about watching the players suddenly work through death after death, when most of their runs are flawless or nearly so.

If the Save vs. Kill The Animals debate is one of showmanship versus pure flawless execution, I'll gladly take a little extra showmanship.