One of the new additions to our annual Extra Life charity marathon for 2024 is what I’ve called the “Short Games Block”. For those unfamiliar with speedrunning marathons, a “block” refers to a collection of games (usually 3 or more) that are placed together on the schedule and all share something in common. For example, in previous marathons we have done the 7up Block and McDonald’s Block where I ran four games that either all featured Cool Spot (7up) or featured McDonald’s characters. With this in mind the “Short Games Block” is, obviously, a block of games where their commonality is that they all take very little time to beat (about 10 minutes or less).
The reason why these games are all on the schedule as just “Short Games Block” instead of being individually itemized out like everything else is due to a limitation of the software I use for putting together the schedule. These games do not take very much time to set up or run, but the Horaro scheduling software I use automatically puts a buffer of 10 minutes after every entry on the schedule. Normally this is fine because after a 30 or 45 minute game there’s going to be some swapping of programs or consoles and there might be a donation or two to read. But when the schedule always puts 10 minutes after everything and I play three games that take 10 minutes each to complete suddenly that’s an entire hour on the schedule for only 30 minutes’ worth of video game content. I don’t need 30 minutes of setup time for three games. So, the problem I faced was not being able to make specific games exempt from this automatic buffer. The solution was to just put “Short Games Block” on the schedule as one entry and then list the contents of that block here so you know what to expect.
The 2024 Short Games Block starts at approximately 10:55 AM (Central) on November 3rd and runs for 90 minutes. Here are the games in the block in order of appearance:
- 10:55 – Super Sprint (NES), 1 Loop
- 11:05 – Adventure (A2600), Game 1-3
- 11:12 – Gone Home (PC), Any%
- 11:18 – 3D Body Adventure (PC), Emergency Room
- 11:24 – 3D Dinosaur Adventure (PC), Save the Dinos
- 11:30 – Jurassic Attack (PC), Any%
- 11:37 – HOARD (PC), Princess Challenge
- 11:47 – Pokemon: Play It! (PC), Any%
- 11:57 – Motocross Maniacs (GB), Game A
- 12:13 – Monster Truck (GB), Any%
As always please note that the timestamps, despite how exact they may appear, are estimations. The games are very short but their order will not change so for example if you wanted to see the Gone Home speedrun you’ll know to keep an eye out for the Adventure speedrun because as soon as that ends we’re going straight to Gone Home which is next on the list. In a perfect world this run should start at 11:12 AM but chances are it will probably be a few minutes in either direction. I put the Short Games Block close to the beginning of the second day of the marathon to avoid as much time variance as possible since the longer a given day goes on the higher the likelihood that the schedule will be off by several minutes.