They say necessity is the mother of invention, so when speedrunning Super Mario Odyssey became “too easy” for Twitch streamer DougDoug he decided to spice things up by making the game’s heads-up display get progressively… uh, worse the longer he played.
You can see the results below. The rule for the “Mario HUD Speedrun Challenge” was that every five minutes he had to layer additional HUD elements from randomly chosen games like Street Fighter II, Dark Souls, or Team Fortress 2 onto his streaming software overlay. His goal? To complete a successful Odyssey speedrun despite the HUD and try to match his personal best time, which is just one hour, 11 minutes, and 21 seconds.
“To beat it, I’ll have to play the best Mario Odyssey of my life,” DougDoug said in the video.
Every five minutes he spun a virtual wheel on the website Wheel Decide to determine which random game’s HUD elements to spackle on next. To make it easier on himself, he played Odyssey on easy mode and specified that “only screen elements that are “present at all times” in a particular game will count as potential HUD additions.
A member of his chat suggested that he only take one aspect of a given game’s HUD in order to conserve space, to which DougDoug replied, “Nah, I’m not a coward.”
Unfortunately, the first HUD he spun for was Runescape, which he promptly pasted over Odyssey’s moons and coins readout in the bottom-right of the screen — he now had to rely on memory to stay on top of these key stats. Another ongoing challenge for DougDoug was compensating for the stream delay, since he was playing while looking at his OBS streaming software screen.
He seemed to be doing a decent job playing despite the visual limitations, but the addition of Red Dead Redemption 2 added a new meta for his challenge. When the time came to graft on RDR2‘s HUD, one galaxy-brained chatter said it was imperative for him to add the horse in as well.
“The horse is not part of the HUD, dude,” he said.
That resolve did not last. He would later add a tiny version of the horse into the Runescape items area of his nightmare HUD, place a Duke Nukem gun on its head, give it a Dark Souls life bar, and, as a finishing touch, add an angry, lightsaber-wielding Shigeru Miyamoto with a gun for a hat. One viewer objected to his shrinking the horse down too much, so during the final Bowser fight he restored it to its full, screen-crowding glory. But he did make one concession to sanity, re-organising HUD elements so that at least transparent components clustered near the middle of the screen, offering the merest modicum of visibility.
“As IGN would say about this HUD, it’s got a little something for everyone,” DougDoug said.
As the streamer reached (and completed!) the endgame his screen looked like the busy design of a Domino’s Pizza box. Although his run ended up being slightly over two hours and 30 minutes, it at least bestowed upon the world the image of Miyamoto riding a gunicorn, which more than justifies the unimpressive time.
Before he embarked, DougDoug asked viewers to keep track of all the HUDs he’d add over the run so that they can appropriately rename Mario Odyssey. What resulted was him playing the best run of Lego Legend of Old School Final Grand Elder Star World of Zelda Warcraft Kingdom Call of Dark Half Breath Raid of Animal Shadow Life Risk Scrolls of Skyrim Wars Legends Crossing The Metal Duke New Super Red Hearts Wild Duty Banjo New Kazooie Super Fantasy Fallout Horizons Team Dead Mario Souls Donkey Kong Sims Theft Gear Runescape Redemption Fortress Solid Rayman Witcher Mario Odyssotta Tetris Undertale Odyssey Halo Fortnite Rain 53252V2310644642333 anyone’s ever played.
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