Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 21 hours ago
Ok. Got some explaining to do. So every week or so, me (@iDestyKK) and my brother (Dr. DOOM) play MAME. Every so often, Block Block is one of the games we play. On average, each run of Block Block takes about an hour. But I was wondering, what if I took the fastest runs of each level from each run and put them into a single video? That's this video. Hence the scores going all over the place inconsistently.
I call it "semi-optimised", because we aren't really trying to go for fast times. We are just gaming at night, with popcorn, trying to have fun. There are even inside jokes we have. Like I would intentionally make myself as small as possible in some levels or die on purpose. Nothing is meant to be taken seriously here. These just happened to be our fastest times on each level.
This required work of a spreadsheet, some basic Bash scripting, and FFmpeg to do automatically. And this is the result. A run of Block Block in 28:05, excluding all of the level ending transitions, bonus rounds, title screen, and ending scenes. I plan to make a video like this yearly, as long as we keep playing this game.
This is a (very simple) media project. As usual, this means there is a blog post for it. You may view that here: blog.claranguyen.me/post/2026/06/19/block-block-optimisation
Timestamps:
0:00 - Rounds 01-05
2:17 - Rounds 06-13
6:57 - Rounds 14-21
11:36 - Rounds 22-30
17:34 - Rounds 31-43
23:32 - Rounds 44-50
Ok. Got some explaining to do. So every week or so, me (@iDestyKK) and my brother (Dr. DOOM) play MAME. Every so often, Block Block is one of the games we play. On average, each run of Block Block takes about an hour. But I was wondering, what if I took the fastest runs of each level from each run and put them into a single video? That's this video. Hence the scores going all over the place inconsistently.
I call it "semi-optimised", because we aren't really trying to go for fast times. We are just gaming at night, with popcorn, trying to have fun. There are even inside jokes we have. Like I would intentionally make myself as small as possible in some levels or die on purpose. Nothing is meant to be taken seriously here. These just happened to be our fastest times on each level.
This required work of a spreadsheet, some basic Bash scripting, and FFmpeg to do automatically. And this is the result. A run of Block Block in 28:05, excluding all of the level ending transitions, bonus rounds, title screen, and ending scenes. I plan to make a video like this yearly, as long as we keep playing this game.
This is a (very simple) media project. As usual, this means there is a blog post for it. You may view that here: blog.claranguyen.me/post/2026/06/19/block-block-optimisation
Timestamps:
0:00 - Rounds 01-05
2:17 - Rounds 06-13
6:57 - Rounds 14-21
11:36 - Rounds 22-30
17:34 - Rounds 31-43
23:32 - Rounds 44-50
