Yeah I've watched that guy's stuff for ages now, pretty wonderful how much the game world and rules have been kind of reverse engineered and manipulated to do all kinds of crazy things.

Took a year, worth it

Tempy wrote:

I never really got TAS runs, but I watched this video last week and I kind of love the lengths people will go to do ridiculous things like 0.5x A press runs of a level. I actually did a little yelp of joy when I correctly figured out how you get past the syncing speed issue, which is more down to how well the guy explained it than anything else.

That's insane. People like that both enthrall and terrify me.

It's a bit like something I found out about the OG Pokemon games recently. Wild Pokemon have a chance of appearing when you're in the long grass. "Long grass" like all the other terrain in the game is just a type of tile. In the original games, each "tile" that your character can stand on is made up of four smaller tiles. These smaller tiles are just graphics. You can have long grass tiles that are made up of four images of grass, or sometimes three grasses and one flower. What a main tile "is" is defined by which of the mini tiles is in the bottom left. So the game looks at the mini tiles, and says "hey, the bottom left mini tile is a grass icon, therefore the whole tile must be grass, so I should check to see if a wild Pokemon encounter is generated". In the Japanese versions of Red and Blue/Green, the long grass tiles with flowers in have the flower in the top right. For reasons unknown, the PAL and NTSC-U versions of these games have the long grass tiles rotated, so the ones with flowers in have the flower in the bottom left. So the game thinks these tiles aren't long grass, just empty space. Speed runners somehow figured this shit out, and will plan their routes through long grass areas to include as many flowers as possible, as it reduces the chances of a time-wasting battle.

mind_blown.gif, etc.

This is perhaps a similar, if more brisk look at the apparently rather infamous 'barrier skip' which took 15 years for people to figure out -




Speedrunning really is crazy, I might have got into it had the ability to record stuff and known something of the whole scene when I was younger. I used to love finding all sorts of weird tricks and glitches, and escaping the map, Halo 2 in particular was brilliant for that.

If you want your mind fucking blown you need to watch the current Ocarina of Time Any% world record. It's obscene

GurtTractor wrote:

This is perhaps a similar, if more brisk look at the apparently rather infamous 'barrier skip' which took 15 years for people to figure out -




Speedrunning really is crazy, I might have got into it had the ability to record stuff and known something of the whole scene when I was younger. I used to love finding all sorts of weird tricks and glitches, and escaping the map, Halo 2 in particular was brilliant for that.

The hover to Phantom Ganon needed in WW speedruns is insane. Precisely mash a button as dead link floats up to the platform then break some pots without landing and hoping a fairy flies into you. Miss that, you're dead, run over. That part happens over three hours into a run

GurtTractor wrote:

Hehe yeah, hence the "any% is dead" I guess.

Yeah, I got into watching DK64 speedruns a while ago. Current times stand at 30 minutes for any%, 2.5 hours for NLE*, and 5.5 hours for 101%. Over a third of an any% run is the final boss fight. Pretty dull to watch.

*NLE = no levels early. The DK64 community created the category to sit between any% and 101%. There are various rules you need to observe, but it basically boils down to "you must enter each world legitimately".