Comment by nacs
6 years ago
The video explanation is almost as impressive as the speed run itself.
The speed run is literally doing low level assembly code manipulation to pull off this time apparently.
Worth a watch even for people who aren't into gaming.
The 0 exit speedrun for Super Mario World uses pretty much the exact same method (koopas and all) as well https://www.speedrun.com/smw/run/y65xp50z
SMB3 also has an interesting tool assisted speedrun (non-human doing the inputs) where fast inputs on the second controller cause an overflow on the input buffer allowing for the game to be beaten basically instantly from the start screen.
If you like this because of the interesting stuff done to abuse the game The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time has pretty much been a history of "and then a quicker way to corrupt the game was found".
It's not always about going fast either, challenge runs also get a lot of very interesting results from a lot of dedication. Super Mario 64's A Button Challenge (try to beat the game with as few A presses as possible) has tons of outrageously complex tricks with amazing explanation videos. One in particular caught people's attention to the point it became a meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A though it's not actually the most technically impressive to come out of that endeavor.
I'm really glad that video became a meme (probably because of the completely unnecessary argument about what a half-A press is) because it got me interested in how a lot of these old games work. The engineering that went into optimizing them is incredible and it's a shame that newer games typically don't bother as much.
For optimizations, the compilers do much work for you now. So it's not like it's not done anymore, it's done in another way. I myself stopped handcrafting assembler when I noticed that GCC beaten me 9 times out of 10 :-)
1 reply →
An A press is an A press. You can't say it's only a half.
Well, TJ "Henry" Yoshi, hear me out. An A press actually has 3 parts to it: When A is pressed, when A is held, and when A is released. Together, this forms one complete A press.
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I immediately understood what a half-press meant, because when something/someone tells you to "press x", it usually means "press and release"; and omitting half of that is exactly what I expected "half a press" would be.
tl;dw version of the video's explanation:
A full A press involves both pressing and releasing the button. If you press the button during one level, hold it down, and then release it during another, then only half of the button press can be counted against each level. Otherwise you'd be double counting it.
Sure you can, when you define ahead of time that "press" means a full down/up cycle. When you say the down part of the cycle is a "press", you're being just as arbitrary.
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Agreed, I was first perplexed at what was going on, starting to not see where it was going at all with the low-level explanations, and then when the enemy positions turned out to be assembly instructions... mind blown.
It also reminded me of this video which shows Flappy Bird being code injected into Super Mario World, by hand... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0