Comment by crazygringo

6 years ago

That's absolutely insane. Manipulating the state of the game world so that its data maps to instructions to complete the game, and then glitching in a way that executes it.

The only thing I'm not clear on: even knowing exactly what you're doing... how likely is it that you could pull this off in real-time? Did the player have to do this 10 times? 100? 1,000?

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crazygringo

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kibwen  6 years ago

I don't know about the run shown in the OP, but there are a fair number of memory-manipulation/ACE speedruns that are feasible in RTA ("real-time attack", a.k.a. something a human could pull off, as distinct from TAS). Off the top of my head I can think of such routes for Pokemon Red/Blue, Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario World.

To answer your question of "how likely is one to pull this off" for those three, the Pokemon one requires no almost advanced execution, other than turning off the console at a precise point to corrupt the save data you otherwise just need to follow a simple (though long) series of steps. The Mario one requires some pixel-perfect precision, and runners often used hacked ROMs that display coordinates in order to train. The Zelda one requires exact angles to be held on the analog stick, and I've heard of people creating guides out of cardboard and rubber bands in order to help them achieve the angles more reliably.

Sorry that I don't have any video links on hand, but you could almost certainly find examples of these in the GDQ archives.

EDIT: Found a good video for the SMW example, by SethBling, which actually goes a step further and manually reprograms SMW into Flappy Bird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0

EDIT 2: Here's an excellent explanation of the Zelda ACE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdRJWDKb5Bo

  • xg15  6 years ago

    Even then, some of the timing accuracy required still mystifies me. E.g., if I got it right then, for the RNG manipulation to work, you have to press "A" on the menu screen in one particular frame, counted from when the console was switched on. At the standard PAL framerate of 50 FPS, this gives you 1/50th of a second to react, with no visual indicator that the frame you're looking for is about to come up. I have no idea how to even begin training this.

    • marvin  6 years ago

      There are some cues you could use to get very close, particularly the rhythm of the music.

      I've heard that a decent drummer can hit a note within 15 milliseconds of the mathematically correct point on average, and that makes it plausible that you could use rhythm as a cue to hit within the 20 milliseconds that this would require.

      But obviously this would become less likely to succeed as the length of the game continues and timing errors that affect the soundtrack compound.

      2 replies →

  • Hamuko  6 years ago

    GTA Vice City and San Andreas Any% are also memory manipulation. World record for Vice City is 8.5 minutes and 15 minutes for San Andreas. I think both are very precise but very much doable by speedrunners, although not consistently.

  • lillesvin  6 years ago

    One of the Castlevania games (maybe Symphony of Darkness?) achieves ACE by inventory manipulation.

    Mega Man 1 has an ACE category as well which is really interesting. I think Nudua explained it somewhere. (On my phone, but a quick googling should help you.)

secabeen  6 years ago

> The only thing I'm not clear on: even knowing exactly what you're doing... how likely is it that you could pull this off in real-time? Did the player have to do this 10 times? 100? 1,000?

Speedrunners usually list their number of attempts in the top right corner of their splits window. In this case, it says 16/3904. My read of that is that this is his 3,904th total attempt at speed running this game (I have seen runners with attempt counts at over 40k). The 16 is probably attempt count for this specific session/stream, but I'm not as sure of that.

have_faith  6 years ago

Having done some speed running (mostly Mirror's Edge), I've clocked 1000's of attempts on some stages. At one point I realised my cam software was taking a screenshot when I pressed record and made it into a seizure inducing compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqN5C_T8yxU These are only the attempts I recorded...

rockostrich  6 years ago

They have to do it a bunch to build the muscle memory, but once they have it they get pretty consistent. For instance, dannyb21892 just recently broke the WR for any% in Zelda OoT 2 times in one stream and the run includes similar precision to do ACE.