I believe they didn't change too much, if anything, inside ROMs, it's mostly overlay things. Probably that's why most "Strategy unavailable" screens are related to illegal positions and not illegal moves - the former are easier to trace.
All it really takes is watching the RAM addresses for the character's x,y position and making sure it's within expected bounds. They can monitor other things too, like how far a stage is scrolled, or track if the level progression matches the intended route all with single numbers. Like at 6:00 how the 4-2 wrong warp isn't able to be performed, because it assumes you're at the wrong height to have made it to the intended path on top of the level versus how far you are through it (player Y and level scroll), or the 8-4 wrong warp isn't allowed, because that level shouldn't be possible to reach from there by normal means (level#). Just one or two numbers worth of data is all it takes to trigger a rewind. They could probably easily check for most things that pass in these videos too if they wanted, but outside the speedrun tech that most people would consider cheating they really shouldn't care, because it's not going to end up on the leaderboards and make people upset. I'm honestly very surprised to see the invisible ladders glitch isn't caught somehow.
So, this kinda confirms what I suspected in my comment on the last video; the "Strategy Unavailable" messages are mostly based on reading the position of the player sprite, and determing it shouldn't be there. Explaining why the "upward long ladder" glitch isn't disabled, as Mario is not in a position that should be impossible to reach by playing the game normally.
I agree, they probably just put a bunch of invisible triggers surrounding the "playable areas" and in any areas that are not the ones you're allowed to visit. Also they probably rewind to the beggining of the challenge because a normal rewind risks leaving you in a softlocked state depending on the exploit you're using
the flagpole glitch could've been avoided: if the flag sprite (on top of the small castle) is visible and the mario sprite is before the base of the flagpole
I think the "strategy unavailable" message roughly translated to "this trick is prohibited" in the Japanese version. I guess it could be a cultural thing that English speakers feel more rude when being yelled to stop?
The way the game reverses when you do a glitch feels like the gaming equivalent of spray bottling your dog when they do something bad “No. No. Bad. No.”
Since "Strategy Not Available" fully resets some of the runs in the game, it seems to me like Nintendo avoided using it for glitches that a player could reasonably stumble into on accident - like Link block-clipping or kirby clipping through a slope.
It might be coincidence, but the strategies that aren't blocked in this video are strategies that don't save time (and one that doesn't even allow you to finish the level). The ones that are blocked save time.
There are 30 rewind messages in total, but most of them are lame: - Not available this challenge. - Don't leave the labyrinth. - Wrong gate. - Bike overheated. - Can't go that way. - Break this one last. - Not available this challenge. - Can't break blocks. - Wrong pipe. - Out of bombs. - Can only use fire once. - Not fully recovered. - Can't go down there. - Missed an eggplant. - Can't become Raccoon Mario. - Enter the pipe on the right. - Can't lose Frog form. - Can't lose Shoe form. - Can't lose Hammer form. - Lost the Wheel ability. - Get the Heart Container. - Blocked the vine. - Too far. - Take another route. - Level up from the menu. - Cannot enter. - Cannot leave the area. - Strategy unavailable.
Mannaggia to all that used the long ladders glitch in the previous tournament, I SWEATED TO EARN THOSE MILLISECONDS TO REACH THE TOP! And then people had to go "no ladder no problems"
Slightly disappointed that they didn't program in an explicit patch for arbitrary code execution, if only because it would be very funny for them to acknowledge its existence. I assume it's not even possible to get to the right area to _attempt_ arbitrary code execution in Legend of Zelda or SMB3?
@@fuseegelee If I remember correctly the games first world has 2 optional levels level 2 and level 3 that the challenge stops you from accessing Edit: its levels 3 and 4 not 2 and 3
With the exception of the Long Ladder glitch, they probably left these in because they grant little to no competitive advantage (flagpole jump, LoZ block clipping, Metroid buzzer-beater) and/or they're far too difficult for most people to pull off (Kirby crash, flagpole/Bullet Bill glitch). As for the long ladders, I'd imagine that's going to get patched out soon now that it's become widely known.
It only appears when the game completely crashes and locks up. For instance, there is an infamous password on Metroid for NES that causes the game to massively defecate itself; entering the password "ENGAGE RIDLEY MOTHER (f-word)ER" causes the same error screen to appear on NSO.
yeah it really is some stuff was just prevented by accident, some prevented on purpose so new players can play without being immediately outclassed, and others were just left unfixed so experienced players can mostly stick to typical speedrun strategies and be fine (also you will NOT believe how glad i am that they kept the flagpole glitch)
These are NES roms, it's pretty simple to find variables that track the player/screen position and then act accordingly (say you've gone somewhere unrelated to the challenge or gone somewhere "illegal"). In terms of the long ladder glitch in Donkey Kong for example, it's easy to tell when the player is attempting to screenwrap vertically by climbing to the bottom, and while it'd probably be just as easy to check the other direction too, my guess is they only put a check to say "the player's too close to the bottom, something's not right." and not the other way around. For Mario 1, they probably check the screen's position for various things, such as where the end of a level is, and the warp zones, which is why you can jump the flagpole in 1-1 without being stopped, or do the flagpole glitch. The game just checks for if the screen has hit a certain position, and if it has, either rewind the player since it's deemed unrelated for 4-2 or impermissible in the case of 8-4, or keep functioning as normal in terms of checking for the end of the level. As for 1-2, since the entire point is to go over the end of the level, you just track Mario's y position and compare it to the screen position going to the warp zone, and if something doesn't line up, rewind.
Mainly referring to a lot of the stuff they cut in part 1, but I really wish they would just let the games stay the same. I feel like they entirely missed the point of why people speedrun when making the Speedrunning game.
I think the point is so that people that don't want to learn the game on a frame perfect level or deep dive into complex glitches can still enjoy trying to master the basic mechanics of a game. I think a mode with none of the illegal position stuff makes sense though to please both crowds
On one hand I get where you're coming from, it is kinda lame to see cool tricks be patched out such as fighting Boom Boom early or getting to Mario 1's 1-2 warp zone via the wall clip. On the other hand, I think Nintendo's trying to keep how to beat the challenges more vanilla, which for this type of game is understandable. It's not exactly very interesting to see players long ladder and screen wrap Donkey Kong, or completely break Zelda 1 and ignore any and all enemies via wrapping, or skip an entire section of a level through unintended methods in Kid Icarus and Mario 3 (yes I know I called fighting Boom Boom early cool, I'm stating it from the perspective of Nintendo here). And it's especially not fun for younger players who have a casual interest in retro games that may've picked up this game and want to try and compete, only to see these kinds of shenanigans on the top of the leaderboard.
@@Flaming_Rok then they should either have two modes or just not do a global leaderboard to begin with; global leaderboards aren't even particularly helpful metrics for the average player.
The 1990 NWC was structured more like an esport than today's speedrun charts, so it kinda feels more true to the actual event despite the modern UI and speedrun focus. And it was a different time; I think discussions were very early about whether glitches need to be ruled "cheating" or "hacking" or not, and since verification (like with video; this was very pre-RU-vid) wasn't standard, minutia about glitches was secondary to just finding something better than the honor system. And besides, people first learning about speedruns seem to generally be surprised that glitchless/"as intended" (or even 100%) isn't the community's default ruleset. It's a common comment from non-gamers after someone introduces GDQ to them. Nintendo probably picked the safest interpretation for newcomers' and kids' sake.
They should have had a generic game crash handler that said "Strategy Unavailable" and reset the game. That would be so much cooler than "An error has occurred."
In World 4-2 you can have Mario warp to the other side of the screen on the vine. It probably doesn't work, but would a message pop up if you did that?
Has anyone used the ladder glitches to beat the Donkey Kong kill screen and keep going? The kill screen is just a programming oversight that gives you a lot less time than you should have, so one of the long ladder glitches may allow you to go beyond it.
I wonder just how exactly the crash at 3:04 somehow magically leads to the end credits like that. Maybe it's some wild undefined behavior/open bus ride? But then why does the game do this when using Stone underwater like that? Is it getting confused on how the Stone ability should react in such a scenario (under water but not in the swimming state), so it tries running a nonexistent subroutine? It'd seem like the game actually _does_ crash first and ends up at undefined-behavior land before it reaches the credits routine, since NWC intercepts the crash before the credits warp happens. Now the only question is, why does pausing on that exact frame stop the crash? Seems rather specific...
The crash is because stone has no behaviours for operating under water coded in, because you normally can't be stone in water. Not sure about the credits warp though. You could try searching for a TAS of this route, usually tasvideos submission pages have a technical breakdown.
I know from experience the Stone glitch can load level data without actually changing what level you were in. For example, one time I was taken to one of the Butter Building levels, but once I completed it and was taken to the overworld, the only door marked as level complete was the door leading to the first stage. I've also gotten to the debug room hub, and at one point it tried to load a Warp Star room and instead spit out a glitch level. My guess is that the timing of the start input affects what level data gets loaded and that the end credits sequence is grouped along with that data
@@Patashu I dunno, I found a few TASes that perform this glitch and they don't exactly explain further than 'entering a water region from any side other than the top while in stone from causes the game to freak out, and if done properly this can lead to the credits', so I suspect the exact reason's unknown. The actual 'crash' does seem to be the result of a branch instruction (I think to detect if Kirby just entered water) not passing properly, leading to it taking an unintended code path and the actual killer blow being from running an RTI (return from interrupt) instruction when the stack isn't set up for it, causing it to jump to a bogus location. That last bit is where NWC presumably intercepts, since it quickly starts running invalid/unofficial opcodes that the internal emulator likely flags as a 'the game is borked' signal, causing it to bail and show the error message. Still doesn't explain how the credits warp happens, though... But, when I tried testing the glitch myself at an easier-to-reach location (this glitch was historically done in 6-1, since a breakable stone tile placed under a door in the air happens to be the underwater version, meaning it leaves behind a floating water tile in it's place where you can activate Stone under), I managed to actually get a credits-warp there _without_ hitting pause on the exact frame. I happened to pause just before it happened, and through repeated tests it seems like that the actual execution of this glitch is heavily timing-dependent. Depending on when I unpaused how exactly the credits looked, if the warp actually happened at all and it instead crashed, seemed to differ down to when I unpaused. Since I don't exactly have the 30 hours necessary to individually look at every instruction executed that results in this, this is as far as I can test, but it's definitely looking like it's race condition-heavy (maybe the objects present have an effect here? The tomato sprite present where the glitch is performed in 1-1 is simple and never does anything, maybe it's having some consistent effect on the execution flow that causes some particular piece of code to line up in such a way that the glitch causes a consistent effect, in comparison to the room in 6-1 that has a convoluted miniboss with multiple possible states, where the effects are much more random?).
Welp, i was kinda intrested about the ladder glitch in Donkey Kong... But they patched the credits warp bug. :/ I'd be thinking N wants to be closely patched, but not fully to be broken enough to skip it.
6:05 this feels... cheap? Off? Wrong, even? It doesnt feel right to give the player a tell when they're near the warp zone in a SPEEDRUN, right? I cant be the only one that thinks this Edit: guess I am the only one that thinks this lol
If you look at this game as more of a speedrun tutorial, it makes sense imo. It's pretty rare for someone to try and speedrun a game without so much as looking up a route first, so having the game try to teach players tips and tricks for getting better times (or in this case get a time at all) is fair play.
It's not really that intrusive, Little Timmy could use the reminder as their first time trying out the legend challenge. I suppose if anything, an option to turn off the notification would be nice, but it's not that big of a deal. more accurately it's probably just a way to track if the player isn't going off anywhere they're not supposed to
Yeah to add on to that for longer runs speedrunners may be allowed to have the route open during the run to refer to it. Usually you'll see this more often with 100% runs of games
Save for the fact that they've clearly missed a few, most of the glitches they leave is because they offer no benefit to win. Sure. you can jump past the flagpole in SMB, but that doesn't help you in any way. If anything, it's detrimental since now you can't finish the stage.
the credits warp in kirby's adventure isn't dependant on pressing start, it's dependant on arbitrary ram values (caused by stuff going on in the screen-- you have a better chance if you manipulate enemies) when you use stone the game goes "okay here's the part of the code that tells you what to transform into" but with you being underwater that part reads "write random stuff wherever in memory" but sometimes it writes little enough that an error handler credit warps you (there are quite a few error handlers in this game, surprisingly) i don't think they even are aware kirby's adventure has glitches and just kicks you because the PPU exploded
I'd imagine the 3D Classics Version fixed it. It may not look like it, but it should be a remake due to the added 3D effect (+ it has no slowdown which is a massive plus). Would likewise be very surprised if it's still possible in Nightmare in Dreamland if you count that as a version of Kirby's Adventure.
I'm not sure if you can do the slope clip variant shown in this video, but I know the much easier version in Orange Ocean was fixed in the 3D Classics version by removing the stray water tile that gets left behind when breaking a block. You can still do the Stone glitch in the Dream Collection port (Wii) and the Wii U Virtual Console port. Doing it on the Dream Collection port requires you to reset the game, though, while you can just load a savestate in the VC port after crashing. Doing that causes some graphical glitches, though
An Error Has Occurred. I think that sound has inspired anti-piracy screen guys. Also, I didnt know Metroid had a unique game over for that! Never saw that before!
Most of the glitches that aren't blocked don't offer any real advantage to the player, but Donkey Kong's Long Ladder glitch could risk getting blocked in a future update if Nintendo finds it not fair for online competitions.
@@crazycanyon3028Could maybe make the records version specific or something, not too much of a stretch given how the speedrunning community usually handles it
This continues to be a very embarrassing showing from Nintendo. I mean, seriously. That one glitch is still available and saves significant time, thus wrecking the leader boards.
"Strategy unavailable" Merely refers to POSITIONS, not glitches themselves. There's nothing "embarrasing" about this. Also saying that using a glitch in a speedrun "Ruins" the leaderboards is like saying running shoes ruin the leaderboards for 100m
@@SawBSketchWell, for the second part, it can ruin the game, or be unfair to others if the glitch isn’t easy to replicate. At the same time, it could also ruin the game if it’s easy to replicate, as everyone will be able to get low times.
@@SawBSketch AGZshark gets it. Nintendo tried their "best" (*snicker-snort*) to prevent certain exploits from occurring, so that it would level the playing field and keep things "fair". Yet, they've missed numerous unintended things that speedrunners have been utilizing for years, such as the "phantom ladder" glitch in _Donkey Kong_ which saves *a ton* of time. If we're talking about the *original games?* Yeah, no, exploits are all fair. But for _this specific title?_ They should've tried harder to "prevent" advantageous exploits.
@@JoLiKMC "Advantageous exploits" is one of the things that give speedruns speed. Complaining about "advantageous exploits" is like complaining that people take corners tight when racing.
Honestly, it's stupid that this game has "Strategy Unavailable". For a Nintendo World Championship, let us do the tricks! (I know I'm not saying this well but hopefully you get it.) Even weirder some are allowed and some aren't too, you allow bullet bill glitch in SMB1 but not wrong warp?
Nintendo need to block the use of these glitches and disqualify anyone who uses them. How is anyone, playing the game normally, as intended, meant to get the best time if someone else is going to cheat and get a time that is impossible for normal players to achieve. Defeats the purpose of the WC contests.
@@ShursGarden I have. My point is that in the WC:Nes game for the Switch, the use of these should not be allowed. They wouldn't be allowed if it was an in-person event, so shouldn't be allowed in the online events.
@@ShursGarden Don't be ridiculous, this game was designed to be played by anyone, the idea that you need to go online to learn strategies before you have a chance to properly play the game is absurd. Can you really imagine a 7 year old learning all of this? Should they be locked out of playing the game as intended as a result? The way they're doing it forces players to compete with the skills in playing the game, not with their skills in learning and exploiting glitches.
@@kieranboulton3953 You aren’t locked out of getting an S Rank just because you don’t know glitches. If you want to be on the leaderboard, maybe. A good amount of these aren’t actually helpful in the long run. But just for getting the highest rank? They’re not required. Actually try learning a speedrun yourself. The people who play those games absolutely love them, and they’re masters of the game. You wouldn’t beat them even without the glitches.
im pretty sure that the "banned" gitches are banned because they put you in positions that you are not supposed to be in. some of these are allowed because they are meant to happen in areas that you are supposed to/can be in anyway.
