This game was one of the first GBA games I ever owned but I didn't really like it at the time because it was really really hard. Years later I got into watching F-Zero speedruns and naturally I checked out MV since it was the only one I actually owned. Unfortunately by this time, most of the competition for this game had died out and there wasn't much TAS work put into this game and decided to take a look into it myself. Thankfully FatRatKnight assisted me with his research and his
that is pretty much the only thing that makes this game TASable at all.
The rerecord count here is an estimate since I did the Pawn tracks on the same bk2 file and I redid some after having already started on Knight.
A lot of important mechanics are covered in the
Game Resources page but here are some additional tricks and information
The
Facing Angle is obviously the direction the ship is facing, but the
Momentum Angle is the direction the ship is actually moving. These are not synonymous with each other, this game is VERY slidey so these are frequently different. I sometimes refer to
Momentum Speed, the speed in the direction of the Momentum Angle. The speed listed on the speedometer is your Momentum Speed.
Drift Drive Technique (
DDT for short)... also sometimes affectionately referred to as the
Drunk Driving Technique, is one of the most important techniques in Maximum Velocity. In F-Zero SNES drifting merely shifted your momentum direction to the left or the right. In this game, strafing simply adds additional speed to whatever side of your vehicle you're strafing to. The intended use of this is navigating turns but one can abuse this on straight tracks to move more quickly.
It requires careful planning however, a ship's facing direction can only be so far from its momentum angle: In the case of Jet Vermillion, it is 45 degrees. Trying to exceed this limit results in speed loss and no additional difference in angles. Also except under certain conditions which will be explained below, one's momentum angle will constantly try to catch back up with the facing angle. This means if you're not careful you can just do a turn into a wall instead of drifting as intended. This means it is sometimes required to switch what side of the machine you drift with, creating an s-pattern. And looking like a drunk driver.
A diagram of DDT:
Blast Turns are when one lets go of the acceleration button for at least one frame and then represses it. This causes the vehicle to enter a state for 10 frames where the momentum angle catches up much more quickly to the facing angle than normal. This allows one to regain control over momentum angle allowing one to make sharp turns without too much speed loss. Note that the optimal spacing for blast taps is 10 frames apart. You will not regain momentum angle anymore quickly by doing it every other frame, and will in fact merely lose speed by doing so. The only reason to do two blast taps less than 10 frames apart is if you don't want two full length blast turns, but instead somewhere between 10 and 20 frames.
Japanese Dash Technique (
JDT) is the one scenario in which your momentum angle does not constantly update. If you drive into the wall and let go of the accelerator before doing so, your momentum angle will be directed to the nearest lap checkpoint and will not resume chasing the facing angle until you resume pressing the accelerator. In this state, you are able to rotate the ship to be any angle regardless of what the current momentum angle is. Now this would normally be useless, but if you then end up hitting a dash plate, your momentum angle will then change to the direction of the dash plate and you will be moving at top speed. Since you can have any facing angle you want, you can take FULL advantage of drifting adding speed and have your momentum speed and your drift speed facing the same direction. You will be able to move very quickly in a single direction but since you are facing past the turn limit AND because you cannot hold your accelerator during this, you will lose Momentum Speed. Therefore it's critical you either find some way to regain the speed once you resume pressing accelerator or you simply do it into the finish line ending the race.
The trick was named because it was discovered by Japanese players early in the game's lifespan.
A diagram of JDT:
Brake Tapping works in Maximum Velocity much like it does in F-Zero SNES, but with additional applications. Tapping on the brakes may allow for cycling through oscilation of boost speed much more quickly, causing your vehicle to spend more time at the higher numbers during a boost than the lower ones. Additionally, you can do this when near top non-boosted speeds to avoid hitting the speed that causes your speed to fall downward in the oscillation cycle. You can also perform
Turn Tapping in such a scenario, deliberately hitting the 45 degree limit right when the number is about to hit max to force a speed loss smaller than that of tapping the brakes. One might wonder why not simply let go of the accelerator, and the answer to that is that that would result in blast turns, which would cause less optimal drifts.
Getting
CPU Bumps is one of the two reasons to use Grand Prix instead of Training mode. The named ships will at various points in the race be teleported right behind you moving at top speed. You can abuse them to get additional speed. Additionally the game places slower moving unnamed yellow and green cars in front of you after a certain amount of time. These can also be abused for additional speed, but doing so is fairly precise. The exact amount of speed you get after a bump is dependent on a wide amount of factors, such as your speed and direction and the other ship's speed and direction. You can get a wide variety of bump speeds just by slightly modifying input. This means a lot of trial and error is required. A pendulum motion of sorts is often fairly effective for getting good bumps but are still not consistent and might not always be viable in a given situation. CPU Bumps are the only way to go above the speed limit of 640km/h, but said speed will be forced back down to 640km/h after one frame.
The other reason to use Grand Prix mode is
Mine Boosts. In Grand Prix on later laps (usually 4 or 5 but sometimes they appear on lap 3), mines will spawn in the track. These mines will cause you to gain a ton of speed if you hit them (though they will not cause you to go above a speed limit of 640km/h) and will push you away from them potentially having dramatic effects on your momentum angle. One technique I often perform is setting up a drift off of the knockback of a mine.
Some tracks have pre-placed mines that work the same way except leave damaged track underneath them upon detonation. They also do not count against the spawn limit.
Both CPU spawns and mine spawns use the same system and are luck based... kinda. They seem to be based on everything that happens during an individual race but WILL NOT be affected by previous races. This means when I found improvements in Pawn 1 and 2 after completing the rest of the tracks, they were easy to sync back in. However, it means that individual tracks are still very hard. There are somewhat patterns to them (usually spawns will only appear after a previous spawn has gone too far away), but there's still a fair amount of guess work involved. I can somewhat manipulate spawns by doing different behaviors but this is impossible to plan perfectly unless one performs disassembly and what would likely be a lot of number crunching.
This game has
Rocket Starts where by timing when you start holding the accelerator while the signal counts down, you can get a boost at the start. However it sucks so using a CPU bump is better.