Commentated version: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1150065207
Goals:
- Beat the game as fast as possible
- takes damage to save time
- major skip glitch
- heavy glitch abuse
- Heavy RNG manip
- Genre: platform
- Genre: Adventure
Note: the category I'm submitting is any%, however I'd prefer this run to be published along with the 42 minute run. the run I'm submitting basically skips the whole game, while the 42 minute run gets to show most of the game in an entertaining way, as well as having a route that RTA runners can follow.
This run is done on the NTSC version, because it does not have a menu to select a language, unlike the PAL version.
This run used about 230 000 rerecords of RNG brute-forcing with scripts to manipulate Grunty stopping in the middle of the arena.
Techniques used
Even though this run is short, a lot of new tricks got found.
RNG manipulation via jumping
For most of the run, jumping is the only thing that can affect RNG without losing time. This explains all the jumps everywhere.
Damage boosting
Allows you to go at rolling speed (2.00 pixels per frame) instead of the walking speed (1.60 pixels per frame) for the duration of the knockback.
Buzzeye frame rule
Buzzeye will only coem out of the ground to teach you a move every 5 frames. If you don't get there on a good frame, it's better to use the waiting time to place yourself in a better spot for after learning the move.
Superwalking (new!)
At first there was superjumps, which can be seen in all the other publications, where you can gain speed by changing direction then jump on a ledge over water or lava. It was pretty fast, but jumping meant that you had to wait until your land to get another one of these boosts. Now here comes superwalking, which is basically the same glitch, except you don't even need to jump to gain speed. This is the main mode of transportation used in this TAS, and it allows to gain insane speeds.
Speed conservation (new!)
Once you gain insane speeds, the game will try to back to normal speed every 5 frames (in the air), every 6 frames (on the ground) or every 12 frames (in the air, above water). To avoid that, you can switch direction the frame before you start losing speed to delay the slowdown by another framerule.
Levitation (new!)
It was done by accident in the previous TASes, but here's how it's actually done. Once you get a horizontal speed that's faster than ~5.5 pixels per frame (about triple the normal walking speed), the game will only apply gravity on Banjo when he's turning.
The 50 jiggy door skip (new!)
With everything that I explained so far, it's still impossible to clip past the 50 jiggy door, since it's impossible to gain enough speed to clip. The only workaround is to clip into a nearby bridge, and use that bridge as a really convenient spot to gain speed. While you're clipped into that bridge, you're on ground, but somehow the game considers that you're also above water, since there's no proper floor separating Banjo from the water down below. Clipping out of the has its challenge in itself, you need to moving at either 8 or 13 pixels per frame moving up, so precise speed control needs to be done in order to have enough time to gain rightward speed while not clipping out too early.
Final boss phase skips
For the first 2 phases, you can shoot an egg then backflip to get a knockback which lets to play the quiz. This works because the game checks if you're in the egg firing mode or not to determine if an egg hits an enemy, and since I'm in a backflip when the egg hits, the game considers that I hit Grunty or Klungo with a melee attack, which causes a knockback.
Quiz RNG manipulation via pause-buffering (new!)
There's 4 types of questions that you can get in the quiz, some being much better than the others:
- Sound (fastest)
- Character (fast)
- Location (3-4s lost)
- minigame (20 seconds to a minute and a half lost depending on minigame)
As it turns out, pausing between questions turned out to be very effective to get rid of unwanted questions. Even if it looks so to do, it can still save about 2 seconds to get rid of a location question using this technique. Overall, for this run, the pause-buffering technique saved about 7 seconds.
Instant ghost return (new!)
In the final fight, during certain phases, you can get the ghost stuck in a wall if you manipulate Grunty to be next to wall, and hit her on the first possible frame, the ghost will almost instantly get back into the robot. This does not give a lot of time for you to hit the ghost, so you gotta be quick.
The route
Here's what's required to beat the game
- 80 notes, to learn eggs
- 6 jiggies, to open Breegull Beach, which has Kazooie and eggs
- Pack whack, to be able to open the first 2 levels, to eventually get eggs
- Climb, to reach the Grunty fight which unlocks Kazooie
- Kazooie (of course!), to be able to shoot eggs
- Eggs, to be able to skip the Klungo phase of the final boss fight
In other words, if there was a way to beat the final boss without eggs, we could directly go to the final boss fight after learning pack whack, but that may be for another time.
Allright, so the run starts by Banjo getting 6 jiggies in Spiral Mountain, as they are the fastest jiggies to get from the fact that most of them are standing still. This lets us open both Cliff Farm and Breegull Beach at once. Once we're in Cliff Farm, we only need to learn how to climb, so that's all we'll be doing here. Once we're in Breegull Beach, we unlock Kazooie and eggs with the notes that we got along the way, and we're ready for the boss fight.
feos: Judging...
feos: Quality of the movie is great, so there's no doubt it's getting accepted. What's more interesting is branching.
Clipping through jiggy doors seems to be similar to Backwards Long Jump in SM64, but not only in terms of its mechanics, but also in terms of how common it is (going to be) in TAS branches.
- Fastest completion is now using it, and thanks to skipping most of the mandatory items, it is a major skip glitch, and most of the game is """missing""".
- Full completion will also use it, but it will only save a few minutes there, because collecting the items is required by the goal.
- And the run that avoids clipping through jiggy doors needs to be explicitly labeled, just like we label the "no BLJ" branch in SM64. The author suggested "no levels early" and that seems to reflect well what this is all about.
Also this means that this branch will need no label! Because "levels early" is a common timesaver from now on.
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