The purpose of this page is to document all of the known tricks of the game Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (N64).
Because of the nature of this site, we concentrate here on tricks that are difficult to play in real time, but are useful in the making of tool-assisted speedruns. For most of the tricks, a
frame advance feature in an emulator is a definite must-have.
Memory addresses
Mupen64
If you're using mupen64, you will need
MHS to see these memory addresses. The offset for the mupen64 addresses is 5CEC90 and the addresses can be downloaded
here as an .lssave file. Thanks to
Anavrin for finding these:
009CEC90: Vertical speed of Kirby (type: float).
009D1F50: Horizontal speed of Kirby (type: float).
00A1A3EC: Horizontal position value of Kirby (type: float).
00A1A3F0: Vertical position value of Kirby (type: float).
Physics
- Horizontal movement
-
From slowest to fastest in general:
- Walking top speed: 5
- Walking upward on a slope slows you down.
- Running top speed: 6
- Get into running speed as often as possible (by walking, releasing the D-Pad direction for two frames and then holding it down).
- Rock bird flying top speed: 6
- You need Rock + Cutter to get into the rock bird form.
- Slide kick top speed: 9
- Try to slide kick off of ledges when possible.
- Curling top speed: 9.7
- Speed decreases over time, so do not stay in this form for too long.
- Double fire top speed: 10
- Single fire top speed: 10.5
- Doing an air-puff after each fire blow keeps your speed for a bit more distance.
- Vertical movement
-
Upward:
- Initial upward speed from jump: ~16
- Walking upward and jumping does not reduce initial jump speed.
- Flying upward speed: 4~7
- The fastest way to fly upward is to rapidly tap the "A" button.
Downward:
- Terminal downward speed: -16
- To save time falling down a pit or shaft, jump ahead of time and just barely miss the edge of the hole. The result is that Kirby will pre-accelerate himself into the hole and start his descent with more than zero downward speed. Have as much velocity as possible before dropping down.
Tricks and timesavers
- Try to slidekick before entering a new room or map. You should slidekick ~26 frames before seeing Kirby's running animation into the room.
- All of Kirby's moves are slowed down in water. Try to swallow enemies and use power-ups outside of water as often as possible.
- Swimming with a fish over your head saves time.
- Many times in this game, you'll need to get rid of power-ups. The common way to do so is to press the "R" button to pull out the power-up onto your head, at which point you can either throw it at enemies or into the air. However, the fastest way to get rid of a power-up on your head is to have an enemy hit and destroy it.
- There are also times where you need to pull out the power up on your head to toss it at other enemies to create a new power-up (double fire, for example). In those cases, this trick can come in handy:
To do this trick, you need to press "R" or any "C" button on the last possible frame before entering a room or map. Instead of pulling out the power-up onto his head, Kirby will get the power-up back in his mouth, which can't be done without this trick.