Submission #5067: dekutony's DS The Legendary Starfy "SRAM glitch" in 02:38.48

AREUGUYSREADY4SOMESTA... Wait, this is THE serious sub... FUCK.

oh boy... ok. The Legendary Starfy is actually the fifth game in the series, and the first (and only one) released outside of Japan. Developed by TOSE and published by Nintendo in 2008-2009, is a platformer featuring the titular Starfy himself, with his best bud Moe the Clam dude and... I think that's it. Bunston who!? I don't know who that is. Is that a Zootopia character or something? That movie was good BTW, I think... This movie is like a spiritual successor to the original Starfy TAS, screwing the game to beat the final boss really really fast.

This TAS uses a SRAM glitch that corrupts the save data by creating a save file and then closing the game before the save is fully made, and then start the game from said incomplete save file. (found by accident lel) Technically speaking, you can still create a movie that corrupts save data from power-on and a bunch of resets, but... the effects aren't... the same... (also consider that accessing these save files crashes the game, so...) K let me explain the effects a little bit. It seems that hard reset is the most effective method of achieving save corruption, it causes both files to corrupt it's intro sequences. It also lets you actually access the file without crashing. The first image I linked to manages to get to the file select screen, at Stage 10-[null], which doesn't exist, which means when accessing the files, it crashes the game. Second Image shows the title screen, with a glitched textbox showing both Yes and No options selected. Choosing No closes and then spawns another textbox, which loops infinitely, until you say yes... but choosing Yes will result in the game crashing. I was never able to replicate the same effects from this movie to a new one, so I was forced to use dirty SRAM to get the desired effects. I hope that's ok for the judges. As for a verification file... really? It's not that hard to do, in fact you just would need to boot the game and create a file at the beggining. Then replaying the movie and the save file will make the movie sync. After some input editing, I removed the start from dirty SRAM option, but the movie desyncs because the save data doesn't get corrupted anymore. I hope you can understand why I'm using dirty SRAM now. BTW thanks xy2_ for confirming the movie syncs! :D

There's something really important to consider about File 1 and File 2. File 2 is faster than File 1 because File 1 still has the in-game cutscene where Bunston gets kidnapped. File 2 on the other hand, doesn't, despite selecting File 1 being faster by 2 frames.

This is where you wonder if the glitch corrupted more than just the save file... cuz it looks wrong... like a lot. Q: Wait, why do you pause the game many seconds later after the game starts? Good question. The thing is that if you don't wait a certain amount of frames, when you pause the game early, the game will crash. So, yeah... very simple answer.

Yeah. Once you exit the stage you get send to the world map. From there you just press B and start going forward til you get to Stage 8. Stylus to navigate is faster than D-pad because you can move through 2 stages twice, something not possible with the D-pad. When I get to the final stage, I press X to go through the blue door, which is WAY faster than starting the level normally. Holding A while the title card descends makes the card descend faster, saving quite a few seconds.

After going through some stairs, our hero Starfy travels to the final room against Mashtooth, cuz he feels like it.

Actual gameplay!!! This guy will inmedeately ram straight at you. You can double jump and perform a Shooting Star attack. Shooting Stars deal 2 damage to bosses, instead of the usual 1 from a regular Star Spin. The bad guy is killed in one cycle. Mashtooth after ramming into you, he unleashes a thunder attack, which wastes a bunch of time. It was impossible to hit him with 5 Shooting Stars, so I got to strategize my moves to 2 Star Spins and 4 Shooting Stars. Thankfully, the guy is dead in 1 cycle... almost.

Yep, this is where all my frustration with this TAS comes from. The glitch corrupted the intro stage... and THE FINAL BOSS HIMSELF. Mashtooth becomes invisible, being able to warp his weak spot to impossible places and throws invisible meteorites at you.

This final part kicked me in the balls really hard, obviously because I couldn't see the bastard and his STUPID meteors. He likes to move his weak spot to different places and he's invisible, but you can still hit him. Hitting him 3 times is faster than the usual 2 is faster because of his meteor attack next, despite you having to wait until you can hit him this many times.

Then there's the meteorites; HOLY SHIT. Since those things are invisible, it was extremely difficult to mirror them. You'll always get 3 meteor cycles from this guy, so it doesn't really matter how hard you try. My chosen pattern was 2-3-2. There was also 1-3-3, 3-2-2, 2-2-3, among others. 2-3-2 was the most reasonable and possible to manipulate, so I chose that one. After some real frustration and saltiness, Invisimashtooth launches me with an invisible giant lazer attack, which Starfy manages to counter with turbo Y inputs, after the bad guy makes an even more powerful beam, our hero counters it as well, making Moe and whoever the other guy was to cheer him up! Starfy perseveres, and... the credits roll... o-ok then.

to xy2_: for getting interest into this game, and verifying the TAS syncs! to FluffyMoth and everyone else that showed interest into this run.

And you, for watching! Hopefully y'all like this one cuz many people don't like my other ones. T_T

Samsara: GIVE THIS MOVIE A STARfy

Samsara: Giving it a Star's out of my jurisdiction but I'll judge it anyway!!!!

Samsara: Due to some of the discussions surrounding the movie (which is a serious submission, for the record), I'm setting it to Delayed for now while the glitch is being investigated further.

Samsara: Status updated to "needs more info" just because I like this status... Also, it's accurate while I wait for some sort of console verification on the glitch and/or a potential file that achieves the same result without dirty SRAM.

Samsara: After a lot of testing from xy2_ and a lot of deliberation/discussion, I've decided to reject this run for now. My reasoning for this is a little weird, hopefully I can explain it in a way that makes sense.

This is a strange submission. It's based on save corruption that only works in a specific circumstance, where other methods of potentially triggering it either don't work or give completely different results. As of right now, in the nearly three weeks this has been on the workbench, there's no proof that it is actually legitimate, which means that I can't exactly judge it properly.

But that's not the main reason for my rejection. It's the fact that proving the run's legitimacy literally means creating a run that would be published over this one.

The run that would be published would start from power-on and, in theory, trigger the same save corruption through the usage of hard resets. If it works, then it proves the legitimacy of this run... But, of course, it simultaneously renders this run obsolete in doing so. It's a weird catch-22 where, under almost every circumstance, this run can't be accepted. Now, if someone completely, 100% proves that this is the only way to trigger the glitch, and that it's not just taking advantage of an emulation error, then I would be happy to re-judge the submission in the future. At the moment, however, that's not looking to be the case.

dekutony, I suggest looking further into the glitch and seeing if you can do anything from power on with hard resets. You mentioned in the submission text that it doesn't work, and that you needed the dirty SRAM, but I (and many others) have the feeling that this should still be possible from a fresh movie file.