Introduction

After the Brock through Walls glitch recently brought new life and improvements to the Gen I Pokémon games, it may also have broken some of the categories. This movie is supposed to not only contest for the fastest time in the so-called "any%" category, but also contest the categorization itself, which has shifted a considerable amount with the new findings and may need to be adjusted.

Categories

  • Aims for fastest completion of the game
  • Heavy glitch abuse
  • Heavy luck manipulation
  • Forgoes save corruption
  • Corrupts memory
Used emulator: BizHawk 1.8.0 (syncs on 1.1.0 - 1.6.1 and 1.8.0+)

About the run

Goal choice

This run tries to finish the game, contesting with what is currently the (awkwardly named) "any%" category, which forbids certain kinds of heavy exploits. It specifically disallows:
  • save corruption - separating it from the "SRAM glitch" category (see here)
  • manipulating warp locations - separating it from the "warp glitch" category (see here)
Note that this run is faster than the currently published "warp glitch" movie, which doesn't use the Brock through Walls glitch. It does not, however, compete with this publication, there is a much faster route for this category using the new glitch.

Emulator Choice

This movie uses the pre-1.7 frame timing and syncs on all pre-1.7 versions as well as 1.8 which allows to adjust the timing method.

Version Choice

Both the Red and Blue version work for the chosen route, and there are only very minor time differences between them. I chose the Red version merely for convenience, since the needed Weedle encounters are more frequent in Red, plus minor time savings in having a faster intro sequence and having a shorter default player name.

Brock through Walls

Even though this glitch has apparently been known about for a long time for the Japanese version of the game, it was not until recently that it is understood and usable in the UE version as well. It allows using the Pewter gym guy to exploit the game's cutscene mechanics in order to walk through any overworld object.
The game stores the player movement during a cutscene as a sequence of simulated joypad inputs (at $ccd3). The inputs will be played back one by one, and the cutscene ends when all movements are finished. After performing the Brock Skip glitch, it's possible to talk to the Pewter gym guy from the right, which is not supposed to be possible, so there's no cutscene path defined for it. The mapping from the player's coordinates to the path he'll walk in the cutscene is defined in d:7d06. Each entry consists of four bytes:
<y> <x> <2-byte address of the path to walk>
With no mapping defined for the right side of the NPC (coordinates (36, 16) ), the game searches on in the memory areas beyond, and will eventually reach the RAM starting at $c000. If it doesn't find the coordinates anywhere, it will loop around the game memory forever, effectively soft-locking the game. The coordinates must be aligned properly to the 4 byte blocks at d:7d06, that means the block must start at an address ending in 2, 6, a or e. If aligned properly, the two bytes after the coordinates are used as the address that points to the joypad inputs the player will execute during the cutscene. This list is terminated by an 0xff byte, and the game will continue copying bytes until it is found. If there is no 0xff byte in time, it will overwrite other memory areas, specifically $cd3b. This address is used to define joypad inputs that can override the simulated ones during a cutscene. The feature is (to my knowledge) not used in the game, and causes the cutscene to pause while overriding inputs are pressed, while still preserving all other effects of the cutscene, specifically the ability to walk through any object. Using any warp (e.g. entering a building) cancels the cutscene and the associated effects.
In this run, Charmander's DVs are used to put the coordinates at $d186. The PP for the first and second move (at $d188) are therefore used to determine the address from which to read, which will be 33 for Tackle and 34 for Growl at the time of execution. These spell out the address $2221, which sets $cd3b to 0xe0, enabling exactly the left, up and down directional buttons, which happen to be the exact directions that are necessary. Note that the required buttons don't need to be enabled in order to use them, as long as there is an enabled button you can press whilst going in the desired direction (like B, Select, or even a different directional button). Also, if the memory corruption goes further, $cd60 and $cd6b can be affected, which can influence the ability to use certain buttons or do interactions, but they stay unmodified in this run.

Route

Intro

  • The enemy is named "B", since displaying shorter names is faster.
  • The player is given the default name, it's not shown often enough for a shorter name to make up for the time lost in renaming it.

Pallet town

  • The options are changed to fast text speed, no battle animations and a set battle style, which speeds up all upcoming battles. Changing the options in-game is faster than doing it in the main menu.
  • Charmander is chosen as the starter, since it knows Growl and can be poisoned. Bulbasaur would be faster in the rival fight, but it can't be poisoned which would lose more time later.
  • Charmander's DVs are manipulated to be 1/0/2/4, which is needed for the Brock through Walls glitch later on.
  • Losing to the rival is faster than winning, and we won't need the experience.
  • Note that Charmander's Growl misses exploit the fact that all moves (except for Swift or when using X-Accuracy) have at least 1/256 chance of failing, even if they are supposed to always hit.
  • When delivering Oak's package, it's faster to stand next to or above Oak instead of in front of him. This will cause the rival to walk less steps, and NPCs walk at only half of your speed.

Viridian City

  • The Pokecenter is used to set the warp location for the upcoming death-warp.
  • Buying a Pokeball in the mart is faster than picking up the one in Viridian Forest.

Viridian Forest

  • Charmander is poisoned by a wild Weedle to drain its HP and faint to an encounter right in front of the Bug Catcher. This sets up a Trainer-Fly.
  • A wild Rattata with a Spc stat of 7 is growled 6 times to set up a L1 Nidoking encounter.
  • Nidoking's Atk DV is manipulated to be 15, as it will do all upcoming trainer fights.
  • Using the Experience Underflow glitch, Nidoking is raised to L100 on a L3 Weedle.

Pewter city

  • The selected start menu item is set to "save" in preparation of the Brock Skip glitch.
  • The north-east house is entered to manipulate Route 23 later on.
  • After performing the Brock skip glitch, we turn around and talk to the guy again to trigger the Brock Through Walls glitch, allowing us to ignore any obstacles in our path and go directly to the Indigo Plateau.

Route 23

  • All overworld maps (cities and routes) are connected at their edges, so you can traverse the world without loading zones. The connection between Route 22 and Route 23 is special though, since it is the only one that can't be used legitimately (you need to go through the gate house), even though it works and is defined in a perfectly valid way. This allowed the current publication to skip two of the badge checks, and allows this run to skip all eight badges. The tileset used in the two routes is different, which not only creates visual glitches when crossing maps, it also confuses the game about where to place the player in the map, putting it at the coordinates of the warp with the ID of the last used warp. By entering and exiting the house in Pewter city, this ID is set to 4, which allows us to skip all guards checking for badges.

Indigo Plateau

  • Depositing Charmander seems tempting, but ends up costing more time than can be saved in the Hall of Fame.
  • When using Thrash, you are bound to use it for 3-4 turns. This saves time by skipping the move selection, but causes confusion after it finishes, so it's only used to end a fight.
  • Agatha is the most painful fight, her Gengars and Haunter can only be damaged with Poison Sting, which is doubly non-effective and has only 15 base power. Even being at L100 with optimal DVs and having the STAB bonus, it takes 7 hits to kill the L60 Gengar.

Noxxa: Judging.
Regarding primorial#soup's run, it does much of the same things this run does: use underflow to glitch a Pokémon to level 100 instantly, skip badges and skip badge checks by walking through walls. There isn't really much that primo's run does that this run doesn't, except show off more of the game because the walk through walls glitch comes much later in that run. Primo's run has no real limitation that would make it a different category from this run, so this run will obsolete it.
The "warp glitch" run by MrWint is pretty much any% (sans save corruption), and this run beats the game faster under at the same restrictions (and more, in fact), so that will be obsoleted as well. While there may be an improvement incoming that uses a glitched warp, it will have to be seen when that is submitted whether that would obsolete this run, or whether this run would remain as "no warp glitch", like primo's current run is now.
Spikestuff: Publishing....

TASVideoAgent
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This topic is for the purpose of discussing #4416: MrWint's GB Pokémon: Red Version in 22:02.94
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This....is hilarious. I'm just wondering now how would this category still hold with more and more discoveries lol. Also an encode would be nice. :) Edit: Maybe "All badges", but it would just be this run but walking through walls to other gyms then back to E4, so idk.
Fortranm
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I swear you said "I'm done with Pokemon for a while, I want to TAS something else" not too long ago... The thing is, now that Brock Through Walls has been discovered, the "any%" and "no save corruption" categories are quite similar. There's basically nothing in here that isn't in the NSC category, and it's slower, so there isn't much point in having it. Shame you can't manipulate the TM for Earthquake or something to appear on that glitched path, it would speed up the Agatha fight.
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thatguy wrote:
I swear you said "I'm done with Pokemon for a while, I want to TAS something else" not too long ago...
That was before this WTW became well known. There was almost no room for improvement without a new skip like this. Anyway, this TAS is awesome. Voting yes! And looking forward the next ones. :)
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As impressive it may be to see this game getting destroyed even more, I don't really see the point of this category. I couldn't imagine a more confusing name for it than "any%" (to me, any% in Pokémon Gen 1. will always be the save corruption run, but I won't even try to convince anyone for this opinion). "no save corruption" was very obvious as a restriction, this case requires much more explaining. Why not having (name them whatever you want): - any% - any%, no save corruption - any%, no memory corruption And if you want a MST kind of thing, you could create a category that has to obtain all the badges, while also allowing all the glitches. The only restriction would be, that you not only need to have the badges, but also have the gym leaders actually be considered "beaten" by the game (this would of course be pretty pointless, if you could still achieve it in a minute using save corruption).
Current project: Gex 3 any% Paused: Gex 64 any% There are no N64 emulators. Just SM64 emulators with hacky support for all the other games.
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^I think MrWint agrees with you to be honest. He does note in the submission that this run was made partially to challenge the game's current categorisation.
ALAKTORN
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I am lost in all the categories… but isn’t this ACE? Reading the submission text it felt like it could be manipulated to do whatever you want, can someone clarify that?
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Rerecord count: 24,572,287 o.O The TAS is pretty funny though, so I voted yes.
Current thoughts: Hachiemon (J) for GBA.
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thatguy wrote:
^I think MrWint agrees with you to be honest. He does note in the submission that this run was made partially to challenge the game's current categorisation.
Right, this is at least part of the point of this submission.
ALAKTORN wrote:
I am lost in all the categories… but isn’t this ACE? Reading the submission text it felt like it could be manipulated to do whatever you want, can someone clarify that?
Since this has become a rather touchy subject for this game in the past, I'll answer it in short: no, only memory corruption, no ACE.
Exxonym wrote:
Rerecord count: 24,572,287 o.O
I spent 19791833 of them for brute-forcing Charmander's DV's alone, which probably was total overkill, at least considering the result I ended up with.
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Oh wow... after following the R/B thread, I honestly did not expect this route. Well done actually defeating the league at record speed. It's a shame poison sting is needed for the ghosts, but what can you do? Big yes vote!!!
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solarplex wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FnE8N3EwnQ
Er...can you please change the colors to black/white? This looks rather odd. :P Thanks anyways. Edit: I was going to comment on why the use of Nidoking until I saw the thrashing. That was unexpected. Yes vote.
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jlun2 wrote:
solarplex wrote:
-video version 1-
Er...can you please change the colors to black/white? This looks rather odd. :P Thanks anyways.
My eyes vomited.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account. These colours are pretty neato, and also these.
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Spikestuff wrote:
jlun2 wrote:
solarplex wrote:
-video-
Er...can you please change the colors to black/white? This looks rather odd. :P Thanks anyways.
My eyes vomited.
My bad, someone should have told me in IRC, those were default on bizhawk so ya. be up with a new encode soon
Buddybenj
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Amazing how far this category has gone! No-brainer yes vote!
Projects: Interested in TASing N64 Mario Golf. GBA Mario Tennis: Power Tour is on hold.
Zarmakuizz
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I'm okay with the colors, but the frame counter hides the opponent's Pokémon level (and the wild Nidoking's level). Yes vote.
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Thanks for the encode. This run is crazy. Yes vote.
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Yes vote.
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Even though this is a run meant to show off the "Brock-through-walls" glitch (and it even fights the Elite 4), something bugs me about this run where it just seems like there is a much faster way to do this, even while staying consistent with the goal choices given.
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This was an amusing run with not fully understanding getting poisoned and losing until noticing it somehow acted like using an escaperope / teleport, it is definitely the earliest I've seen a level 100 pokemon in these type of runs so far myself. That added to the brock walk through walls glitch made this entertaining. Didn't ever expect to get to the elite four in 10 minutes without using memory corruption. The guy before mentioned it seems like it may be possible to increase the speed still, perhaps by getting a glitch battle with a pokemon that won't be ineffective against some of those Agatha pokemon? Then again Nidoking is overpowered to everything else still though~ The true unsung hero of this TAS is B. Your rival manages to catch and level up 6 pokemon past level 60 in barely 15 minutes. He may have lost to you, but that will remain a record for the ages.....Or he could have just used rare candies.
Enjoys speedruns but hasn't actually tried making any yet.
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Very cool and enjoyable to watch! The Brock Through Walls glitch was hilarious and I never thought you could get to and beat the Elite Four so early. I don't know how this would be categorized, but if nothing else, it can always be "published" in Gruefood Delight. Yes vote!
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CoolKirby wrote:
I don't know how this would be categorized, but if nothing else, it can always be "published" in Gruefood Delight
The only way this TAS is going to gruefood is if something better gets made before it's published, lol
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
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The previous run used a memory corruption glitch to warp to the end. Can this walk through walls trick not be used to reach a place where you can perform that memory corruption glitch in order to reach the end earlier?
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^Yes, the player can go to the Celadon/Saffron area and perform the Fresh Water item underflow trick, which is a number of minutes faster (something like ~14-15 min total). That's why the goal of this submission is to challenge the current categories, a move that I applaud. A quick summary: - For a number of years, this 1 hour 19 minute run was the fastest R/B run, and had very little controversy as the majority of the core gameplay was kept (6/8 badges, defeating the Elite Four normally, etc). - Then, this 41 minute run came out, which first began the trend of performing a glitched warp directly into the Hall of Fame. Many saw this as too similar to the Yellow save corruption run as it broke the core gameplay, but it was accepted as an improvement as the main goal of the R/B runs was simply "beat the game without save corruption" which this does. - The R/B category was eventually improved down to this 28 minute video, which continues to perform a glitched warp into the Hall of Fame, still with no save corruption of any kind. Around this time, the 1h19m video was deemed different enough and was split into a "no glitched warps" category. Since the gameplay was drastically different as well as the goals, this was a perfectly reasonable decision. - Now, the Brock Through Walls glitch takes the above distinction and throws it out the window. Using it, both the "no glitched warps" and "no save corruption" goals can be made into one similar movie, only a few minutes apart, not very different, and both well below the current 28m publication. Basically, there is no longer a good reason to keep the two categories as is. My personal opinion: - As the "no glitched warps" category is no longer different enough to be its own branch, it should be removed. - There should be a "no save corruption" goal movie that's basically very similar to this except using item underflow in Saffron to beat the game a few minutes faster. This submission would then be rejected on known suboptimality. - For those that want a Gen I movie that maintains some semblance of intended gameplay, there's a few solutions: -- Make a 'glitchless' category defined the same way as real-time speedrunners, banning the use of several glitches (con: obviously some are unavoidable and thus pointless to ban such as the 1/256 miss glitch, making the category hard to concretely define) -- Keep the 1h19m run as a separate branch. I would heavily dislike this as it would be very arbitrary to define ("no save corruption and no glitched warps, oh, and you can use this WTW glitch but not that one") -- Make a Yellow version "no glitched warps" branch, which would be quite similar to the 1h18m run with a concise definition. This works solely because Brock skip isn't possible in Yellow. -- Argue somehow that the Gotta Catch 'Em All branches adequately resemble normal gameplay (??)