If you have not heard of this game I strongly advise you to heed my warning about loud sounds, which is annotated at the start of the video and before each time it occurs.
Link to video
This is an Any% run completed with the character sonic because it allowed me to complete the game as quick as possible utilizing lots of area skips and a few glitches. There are only 2 save points used in the run because it is required in order for the game to be possible to complete with sonic. This is because when you try to ride the cobrat in mario desert its movement is impared, and without it you are unable to jump on the ninji to complete the area. For this section I had to change character to boshy, complete it, then change back to sonic requiring two saves. The character change screens were done non-tas since hourglass does not currently support mouse input. For more notes on the run itself please read the description on the video as I do not wish to post a gigantic wall of text, though I will if asked.
How to run boshy with hourglass
1. Set the bubble for Multithreading and Wait Sync to Allow.
If you play the game on wrap or disable it suffers from some very poor performance issues.
2. Set FPS to 50
3. Disable your internet
After disabling the internet the game takes exactly 9 seconds to fail to connect to the update server. Thankfully the game doesn't halt or crash when it fails to create the error window which lets you know that it failed to update.
4. Disable Frame Advance Skips 'Lag' Frames
When this is enabled the game would get stuck after selecting a save game for a long period of time.
5. Do not load save states from previous "worlds".
If you enter a boss room, another world, or a special area like the World of Warcraft area, then load a save state from a previous area the game will crash and you will lose some of your progress in your TAS.
6. Use Windows XP
I tested it on Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8. The only OS where boshy would successfully start was on Windows XP.
There is one visual glitch created when running boshy with hourglass which is boss rooms flickering at all of the times that I created save states. I'm not sure if I'm missing an option somewhere that fixes this, but I couldn't figure out any set of options which fix the problem.
I also noticed that if I make a large number of save states the game will freeze at those places for a brief moment when the run is played back.
This was a very entertaining watch. A tough game trounced by the power of TAS :D If you remake this or TAS a new category, I'd like to see more deliberate close shaves/crazy dodges especially when waiting for things to happen (like the Mario boss)
The only enjoyment I get from these games is seeing a TAS or a speedrun out of if. Seem pretty nice, I liked it.
My first language is not English, so please excuse myself if I write something wrong. I'll do my best do write as cleary as I can, so cope with me here =)
(ﾉಥ益ಥ）ﾉ
Nice run! I was pretty entertained throughout. A big potential improvement is at 11:24 where if I remember right you are able to double jump off the right platform and shoot megaman while he is in his command module which would save like 20 seconds.
This signature is much better than its previous version.
This was a very entertaining watch. A tough game trounced by the power of TAS :D If you remake this or TAS a new category, I'd like to see more deliberate close shaves/crazy dodges especially when waiting for things to happen (like the Mario boss)
I made a new tas, however I didn't use many close shaves except where required (Metal gear solid is completed without waiting and is frame perfect to survive). Instead of doing close shaves at Do The Mario I opted to find a spot where you didn't have to move as it takes something that is usually done by spamming shoot and shows it is possible to survive without doing anything except jumping over mario.
Link to video
This time I completed it as Dark Boshy on Totally Average-Mode to see how fast the actual speed runners of boshy could complete the any% category if they had tas accuracy/speed. I streamed the entire TASing process on twitch which took slightly over 38 hours, however one of my broadcasts that was over 11 hours long twitch decided not to save :(
Things used in this run that were not used in the sonic tas(s).
1. Every frame shots is now possible. If you press the jump key on the same on the frame after you let off of the shoot key boshy will shoot another shot. This works even if you do not have a jump left to use. Sadly, I discovered this during the tasing of world 9 so everything before it doesn't include it. I'd like to submit this TAS, but I assume it would probably be rejected due to this.
2. If you press S to skip to the boss fight with megaman on the first frame that you are in his room the game sound completely disappears. I had the game sound off while tasing most of the game so I didn't notice this until I had gotten much farther through the run. I tried splicing a no input frame in to fix it but it desynced the rest of the run :\
3. RNG manipulation (waiting a specific number of frames) is used to get missingno to use recovery as his first attack. When combined with every frame shots I managed to kill him before his shield goes back up.
4. Saves are used to reset the position of objects so that I don't have to wait.
5. In world 11 "save hovering" is used to skip a majority of the world, including the tower, and is done by holding Z + X while spamming R.
Twitch archives of the stream if anyone wants to see them.
World 1 and some of world 2
http://www.twitch.tv/xwidghet/b/399248574
Finishing world 2 and some of world 4
http://www.twitch.tv/xwidghet/b/399571380
Shang Tsung to game completion
http://www.twitch.tv/xwidghet/b/399816903
Very nice TAS! I loved the metal gear solid world 'die and yet save' trick in particular. Lots of deathtraps breezed through like they didn't exist.
I think for publication purposes, at the very least the sound glitch in the megaman battle would have to be fixed (1 frame saving is not worth it) :)
As for updating the TAS before that to include 1 frame shooting, though, that's up to you - the bosses are already so fast, so it wouldn't be a large entertainment change.
Very nice TAS! I loved the metal gear solid world 'die and yet save' trick in particular. Lots of deathtraps breezed through like they didn't exist.
I think for publication purposes, at the very least the sound glitch in the megaman battle would have to be fixed (1 frame saving is not worth it) :)
As for updating the TAS before that to include 1 frame shooting, though, that's up to you - the bosses are already so fast, so it wouldn't be a large entertainment change.
I tried for a while to find a way to keep the fight from desyncing after inserting a frame of no input/Not S but I couldn't do it. I've decided to instead re-do all of the bosses up through gannon to include the every other frame shots as I want to try to get sub 30 minutes. I'm also re-doing some parts of worlds as there are some shortcuts/tas strats that may be more optimal.
In June 2019 I started another TAS of Boshy under the main RTA category (any%, Average-mode, no Wrong Warp, Dark Boshy only). In 2013, when xwidghet created his 30:37 TAS, large timesaves such as Double Shot technique and World 4 skip hadn't yet been found. A year later, MopeyJo released his 26:45 TAS, where he inluded these timesaves. However, looking at this run, there are many places where it could be optimized even more.
Almost every boss can be done faster. For example, Stonk, a real time speedrunner, managed to beat Hello Kitty boss one cycle faster than MopeyJo's TAS. Besides that, there are many platforming timesaves. The major one is Kracko Skip, which I found in the progress of my TAS. That jump was known to be possible only with Sonic, the inputs to do it with Dark Boshy are extremely precise and unobvious. It saves about 50 seconds of a long miniboss fight as well as one platforming screen.
As of right now, I finished World 6 at 10m 4s, which is almost two and a half minutes ahead of MopeyJo. I hope to finish my TAS in the future and submit it to TASVideos.
Update: entering World 10 at 17m 43s, which is more than four minutes ahead of MopeyJo. Looks like the final time will be low 22, maybe a 21.
~25s saved on two bosses: Skeleton King and Shang Tsung. These along with Hello Kitty and Ganon, are the bosses which can accept at most one damage per frame, thus double shot doesn't work on them, which makes them harder.
World 7 consists of two parts, the first one being straightforward. The second half starts with two RNG-based screens and a long cycle-based screen after them. I saved much time here, but there is a possibility to save additional 2.4s by arriving at a better time for the cycle. It requires not reloading and passing all the bullets multiple times which is ridiculously lucky. I've spent 10000 rerecords over the span of 20 days here and the best attempt I've got is 10 frames away from getting the cycle.
In World 8 there are three autoscrollers and I managed to skip the first one (also the shortest one), which saved ~10s. I tried hard to skip other two, but couldn't do anything, except a minor timesave at the last one. Found a few other timesaves, though.
Timesave in World 9 comes from platform boosting, clean fire room, different Koopa bounce strat and faster block puzzle rooms along with general platforming optimizations.
The TAS is finished with a beautiful time of 22:24.44 (22:32.84 using RTA timing). I've already done some minor cosmetic changes and at the moment I'm encoding it. When the video is ready I will publish it on YouTube. However, submitting it to TASVideos will take some more time, at least because I have to create a verification movie: I need to get an onlineLicence.ini file with Dark Boshy, which obviously doesn't come with the game itself. Also some work needs to be done on stage-by-stage commentary as well as documenting tricks and glitches used. Hopefully the TAS can be accepted in the future.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
It's been a bit... Forgive me for this bump.
Out of boredom, I went and checked for videos of older versions of I Wanna Be The Boshy to back up my case on not only the possible early end input after defeating Solgryn (the final boss), but also on a couple of other crucial version differences as well, regarding Mario's third phase and the World 9 boss.
Looking through the archives of Solgryn's old website, I eventually managed to find the earliest update (v1.4.3) that added Mario (Boss 3)'s third phase, where Yoshis flutter and lay explosive eggs before Mario proceeds to bounce around. Every version of Boshy before 10/6/2011 had Mario fly back up after finishing the second phase, meaning the player could proceed to the next world afterward.
Another later update (v1.7) replaced Bomberman (the autoscroller boss of World 9) with Ganon. Hinting the publication date for Merg's video, I'm suspected to believe that this update was released on 1/17/2013, if not a bit earlier. Nonetheless...
From there, I did timings the old-fashioned way (with a stopwatch), with Phase 2 and 3 against Phase 2 only and surviving Bomberman against fighting Ganon to see which of each bossfight was faster. These are rough estimates I made though, with both timings for both fights intended to end when 1) Mario disappears/is killed, and 2) World 10 (Ninja Gaiden) is loaded, so they're not meant to be 100% accurate.
What I could get was that Mario was (obviously) faster without his third phase, and surviving Bomberman's onslaught is slower than fighting Ganon, though not by so much; the overall improvement with Mario's only two phases at this point would help save at least 10 to 11 seconds.
Now, the early end input. Last time I checked, it was possible to kill Solgryn a second time before he rises up to give the previous bosses one more chance of attacking the player in the former's third phase; the health check would then resume once the Vic Viper from Gradius appears and the fire has risen from above. shar's TAS also manages to obliterate Solgryn on the second phase before the boss activates his shield, so theoretically, the run could've ended by entering the third phase afterward (with a time of ~21:31).
But I know shar said that it wasn't possible to end input early and let the Solgryn boss defeat ending play out after the bosses' attacks. How come? I would assume the bug was fixed in that the game now needs to check if the player has entered the Vic Viper before resuming the boss fight (as noted by shar), but in older versions of the game (at least on v1.1.1, the latest video of the boss fight I could find that made use of that glitch), the 50% boss health benefit from Ez-Mode truly allowed for decimating Solgryn in record time, without needing to survive the later attacks. The video below demonstrates how it's possible. (Timestamp: 1:12:09)
Link to video
Not saying after all these years that a future run of the game will/should be made (especially not by me since IWBTG is not my TASing specialty), but these are just some things I wanted to point out. That said, it looks impossible to find suitable older versions of Boshy; only the up-to-date versions on the Internet Archive and on Solgryn's new site, grynsoft.com, are your best bet, not including beta or hacked versions, so there's not much we can do there. Not that there's any urgency either... But consider it a heads-up for now.
I try to check in whenever possible, at least when I'm feeling it.
Look out for yourself and each other; there's quite a bit going on.
My God, it's been a while...
A lot has changed since Summer 2020. The WR at the time was 30:42 by our old timer BBF. After the TAS was released we have learned to perform Kracko Skip in RTA with pause buffering. It is a massive time save that opened the path to sub 30. It took us almost 2.5 years until at the end of 2022 BBF attained 29:59. Then, new generation of Boshy speedrunners arrived. They have shown incredible consistency and tough grind. They were able to master pause buffering, which allowed to implement more strats with precise movement. In 2025 AnsoWizard became the new Boshy leader when he broke the WR with a 29:46. In 2026 he brought it down to 29:12 with a great chance of implementing a 28 in near future. He of course has world records in all other categories, recently achieving unbelievable 37:18 in Rage mode. His grind and courage is truly admirable. I can only applaud and be pleased that this TAS brought that much interest to I Wanna Be The Boshy.
Now to the news. In late 2025, dimadanadji started work on a 100% TAS and as of today they have designed the complete route and finished all the way up to World 4. It is all possible thanks to new tooling. Pixelsuft created Boshyst (the Boshy Speedrun Tool), which provides many useful features and includes TAS facilities. I can say: it is infinitely better than Hourglass. Now, something which back then could take me weeks to optimize is now being completed in a couple of evenings. Compraing to this TAS, dimadanadji already found almost a second of micro movement optimizations (those that are applicable to any%). And over the years we have found three major starts for any%, which save at least 9 seconds.
Not so far in the future we will see the complete 100% Boshy TAS. Although we are not planning on submitting it here, mostly because we use our own tooling, we still think someone on this forum might find the run interesting. Stay tuned!
Although we are not planning on submitting it here, mostly because we use our own tooling, we still think someone on this forum might find the run interesting. Stay tuned!
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
