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There's a hole in the sky
Through which things can fly.
-Aperture Science Motto
After parsing through the user's manual for her Power Suit, Samus discovered that the Chozo have endowed it with the power to interact with the fabric of reality immediately surrounding the planet SR-388 by simply switching between her beam and her missiles. What luck that she should receive an assignment to go to that planet!
Eager to try out this new power, she realizes a few things: it's tricky and seemingly random to pull off, plus, if she's not careful, she could easily end up in a solid wall, stuck there until someone hits the power switch on her universe. Eventually, with the aid of various other tools, including time manipulators, she attained a mastery over this latent ability and used it to eradicate the metroid species in record time.
The select glitch in this game is a well known glitch that involves mashing the select button to move tiles around the game map. Doing so can give the player access to other parts of the map s/he shouldn't have have access to, including this game's version of "secret worlds." I could easily go into further detail, but I have the mechanics of this glitch detailed at Metroid 2 Tricks.
This was a rather fun run to make. One of the first things I did when rerecording tools came out for the Gameboy was to test this game out, and figure out how to get the glitch to work. I am very grateful to whoever decided to include a map viewer in VBA, because this glitch would otherwise have been impossible to pull off consistently and helped very much in my research of it.
After my two year break from normal life, I found a map editor which allowed me to confirm some theories I had about how the game map worked, and made route planning much, much easier.
What was my least favorite part about making this run? Easily, the last metroid in ruins 3 and the metroid immediately following. Trying to do a bunch of damage boosting while doing some tricky glitching was in no way fun. Those two easily took me a month to do.
Notes About the Run
  • Watching this movie may induce feelings of confusion and disorientation. Do not worry; this is perfectly normal.
  • Much of the route was discovered by accident. I was simply going through the game, using the glitch wherever I could, and just stumbled upon bits of the route that fit together pretty much perfectly.
  • There's a part of this movie where I spend ten seconds filling up on missiles on the same enemy. This is unavoidable as I need the missiles I get from him, and that enemy is the only chance I have to refill at the point.
  • In Cardboard's run, health is tight while missiles are plentiful. A side effect of this route is exactly the opposite, where I can be very liberal with my health, but have to be very conservative with my missiles.
  • The results of the Metroid Queen fight are frustrating. I discovered that her first lunge in each set of two will never be with an open mouth until her health is less than 100. This means that for the first two rounds I could only bomb her once.
  • The end result of the run is a ratio of nearly two metroids per minute.
  • The only two types of metroids I do not encounter at least one glitched version of are the gamma and the queen. Every other kind, including the regulars, get glitched up at least once.
  • Brownie points to whoever can tell me what's truly bizarre about the way I get to the credits. No, it's not the direction I approach the ship, nor is it the way I enter it. :) (Edit: CtrlAltDestroy got it)
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Manipulates luck
  • Abuses errors in programming
  • Uses VBA 19.3
Ending Time According to the Game
Thanks
  • Cardboard, for his run which served as a good reference point and inspiration for tactics. While I didn't seek to copy his run and tactics exactly, watching it was good for motivation and pushing me in the right direction.
  • The developers of VBA, particularly the person who decided to include the map viewer. This run would probably not exist without it.
  • Texel, for the really handy M2Edit program, which was a great assistance in route planning.
  • Everyone who posted in the Metroid 2 Topic, for providing support and for giving me an expanded base of knowledge of various tricks and what not.
  • Everyone on the IRC, who tolerated my use of the channel as a place to think out loud, and also for additional support and motivation.
Thanks for watching!
Screenshots
The following were captured by moozooh:
mmbossman: Accepting as a new "any%, glitched" category.
Raiscan: Processing.

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Posted: 8/12/2008 10:19 PM
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Derakon
Joined: 7/2/2007
Posts: 3960
It would be entirely awesome in a future version of the run to end the game at a non-ship missile recharge. :D
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Posted: 8/12/2008 10:22 PM
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Cardboard
Skilled player (1670)
Joined: 6/11/2006
Posts: 818
Location: Arboga, Sweden
NES TAS of 2008 Rookie of 2007 GBx TASer of 2007
I was just thinking is there any way this might help you? I did not think of it at all until right now when you mentioned the missile station being the end game.
Warp wrote:
omg lol this is so fake!!!1 the nes cant produce music like this!
Posted: 8/12/2008 10:24 PM
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Ferret_Warlord
Skilled player (1404)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
Yeah, I actually tried that. No go. Problem is the counter doesn't decrement until after the room's exit point changes, leading to a secret world and a bad tileset.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Posted: 8/12/2008 10:30 PM
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theenglishman
Active player (441)
Joined: 3/21/2006
Posts: 940
Location: Toronto, Canada
PSX TASer of 2013
Before watching this run, I had no idea that there were Metroids made entirely of garbled tiles and letters. Yes vote without a doubt.
My current project: Something mysterious (oooooh!) My username is all lower-case letters. Please get it right :(
Posted: 8/12/2008 10:43 PM
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Aqfaq
Editor, Expert player (2460)
Joined: 4/8/2005
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Location: Gone for a year, just for varietyyyyyyyyy!!
Sega TASer of 2008 Lucky TAS of 2008
Maybe I'm wrong, but some parts of the "secret worlds" resembled the small air ships from SMB3. This stuff is quite crazy, so my "yes" vote almost overflows to "no". Not quite, thoughdBFGwFFFJF
Posted: 8/12/2008 11:07 PM
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eternaljwh
Joined: 3/11/2008
Posts: 583
Location: USA
Ferret Warlord wrote:
Warping to the queen wouldn't do. It is possible, but she won't be active until all the other 46 metroids are destroyed and you enter her room the way you normally do. Not like glitching to the fight would matter: In order to finish the game, memory address D089, the variable that counts how many metroids are left, must read 0, so I'd have to take care of the other 46 anyway.
Hmm. The natural followup question is, is D089 the one displayed onscreen? If so, is there any way to kill a larval metroid without passing the "change counter from 1 to 9", so that you go to 0 that way, then escape w/select glitch to recharge missiles/end game?
Posted: 8/12/2008 11:09 PM
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Ferret_Warlord
Skilled player (1404)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
Short Answer: No. Long Answer: No. It starts out at 47 (must be viewed in hex to be read right), and goes down by 1 with each metroid killed. The counter on the screen has little to do with anything.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Posted: 8/12/2008 11:46 PM
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CtrlAltDestroy
Active player (325)
Joined: 2/23/2005
Posts: 786
That's really funny. Good find.
Posted: 8/13/2008 12:05 AM
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ugetab
Emulator Coder
Joined: 1/12/2007
Posts: 95
Yes. This run is amazing. Cutting the game to ribbons like that was very entertaining.
Posted: 8/13/2008 1:06 AM
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Raiscan
Joined: 11/11/2006
Posts: 1235
Location: United Kingdom
CtrlAltDestroy wrote:
That's really funny. Good find.
And this is also a nice little example of why we can't accept movies from savestates :D "I'm so awesome the game completed early for me!"
<adelikat> I am annoyed at my irc statements ending up in forums & sigs
Posted: 8/13/2008 4:19 AM
Post subject: Movie published
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TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 14879
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [1175] GB Metroid II: Return of Samus "select glitch" by Ferret Warlord in 23:47.40
Posted: 8/13/2008 4:46 AM
(Edited: 8/13/2008 6:17 PM)
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Ferret_Warlord
Skilled player (1404)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
Oh what luck. I go away to finish up my game of Metroid Fusion and come back to see this! :P (~4 hours with 62% items; I know, I stink, but I didn't feel like going the back route through all the sectors to pick up items I didn't need for one boss fight :/)
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Posted: 8/13/2008 6:16 PM
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Alter
Former player
Joined: 1/29/2007
Posts: 116
Great job on finishing this! Turned out just as awesome as we all imagined. Best part: After the Queen, that was just great.
Posted: 8/15/2008 2:54 AM
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SatoshiLyish
Joined: 3/14/2005
Posts: 43
Ferret Warlord wrote:
A winner is you, CAD! In truth, the way to end the game is to finish off all 47 metroids and recharge your missiles. Any missile recharge will do, it's just that ordinarily you're limited to the ship at the end when you do so. You see, when you touch a recharge station, it first checks to see if D089, the memory location for the number of metroids left, is zero; if so, end the game, if not, fill missiles. So I just glitched back to the beginning of the game because it was so much closer! ;P The original plan was to work over to the station outside the final ruins, but tileset issues set in and wouldn't let me.
wow, that's quite interesting. I guess I was too disoriented viewing numbertroids and other glitchy palettes to notice a switched mothership ^^;
Posted: 8/15/2008 4:11 AM
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pirate_sephiroth
Active player (308)
Joined: 2/28/2006
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Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
New systems TAS of 2009
Ferret Warlord wrote:
You see, when you touch a recharge station, it first checks to see if D089, the memory location for the number of metroids left, is zero; if so, end the game, if not, fill missiles.
In other words: unless some overflow is found, no pacifist run is possible... How did you find that? Setting a breakpoint on read or just curiosity+luck?
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself. It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success." - Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Drama, too long, didn't read, lol.
Posted: 8/15/2008 4:56 AM
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Udderdude
Joined: 6/26/2007
Posts: 28
Location: Canada
Very nice TAS, love the glitchyness. I loved how you could tell as soon as you heard the missle select on/off sound, things were about to get WACKY. Step 1. Memory overflow 0 into D089 Step 2. Refill missles Step 3. Profit???
Posted: 8/16/2008 2:10 AM
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Dasrik
Player (29)
Joined: 9/23/2006
Posts: 207
Location: Moreno Valley, California
The dreaded ABCD Metroid.
"The way to move out of judgment is to move into gratitude." — Neale Donald Walsch DannyLilithborne on IRC
Posted: 8/18/2008 11:26 PM
(Edited: 11/3/2008 7:49 AM)
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Ferret_Warlord
Skilled player (1404)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
pirate_sephiroth wrote:
How did you find that? Setting a breakpoint on read or just curiosity+luck?
Actually, it was discovered by mentally reverse engineering the game ending mechanic with the assumption that circumventing a pacifist run was a complete accident. With that assumption in mind, I thought, "What about that missile reload at the end prevents the game from ending early?" To which I theorized, "Well, they could have set all missile recharges to end the game once all the metroids are dead; ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem since the recharge at the end is the only one you're supposed to have access to at the end." So, theory in place, I tested it. And lo, it worked! As for D089, I didn't really bother finding it until I was about 13 minutes in and my brother encouraged me to find out how the metroid counter worked.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Posted: 8/19/2008 12:31 AM
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mike89
Active player (301)
Joined: 8/8/2005
Posts: 296
Location: NSW, Australia
OK. I have never played Metroid 2 so I fully expected this to be over my head. But I had the ROM handy so I got it anyway. FerretWarlord, you should be taken in for brain-icide. That was more broken than Sonic 3... generally accepted as the standard for breaking a game. Congratulations.
Posted: 1/29/2009 3:40 AM
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Ferret_Warlord
Skilled player (1404)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
Today is my birthday. My sister baked me a cake. I probably need to reprioritize my life. (just thought you all would enjoy this)
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Posted: 1/29/2009 3:51 AM
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Dromiceius
Joined: 10/3/2005
Posts: 1332
The cake is a... glitch?! Happy b-day, ferret. :)
Posted: 1/29/2009 11:29 PM
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alden
Player (120)
Joined: 2/11/2007
Posts: 1522
Wow, your sister must really love you! That's awesome. Thanks for sharing and Happy Birthday!
I make a comic with no image files and you should read it. While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. -Eugene Debs
Posted: 1/29/2009 11:31 PM
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adelikat
He/Him
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TASer of 2010 NES TASer of 2010 DS TASer of 2010 Arcade TAS of 2010 NES TASer of 2008 NES TAS of 2008 Funny TAS of 2008 TASer of 2007 NES TASer of 2007 Funny TAS of 2007
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Posted: 2/25/2009 1:04 AM
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BBC
Joined: 2/24/2009
Posts: 1
amazing run, no idea you could beat the queen like that. one thing though, i noticed you stay far from the metroids when shooting missles at them, whereas if you are close you can shoot missles extremely fast as opposed to being far away, but i noticed even when you are close it takes long for the middle to hit the metroid, why is this?
Posted: 2/26/2009 6:53 AM
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Ferret_Warlord
Skilled player (1404)
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
BBC wrote:
one thing though, i noticed you stay far from the metroids when shooting missles at them, whereas if you are close you can shoot missles extremely fast as opposed to being far away, but i noticed even when you are close it takes long for the middle to hit the metroid, why is this?
I'm assuming you're talking about the zetas and omegas. Their hitboxes close up for a while after getting hit, allowing missiles to go right through them for a short period. The alphas and gammas don't behave like this, although shooting too soon won't do any damage. If I was keeping my distance, it was most likely a spacing issue that involved the quick death glitch. Glad you liked it.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
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