
Mario Kart Wii: The History of the Ultra Shortcut [video] - CaliforniaKarl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmJ_LT8bUj0
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mlinsey
The most interesting speedrun I've ever seen is the Super Mario World credits
warp, which requires the player to write + execute arbitrary code in game by
carefully positioning koopa shells. At first thought to only be possible with
tools in an emulator, this has been done on an actual console!

Summoning Salt video about the overall history of SMW speedruns:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USBboeK7oDA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USBboeK7oDA)

Detailed explanation of how the credits warp exploit works:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAHXK2wut_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAHXK2wut_I)

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crtasm
And since people learned how to inject custom code into the game you get
amazing creations like a full level editor running inside SMW:

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/how-a-game-playing-
ro...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/how-a-game-playing-robot-coded-
super-mario-maker-onto-an-snes-live-on-stage/)

~~~
Klathmon
I'm on mobile and don't have a link right now, but there was a guy a while
back that did a TAS speedrun of I think Pokemon red/blue, and got a full RCE
exploit to work, rewrote the cartridge to the play the opening to the next
game in the series (Pokemon gold), and after playing that for a bit hit the
endgame credits of the first game breaking the world record at the time.

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nwhatt
Summoningsalt has really raised my respect for speed runners. His narrative
ability is top notch as well. I wonder what his day job is.

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reustle
Agreed. I'm always impressed with the production quality of his videos, he
clearly spends a lot of time on them. He even has a google doc linked in the
description to all the songs he uses in each video.

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krispbyte
That's probably because in every Youtube video ever, there's always someone
asking what's the song in the background. I think it should be recognized as
law akin to Godwin's law, the Darud Sandstorm's law.

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hobs
I think this might be the minting of an eponymous law, or at the very least,
one I will attribute to you in the future.

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Theodores
How does it feel if you are a developer and people devote their lives to your
creation?

Particularly if you spent weeks making it and people have spent years playing
with it?

Then how does it feel if millions of people play?

Game developers are kind of cut out of the story. It would be nice to have
their take on the story, to hear what they have been creating whilst others
have merely played.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I know John Romero of id software fame is (still, after 25 years) a big fan of
a lot of the Doom community's output and I see his comments and likes popping
up on speed runs, mods, fan art etc.

I even had a very brief conversation with him on Instagram after posting a
Doom-related photo which was very cool considering he was one of my childhood
heroes.

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nayuki
Along the same topic, this YouTuber made a fantastic video explaining the
Mario Kart 64 Choco Mountain shortcut: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y99Wj-
NStok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y99Wj-NStok)

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xt00
I start listening: Nintendo wii.. hmm old.. Mario kart.. ok cool.. Speed
running with short cuts.. hmm ok esoteric but sure I’ll give it a shot..
Interesting historical narrative about this random corner of the internet
subculture.. hmm cool! Listened to the whole thing.. well done!

~~~
tempestn
Yeah, I didn't expect to watch a 30+ minute video on Mario Kart speedruns, but
I sure did!

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CaliforniaKarl
I think it’s a really interesting video, talking about race game programming
(in the constrained environment of a game console), and how people manage to
reverse-engineer it to discover some extremely large shortcuts.

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ourmandave
Is there also a video on how to defeat Blue Shells?

Because I would pay cash money for that info.

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VHRanger
Depends on the game. In some I think it's not possible, in others it's a frame
perfect trick

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Sir_Cmpwn
Note: frame perfect means that the opportunity only exists during a specific
frame of a game, in other words within a specific moment at the rate the game
displays discrete images. Nearly all older games (and most newer games) have
their rendering code and logic code running in lockstep, so frames are not
just discrete graphical events, but discrete ticks of the universe simulation
as well.

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huntie
It's really interesting to see how broken Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Wii are
compared to Mario Kart Double Dash. MKDD has only two out-of-bounds glitches
that I know of; one on Waluigi Stadium and one on Bowser's Castle.

The Waluigi Stadium one is quite easy, requiring you to ramp off of a while at
the right angle getting you high enough to enter the OOB zone for a later part
of the track.

The Bowser's Castle OOB requires you to be hit with a blue shell right after
the finish line, so it can't be used in time trials. The world record manages
to get hit twice, and it's pretty nuts[1].

[1] [https://youtu.be/3hb2RH2tpWo?t=285](https://youtu.be/3hb2RH2tpWo?t=285)

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bleuarff
I've spent god knows how many hundreds of hours on this game and had no idea
such tricks existed. I'm impressed by the dedication some guys put into
understanding the mechanics and trying to break them.

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cyborgx7
The takeaway for me is to not overcomplicate things when developing software.
The reason all these shortcuts work is because they use weird esoteric rules
for when you can hit a checkpoint. All of this could have been prevented by
simply making it so that you can only hit a key shortcut if the last key
shortcut was the one before it. I'm sure they had reasons to make the choices
they did at the time, but they are inscrutable to me now.

~~~
ghusbands
Your suggested system is basically the same as in Mario Kart, but without
accounting for players moving backwards. As evidenced by your comment, it's
not trivial to come up with a problem-free solution.

Further, no programmer makes perfect decisions all the time. The system they
used wasn't that overcomplicated and is similar to many racing games. The
description in the video makes it sound slightly more complicated than it
really is.

The differentiating bug here is that they allow the player to go from key
checkpoint 0 to the last key checkpoint without, at that point, decrementing
the internal lap counter, instead decrementing that only when you pass
backwards over the finish line.

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cyborgx7
Why would it have to account for people going backwards? All you want to check
is if people have driven through them all, isn't it?

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ghusbands
Drive through all the key checkpoints, drive backwards to the start line, get
credited for a complete lap. Not likely to be useful, but still a bug.

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cyborgx7
At that point, just give them the lap.

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Waterluvian
"doesnt have to do with gameplay ... It has to do with the game's mechanics."

What is gameplay if it's not mechanics?

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berbec
My understanding:

Mechanics are "when I jump, I get X feet off the ground", "I accellerate at Y
feet per second" etc.

Gameplay is "I want to run and jump on to that block".

