missingno

missingno, 2 days ago

If you're in the mood for a 5h22m documentary (big if, I know, but for those of you who are into this sort of thing), Bismuth's The Complete History of the A Button Challenge is phenomenal.

For the longest time, the biggest obstacle to a full 0x 70 star run was Bowser in the Fire Sea. 70 star routing can just pick out 70 stars that don't need A presses, skip the ones that do, but Bowser levels are required to beat the game (the sequence breaks used in true any% would require pressing A to Backwards Long Jump). In this level Mario has to climb a pole and press A to dismount.

Five years ago, a glitch was found with how the Wii Virtual Console handles floating point rounding. If you enter the level and leave the console on overnight, moving platforms will slowly drift upwards as floating point errors propagate, eventually getting Mario to the top of the level without having to climb that pole. Now we had proof that 0x is possible.

AFAIK there weren't any new discoveries that went into this run since then, someone just had to pick out 70 stars that were humanly viable and then sit down and do the full run. But it's still a huge achievement to see that full run finally happen!

ABC is far from over though, a full 120 run still requires 13 A presses, and uses a lot of TAS-only tricks that a human will never do. Some of these may be saveable if new discoveries are found. That pole relies on Wii VC, while three A press saves in Tick Tock Clock rely on JP 1.0 which is only on console, so a different glitch that works on N64 would be the holy grail. You may have also heard memes about "half A press notation", referring to a few stars that require the A button to be held down - since other stars still require A presses, you just keep the button held down afterwards without having to press it again, but if all other A presses were saved these would still be another barrier preventing true 0x 120.

missingno, 2 days ago

Many still are, but 70 star offers a lot of flexibility in routing to just pick the stars that are RTA-able.

I'm curious what the A count for RTA 120 could be. TAS is 13x, but humans will need more.

missingno, 2 days ago

Pannenkoek does have a few videos documenting stars that can be beaten with No Joystick Allowed strats (these are old and there are more on the secondary UncommentatedPannen channel but I don't see a playlist compiling them). A full run is definitely not possible, but at least some stars are doable.

missingno, 4 days ago

I really miss the keyboard on my old Motorola Droid 2. Still wasn't any good for gaming honestly, but it's way better for typing than a touchscreen.

missingno, 5 days ago

Bear in mind that Kirby Air Ride came out in 2003, on a console that's only meant to be hooked up to CRTs. How many users back then do you think would've had access to this feature in the first place? Or would still be playing this game if/when they upgrade later?

missingno, 5 days ago

Gamecube doesn't have enough RAM to preload everything at startup like that, you have to go through the menus and pick a game mode and map to load.

Surely if it needed that startup load anyway, then Sakurai wouldn't be saying he turned the license down in order to get players in the game faster. I'm going to trust Sakurai's word here!

missingno, 20 days ago

Is that you?