Mario Kart Wii: The History of the Ultra Shortcut [video] | Hacker News Reader

Mario Kart Wii: The History of the Ultra Shortcut [video]

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169 pointsCaliforniaKarl31 comments

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

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

OMG, mind blown by the assembly code manipulation in the credits warp! Thank you for linking this

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The problem is that Japanese developers are not exactly easy to get a hold of. The biggest speed games are Mario and Zelda titles (and among those it's especially the older ones). There are speedruns with developer commentary [1] but it's mostly for western indie games.

[1] http://gdqvods.com/category/developer-commentaries/

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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

Because I would pay cash money for that info.

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

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.

for MK:Wii, use a mushroom just as blue shell briefly gains height before smashing down on you.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

At that point, just give them the lap.

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

What is gameplay if it's not mechanics?

Gameplay is to mechanics as features are to implementations.

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".

To me "game mechanics" refers more to the game engine and other implementation details.

Gameplay is the effect, mechanics is how its implemented. There can be many different ways of implementing the same effect.

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