A super detailed, delightful glimpse (24′38) into the speedrunning / romhacking community, pushing the limits of videogame physics to where none of the original developers ever went in their worst nightmares. This guy finds and goes the most complicated way to save a half button press in Super Mario 64. My brain is fried. Impressive! Here’s the same video (5′25) without explanation and comments.
Why would someone do this? The author pannenkoek2012 answers: “Finally, I’d like to answer a question that I’ve been getting since the beginning, which is: Why? Why play the game with limited functionality? What’s the point of executing these complicated techniques when a simple A press would accomplish the same thing? Well, the answer is because it’s fun and interesting! Super Mario 64 has been a game that I’ve loved since my childhood, but over time the challenge of collecting the stars became too easy. So what’s left to do in the game after that? Well, invent your own challenges! If collecting the stars is too easy, then why not impose restrictions to make it harder? People have devised several of these challenges, such as: not pressing A, not pressing B, not pressing Z, not pressing any buttons, not pressing the joystick, not opening any cannons, not activating any caps, not collecting any coins, not touching the ground, even not having Mario make a sound. By imposing a restriction, it forces you to think in new and creative ways in order to find workarounds. That star that’s usually so trivial to collect? Now it requires an unintuitive and complex route that would have never been used otherwise. Out of all of the challenges, I find the A button challenge to be the most interesting, in that it has the most potential for creative workarounds. After all, the A button’s primary purpose is to jump. Since the programmers intended for Mario to jump during every mission, this means nearly every star will require some workaround. Furthermore, jumping is such a simple maneuver that many things can function as a substitute depending on the situation, which allows for a great diversity in creative workarounds. Lastly, the desire to save A presses has been beneficial for SM64 as a whole. That’s because in order to save A presses, new glitches have been discovered and certain game mechanics has been understood better, and these findings carry over to other areas of SM64 as well."
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