Hello and welcome back to episode 53 of RUSH:
Regular...ish… unofficial speedrun highlights!
We know it's been a while, but what better
time to return than when the whole world has
nothing better to do than to watch some of
the best speedruns of the past month?
We've got a lot to cover, so let's get straight
into it.
On February 9th, Eenox became the first person
to collect the golden strawberry on the Celeste
chapter 7 D-side, a ridiculously difficult
variant of chapter 7 created by community
member Monika.
Collecting golden strawberries involves completing
the entire level without dying once, which
took Eenox over 130 hours of gameplay from
beginning to end.
This achievement was outstanding, and his
reaction was entirely deserved.
[Eenox] "YEES!"
"YES!"
"YE-E-ES!"
"OH MY GOSH, YES!"
"I DID IT!"
"OH MY GOD…"
Eenox was also the first to complete the recently
released chapter 9 D-side by Monika, which
is easily the hardest level made for the game,
in 63 hours and 17 thousand deaths.
Celeste has also been gradually approaching
the 27 minute barrier in the Any% category.
TGH and Marlin have been grinding out new
personal bests and world records, with Marlin
currently holding the world record at just
729 milliseconds above the 27 minute barrier.
Super Mario Odyssey has also had several major
events in the past week.
First, a quick but important piece of news
is that the community has retimed every language
in the game and determined that the Chinese
language actually saves 3 seconds compared
to the Japanese in any% routes and other categories,
so all new runs are being performed on Chinese.
This isn't the first time that the community's
used Chinese, as it had been used for a short
time 2 years prior, until early testing seemed
to show that Japanese was faster.
This switch in language has only partially
contributed to the Any% record wars between
Mitch and Tyron18, with Mitch currently holding
the fastest time of 58 minutes and 33 seconds.
The Minimum Captures category has seen an
improvement from 10 captures to only 3 thanks
to several new discoveries.
The first was Pokio skip in Bowser's Kingdom,
which involved clipping out of bounds to avoid
the Pokio captures.
The rest were results of a massive discovery
that allowed the skipping of several wire
captures in the night version of Metro kingdom.
By sending Cappy far down under the map through
two player mode, then performing a backflip,
Cappy is placed roughly straight ahead from
where Mario is standing based on how far down
Cappy went.
From there, Cappy can activate a far away
checkpoint flag, and then Mario can instantly
warp to it from his map.
Plenty of controversy arose after this due
to the moderators of the Category Extension
leaderboards removing the minimal captures
category, but we'd prefer not to touch this
thorny topic.
What's important is that the category has
since returned, and the runners are free to
submit new minimum capture runs, though the
inclusion of new categories to the extended
leaderboards will be more carefully chosen
in the future.
The current world record is 3 captures in
1 hour and 34 minutes by CJYA2016.
Also in Odyssey, Mnyush has discovered the
Inverted Pyramid Skip, which uses precise
platforming and a wall clip to skip the inverted
pyramid in the sand kingdom, saving 38 seconds
in World Peace, and a few seconds in Darker
Side.
This trick has already been pulled off in
a Darker Side run by Dangers, although it
was done partially as a joke, as he had fallen
10 seconds behind from the Cascade Kingdom.
[Dangers] "What the fuck?"
It has also been done in the World Peace category
by two runners, with Lucidityy currently holding
the best time of 1:13:22.
The Super Mario Sunshine speedrunning community
has long argued about the roughly 6 minutes
worth of unskippable cutscenes at the start
of the game.
Runners are forced to sit through each cutscene
during every run and every reset, or atleast,
they used to be.
The community recently held another vote on
four different optional methods of starting
the game, and approved two of them.
Runners of any category may now start the
game from a Peach file, which starts gameplay
immediately after the F.L.U.D.D.
tutorial cutscene, or from a Hacked file,
which starts after the first Isle
Delfino cutscene.
To make these methods compatible with using
a standard save file, an offset of 2:30 and
5:40 are added onto the times of the Peach
file and Hacked file runs, respectively.
Ocarina of Time's leaderboards had some rule
changes due to the controversies caused by
the new ACE runs.
The mods agreed on splitting the ACE and No
ACE leaderboards, where Torje's historic sub
17 minute run still sits as the No ACE world
record.
The Any% leaderboards holds the ACE world
records, which any method of entering the
precise input needed to run the ACE exploit
is allowed.
Zudu currently holds the world record with
a time of 7 minutes and 48 seconds, which
won him the one thousand dollar bounty.
After the discovery of the barrier skip in
the original wind waker, bowserisbored discovered
a faster method of performing barrier skip
with a bomb push, as covered in the last episode,
and has continued finding new tricks in the
game.
Thanks to some of these new discoveries, Demon
was able to complete the first any% run in
under an hour with a time of 59 minutes and
43 seconds.
[Demon] "Holy fuck, ahaha."
"Oh my go-od."
[groan]
In The Elite Rankings, a leaderboard tracking
GoldenEye and Perfect Dark world records,
two 16-year-old records have been beaten in
the past month.
Eric Bergmann first beat Runway Agent in 21
seconds on February 18th, followed by Perfect
Ace earning a 24 second time on
WAR! Agent exactly 1 month later.
Perfect Ace has also taken the status of being
the champion of Perfect Dark with a total
of 28 world records, ending Karl Jobst's 4
year reign.
This has also made Perfect Ace a dual champion,
as he holds the most points and most world
records for the GoldenEye and Perfect Dark
combined leaderboards, so massive congratulations
to him for this stellar achievement.
If you're a fan of Summoning Salt's content,
then you'll know about the Weathertenko, a
ridiculously difficult trick on Choco Mountain
which completes a lap in under 10 seconds.
And if the trick is performed 3 times in a
row, you can score a time of under 20 seconds.
Abney was famously the first person to perform
this trick 3 times in a row, and remained
the only person to have completed this trick
for over 2 years.
However, in February, SmurfySR became the
2nd person to perform the trick 3 times in
a row, then followed by the infamous VAJ nine
days later, but neither were quite able to
take the record.
And if they want it, they'll have to try even
harder, as Abney swooped in at the start of
March to beat his own record by almost 2 seconds,
lowering it to a time of 14.60 on NTSC.
[Abney] "Oh my god!"
[exhale]
[laughing]
We've covered a lot of runs today and we still
have more to cover, but we wanted to shout
out some of the great runs from the past month
that we couldn't cover in detail.
So, for today's rapid fire runs, we have [inhale]
Paper Mario in 1 hour 39 minutes by imglower,
A Hat in Time by Enhu in 36 minutes 7 seconds,
Undertale neutral category by Shayy in
55 minutes and 37 seconds,
Majora's Mask in 25 minutes
15 seconds by raggen,
Super Mario 64 with 16 stars in 15 minutes
and 3 seconds by Slipperynip,
and Celeste with all red berries in 47 minutes 12 seconds by buhbai.
[applause]
[exhale]
[applause]
[applause]
Well, that was all one take.
I hope I don't give Lexi too much of a headache
with editing that.
In speedrunning-adjacent news, Joseph Saelee
was the first person to reach level 33 in
NES Tetris last year, but he has now become
the first to reach level 34, clearing 284 lines.
High Tetris levels are hard to reach due to
the game becoming near unplayable because
of the pieces falling faster than any ordinary
person could handle.
The game was never supposed to get this high,
as proven by the glitched level counter, but
Joseph was able to bring the game well past
its limits in this staggering run.
[Joseph] "Oh my god!"
"Oh-oh yes!"
"Ohoho, woo!"
"284?"
"284! Oh yes!"
"Oh my god!"
"Oh my god…"
In the Tool Assisted Speedrunning community,
two massive new TASes have recently come out:
Sonic Heroes by Malleo and THC98, which is
destroyed through out of bounds trickery and
flight, and an updated Donkey Kong 64 TAS
by RingRush, with a new method of clipping
into walls by manipulating Donkey Kong's angle,
and using other tricks explained in the companion
video made by Bismuth, which we highly recommend
watching.
Lastly, the COVID-19 outbreak has caused some
speedrunning events to get cancelled or suddenly
moved, such as the QuickCade II event nearly
being cancelled due to the Red Bull Venues closing.
Luckily, the organizers and community members
found another venue in less than 24 hours.
We encourage you to seek out runners and watch
the runners featured today, their links
are in the description as always, to help
give them some support as they may be needing
it right now, and also to help keep you entertained
during these breaks.
For example, the Multi-Mario 1120 race just
took place on March 21st, where runners played
Super Mario Odyssey All Moons, Super Mario
Sunshine 120 shines, and Super Mario 64 120
stars all in a row.
Anyways, that's all the time we have for you
today.
Thank you to Willis Greyman, troyofathens,
Spiker, and Podz for helping with the researching
and fact checking on this episode.
This has been Blake, I'd like to thank you
all for watching, and I hope you all stay safe.
