Mario gains a few new powers as he glitches his way to a date with the princess and some delicious cake.
A team of five speedrunners have beaten the seminal 3D platformer Super Mario 64 in a little over five minutes. What’s more, they only fought Bowser three times, and didn’t pick up even one solitary star along the way.
Much like the Portal speedrun from last month, the team makes extensive use of glitches. For example, in certain places, Mario is able to vibrate through walls by skidding backwards on his butt, or race through levels by making one-in-a-million jumps that skip huge sections. The team also uses tricks to get Mario moving faster than the developers intended him to, in order to save time.
This isn’t an astounding triumph of human reflexes though, because the run is what’s called a “Tool Assisted Speedrun,” meaning that a computer did all the actual playing, and the team just told it what to do. That’s not to say that just anyone could have done this, just that the team’s skill wasn’t in moving Mario around, but figuring out how to save time on the run. Every frame was worth saving, and the team’s time of 5 minutes and 4.57 seconds was an impressive 24.17 seconds faster than the previous record. You can read about the run in greater detail here. It’s quite technical, and a little idiosyncratic, but it’s interesting all the same.
Source: via Joystiq
