SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom it may be one of the most unlikely video games of all time, a licensed project that turned out to be a great game and a worthwhile challenge for the speedrunning community. But the absurd does not stop here: Spongebob speedrunners recently discovered that messing up their Xbox discs could result in much better times, although the tactic could become obsolete in the near future.
A new YouTuber video and Spongebob speedrunner SHiFT details the findings of the community. Basically, mark the file Battle for Bikini Bottom the disc in a specific way interferes with the readability of the Xbox, which causes glitches between the game and the menu screen that greatly facilitate the realization of a “delay clip”, an important trick that allows players pass normally inaccessible barriers by overloading the game with an excessive pause.
The speedrunning community has been trying to optimize for a long time Battle for Bikini Bottom it runs alongside the hardware, cataloging the different versions of the Xbox hard drive to find out what the fastest load times are. The downside is that the faster the console accesses the game disc data, the harder it becomes to delay the clip. But by combining stained discs with the fastest hardware, serious gamers could theoretically have the best of both worlds.
Speedrunners are known to do some wild things to get past games faster. In addition to just playing for hours and hours, we’ve seen them crawl on the ground while in virtual reality, inject your own code to Super Mario World, even get involved with the Famicom putting it on a hob. I’m not quite sure where to classify myself sprinkling tomato sauce one Battle for Bikini Bottom drive in search of the best, but it’s definitely up there.
After further testing, however, it was found that this stain method was not reliable enough on its own, not to mention its poor way of ruining copies of an 18-year-old game. Some speedrunners have also come to the conclusion that delay clips rely too much on hardware inconsistencies to be considered a viable tactic or worth advancing.
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“It’s too much,” SHiFT explained during a Twitch broadcast last night. “You need something as fine as a scratch on the disk to make these things work, and we won’t damage our disks. That won’t happen. That’s ridiculous. And, as I said before, it’s not ethical to do that because the basic point of the speedrunning is about preserving a game ”.
SHiFT went on to explain the new developments at Battle for Bikini Bottom speedrunning can produce delay clips and therefore the need to screw up disks, obsolete anyway. By making the execution of the game legal from hard drives via Xbox soft programming, the community would be able to level the playing field by normalizing loading times across the board and disabling delay clips, eliminating frustration of looking for the perfect console with the perfect hard drive to make the technique difficult a little less.
There is not a single unifying body at the center of speedrunning, but rather a disparate collection of separate scenes that do most of their own work. Battle for Bikini Bottom players will need to come together and figure out what’s best for them while balancing frustrating mechanics and accessibility to newcomers. At the very least, we now know that spreading discs with tomato sauce is (probably) off the table.