SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom can be one of the most unlikely video games of all time, a licensed project that has proven to be both a great game and a useful challenge for the speedrunning community. But the absurd does not stop here: SpongeBob speedrunners recently discovered that the penetration of Xbox discs could lead to much better times, although the tactics could become obsolete in the near future.
A new YouTuber video and SpongeBob speedrunner SHiFT details the community’s findings. Essentially, marking Battle for Bikini Bottom the disc in a specific way interferes with Xbox’s ability to read it, resulting in hooks between the game and the menu screen, making it much easier to perform a “lag clip”, an important trick that allows players to remove barriers that are normally inaccessible by overloading the game with excessive pauses.
The speedrunning community has long tried to optimize The Battle for Bikini Bottom runs on the hardware side, cataloging the different versions of the Xbox hard drive to find out which offers faster load times. The downside is that the faster the console accesses the data on the game disc, the harder it becomes to delay the clip. But by combining dirty disks with the fastest hardware, serious gamers could theoretically have the best of both worlds.
Speedrunners are known to do some wild things to beat games faster. Besides the fact that we played for hours, I saw them they crawl on the floor while in virtual reality, enter your own code in Super Mario World, and even mess with Famicom putting it on a hob. I’m not sure where to go sprinkling ketchup on a Battle for Bikini Bottom drive looking for the best, but it’s definitely up there.
However, after other tests, it was found that this method of dirt is quite unsafe, not to mention a bad way to go around destroying children of an 18-year-old game. Some speedrunners have also come to the conclusion that delay clips depend 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 stream last night. “You need something as good as a scratch on the disk to make these things work and we will not defame our disks. That just won’t happen. It’s ridiculous. And, as I said, it’s unethical to do that, because the whole point of speedrunning is to keep a game. ”
SHiFT went on to explain that the new developments in The Battle for Bikini Bottom speedrunning could make lag clips and therefore the need to screw up with obsolete disks anyway. By legalizing the game from running hard drives via Xbox software, the community could level the playing field by normalizing board loading times and the impossibility of delay clips, eliminating the frustration of finding the perfect console with the hard drive. perfect to make the extraction of the difficult technique a little smaller.
There is not a single unifying body at the center of speedrunning, but rather a different collection of detached scenes that do their own thing for the most part. The Battle for Bikini Bottom players will have to come together and figure out what’s best for them, while balancing frustrating mechanics and accessibility for newcomers. At least we know now that greasing their ketchup discs is (probably) off the table.