Another glitch: Use your Wings frame perfect while buying an item in a store. This will also make it impossible to play. I guess most of these glitches are useless huh.
Combine glitches: Use the ring glitch to bring slimes indoors. Then get another frame perfect death glitch on the slimes as you leave the room! You'll be on the overworld, and able to roam around without anything attacking you. But also you can't enter doors so...
Here's a new one: Get two boomerangs: Throw a boomerang and then buy a boomerang while it's still in the air. You'll be able to carry 2. You can still only have 1 on the screen at a time.
I ended up looking at every single indoor room. Unfortunately I didn't see any feasible way to not get stuck in a wall. And that's even considering if there is some way to recover from the Death/Warp state and back into normal gameplay.
For now, the only thing that seems useful is the Ring transition, as it lets you carry enemies between screens. That could be useful for a buffer overflow attack, though my guess is such a thing would be TAS only.
Example of death transition in a staircase. You can now walk south, and find a different NPC room. Unfortunately you can't walk any farther as you will be stuck in a wall and unable to use your items anyway...
There are a few known glitches. Try these combos: Use: a Ring, Wings, or otherwise die. When: entering a staircase or door, or when defeating a boss, or going underwater.
Dying seems to cause you to no longer trigger enter/exit triggers, but you can still scroll by walking. This can let you exit a building to get to garbage terrain. Possibly an interesting exploit
Using wings during a transition seems to set you to be in a "warping" state, which more or less makes you intangible and unable to scroll the screen. This is probably useless.
Using a ring while in a transition will carry the monsters to the next screen with you! This also looks potentially like a promising technique.
what is the best way to determine the number of Key Guardians for each stage?
Play using BizHawk emulator with the Hex Editor on, and you can see the RAM values directly.
I think each stage might be a slightly different memory address, but very close together. I forget now. There is a number you need to hit, and a number that you have. It should be right around 0x419-0x41B at least on stage 1.
But yes, you need exactly 4 key guardian kills on stage 1. The path I show above kills the 4 closest guardians in the fastest order. If you follow this path, it will always drop a key on the same enemy every time.
I didn't check how many kills you need on chapter 4, but mind you that normal/hard mode might change the numbers.
The record holder uses an "undocumented pause feature" to give immediate access to the final boss. This is known as a developer "debug" feature to help them test the game.
In other words: it's a cheat, and cheats are not allowed in most any% runs.
On hard mode, if it matters:
In level 2: Jellyfish and Mermen are the guardians. Kill 3
L3: Skeletons and Crocs: Kill 8
My suggested path in level 1:
Go right and kill the skeleton (1)
Drop down and go left to kill a goblin (2)
Go right and kill a goblin (3)
Go Up Right and kill a skeleton (4)->Pick up key
Now go to exit.
These 4 are the best located enemies. Note that compared to the current WR, this swaps (2) and (4) which reduces backtracking.
Guides for this game say that dropping the key is random, but actually it isn't random.
In truth, the game uses memory address 0x41B to track how many Key Guardians you've killed. It uses memory address 0x419 to track how many Key Guardians you need to kill before a key is dropped.
On the first level, you must kill 4 key guardians. It doesn't matter what order you kill them in. The 4th will always drop the key.
On the first level, the key guardians are the Green Skeletons, or the Orange Goblins. Regardless of what else you kill, or how much frame delay, the only thing that effects key drop is the guardians killed. You can tell they are key guardians, because unlike every other unit, these do not respawn when re-entering the screen, and killing them increments 0x41B.
This mechanic doesn't seem to be recorded in any of the FAQs. Now that you know about it, you can route your levels based on the locations of the key guardians and always have reproducible results. Note that some guardians only appear when entering a screen from a specific direction.
For example, in the first level, if you drop into the first pit, there is no goblin. But if you go to the right and then quickly turn back to the left, the goblin will appear.
If you let the woodpecker peck you, you can get 2/3 jumps midair. I'm not sure it's useful, just wanted to share.
Why is the top listed time called "Cheat %"?
Any% is generally assumed to be without cheats...
In level 2, can you clip through the gate, instead of saving the hostages? I saw there is a gate clip on the amazon level, so, could it work perhaps?
The PSX game needs it's own category, because it's a totally different game. It's 3D, not 2D.
The GBA game is entirely different and probably needs it's own category.
I tried routing the first level. If you decide to skip certain tricks, then you can end with a 16 on the clock. I didn't fully optimize the TAS, so I'm not sure if RTA would be able to get 16 or not. But 15 seems pretty doable.
There are some raindrop guides on right walls, but how do you do it on left walls (i.e. like in the Hell Temple Hard Mode run)?
Getting into a battle while walking through a door allows you to bypass the door trigger. This might allow for many interesting out-of-bound glitches, as well as wrong-warps.
Does the OOB clip not work on N64? I would think you'd have less loading times, and could easily get sub 15 as a result?
