You wanted to get past the gap on the way to fight Screetch? Well, this does the trick:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1016084028019970048

However... it is not quite as useful as we'd hoped. In fact, it's not really useful at all - you still have to fight the boss, except now it's glitched and impossible to complete.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1016084208714899456

Nevertheless: we can cross Skreetch Gap off the list. Maybe someone will find a use for it yet.

Now I'm off to test my theory for how to get into Kazoo's Cave without the leash thing.

I'm not a runner myself, EinKoopa - I just like finding glitches/shortcuts. Have you been working on a new run?

I'll look around the Unders to see what I can find. In the meantime (though I'm not sure how useful it is), I've found an Early-Underground shortcut:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1015378622402531328

BTW, I use the shove-it off of the first ledge after the rails which gives you juuuuust enough time to make it to the right spot. But again, unless there is a big re-route, this isn't all that useful - and even then, without first visiting the village and getting the goal markers, the current route is more efficient.

What might come to be useful, however, is a trick I've found involving the hut-covered "down" bumpers (no, not the trick used in Ivory Peaks): by alternating left and right inputs (or vice versa) quickly, you can not only super-bump a faster, farther, higher jump, but you can also clip through the environment:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1015381845146386432

Maybe if we do this in some area that has a predetermined "out" (maybe some of those used for scripted sequences or region-spanning beeline travel) we can move more quickly between areas. At the very least, it's fun to play around with :)

Hello, all! I've been keeping up with everyone's runs trying to find ways to trim even more time off of the current routes, and I'm happy to announce that I have two new skips that should trim about 30 seconds. I've also found a couple of cool out of bounds that I want to share, despite the fact that thus far I haven't been able to do much with them.

But anyway, the time saves: both are used in the thermal gates past the Skulls Hideout. The first involves the impassable thermal wall; well...

https://twitter.com/i/status/1014696807366979584

...it's not so impassable anymore. And using this strat, you'll end up on the second or third spinny-wheel platform just before whatshisname. Well ,I've got a new strat for that, too (disregard the fact that in this video I've activated the second blasto tube).

https://twitter.com/i/status/1014697015333158913

As you see here, using a mid-air quick turn gets you enough air to land the tube with no problem.

Now, as for the other things I've found, they aren't useful - yet. Nevertheless, they're cool. The first is a neat bypass on the east side of the Skulls Hideout. By using a quick momentum boost from quick turning you can land over the heads of the skulls waiting at the mouth of the hideout.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1014699642431234048

What does this let us do? Well, it turns out that it allows us to make use of a second potentially viable glitch involving the beeline - and more to point a specific one of the launchers.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1014700437230850048

For whatever reason, the beeline is allowing the player to control its direction prior to entering it, allowing the player to launch themselves (by jamming L or R prior to contact) in a direction of his choosing. Now, though it doesn't do much good here, I predict that if we are able to get the launch to happen straight up, we might be able to reach Snowy Peaks. Is that useful? I guess it depends on how high we get.

(It's perhaps worth mentioning that I've gotten this trick to work in the village too; it seems that anytime the game predicts that you are going to fall into a launch, the player gets to control its direction.)

Finally, I want to show off one last awesome, but thus-far useless trick. Once exiting the Skulls Hideout via the east exit (before or after the boss), we can slide underneath the nearest bee launcher, which results in the following:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1014702055271817216

Once we've bypassed the map boundaries, we can find a seam in the ground texture, which lets us fall/swim farther than we can normally.

At the very least, those of us who enjoy de-fogging the map beyond the developer's intentions can do so even more now:

Let's keep it up! I have a feeling we'll be down to 45m in no time!

I'm glad the strat seems to have some potential legs. When I wrote my original comment I was leaving for work so I left out some details.

1. When I refer to the rock climbers being in their "help us find stuff" state, this is only if you exit on the last stop of the Ivory Peaks beeline. Backtracking to earlier states will reset them; thusly, when you backtrack for the leash, they will return to their original "hello, this is our first time meeting you" state.

2. I'm not sure that skipping the ore section using my additional strat will be all that helpful. Perfectly executed, I think a flawless ore section will be faster than a flawless "village return/peaks return."

3. Fun fact: if you use the beeline skip to go to ivory peaks, backtracking toward the village lets you fall into the hole that you normally fix the bridge over, which is the same hole from the title sequence. The game seems to barely be able to handle reentering that sequence, but so far I haven't found any advantageous effects.

This is correct, I came here to say that this was the strat I am working with. You can go right to the top of Ivory Peaks that way, and it even results in the rock climbers being in their "help us find these items" state, but unfortunately you still have to climb back to the start of the zone to get the leash. So here's what I do: use the beeline to get to the peaks (the lone tree), hike over to the left, grab the leash, then progress.

However, I've also had a lot of success with adding even to this: after I grab the leash, I head back down away from the mountain to the slug you use to get up there, then I use it to blast off to the immediate left - this lands you in the other (I believe green) beeline, which you use to zip back to the village, then hop on the beeline one more time to get past the peaks chute and grab the leash.

I did it! I found a workaround on a frame-perfect, seemingly RNG-based skip in Chapter 8! And FINALLY I can post the guide and move on!!!!

:)

Neat! As anyone who's played DH:V will recognize, the canceled N64 game Die Hard 64 was an early draft of what would eventually become Die Hard: Vendetta.

I've included the link to the original forum of DH64's rom release. I've been looking forward to this release because I hope it might shed some light on a few of DH:V's own quirks, such as DH:V's odd quality of letting the player leap through the middle of previously opened double doors - but only from one side.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Regardless, the community has something extra to look at :)

https://assemblergames.com/threads/die-hard-64-rom.66646/

Hey, you know how it is. I teach and school has returned, so.

Anyway, I'm spending part of the weekend finishing my guides for DH:V, with my (hopefully) inspirational run posted shortly thereafter.

I know I've said that before. But I've been routing this silly game for a year, so from my end what's an extra month, right?

Thank you all for your continued support and interest. Beef and I are certainly looking forward to seeing your own runs and strats!

Have a nice labor day weekend!!!

Hmm. Good question. Does circumnavigating the DVD read cause shorter load times?

EDIT: My advice would be to compare your USB-loaded load time of DH:V against Beef's documented load times from a physical disc. Let's see if they match up.

I know, I know... it's been, like, a hundred weeks since my last guide, and we're still lacking my run. I took a trip to Colorado, and Chapter 8 is a real, real pain to get right. But the good news is you aspiring faster-than-me's will have lots of tricks to perfect! See you soon :)

Very good point on the individual levels, Beef, and it brings up an interesting issue involving chapter 7 -- as you can see in my guide, I actually use checkpoint restart in the chapter's opening moments to skip a 58 second forced dialogue. EDIT: So does that mean that such an exploit should be disallowed?

And yes, I am going to submit my run, I just wanted to get the guide out there at the same time :)

I mean, that sounds like fun to me! I think we can all agree that physical game + marathon/full game is the most legitimate run/WR, but having people experiment and compete in other categories simply increases DH:V's visibility. If you're down, I'm down :)

I have posted videos and speedrunning guides for chapters 1-3, and I hope to have the other chapter guides up by the middle of next week.

Please message the mods if you have any questions, or feel free to make a forum post here.

Have a nice weekend :)

You know, I had not timed the difference in loading, but that makes absolute sense. I agree that there should be separate leaderboards and that non-emulation would discourage new runners. It's also helpful because right now several of the exploits in a couple of the chapters are frame-perfect or seemingly RNG based, and being able to test quickly and repeatedly assists the runners of physical copies.

Thank you for modding me, friend :)

Oh that's so very cool! I'm almost done with the recording on my run, but I thought I'd go ahead and link you and the community to a strat for the first chapter, as well as introduce you all to a few of the glitches that I use.

SETTINGS: I change the GAME SETTINGS under the main title options to the following: Bullet Cam = no Then, when you start a new game, I change CONTROLLER SETTINGS to Turn Speed = Max, Motion Center = no

Here's the tech that I use in this chapter:

BODY JUMPS: McClane tends to jump at the edge of a surface; we use this to our advantage often (though in some chapters I negate the auto jump by holstering and walking backwards). However, it turns out that McClane will also auto-jump off of someone's head, too, which makes using bodies for boosting purposes quite easy to do.

URKEL SKIP: In this first chapter I use body jumps for a skip that I lovingly call URKEL SKIP. This skip involves forgoing the long forced dialogue with Al (the actor being from the TV show Family Matters, hence my use of the name Urkel) in order to open the door into the museum. Instead, I body jump off of the cop to the left of the door, which allows McClane to land on top of the man working on the door. Then I position McClane so that he is partially inside the door. It's at this point that I can use a variation of McClane's crouch-jump (to be discussed at a later date) to complete the skip. For this skip, you simply: A. get McClane partially inside the door as I have done here; B. hold jump, and if you've positioned McClane correctly, you'll see and hear him vibrate in the door; C. once you've started vibrating, you then hold crouch and push forward. With a little practice, you'll be through the door in no time, saving about a minute.

SOFT LANDING and DASHMAN SKIP When most people playing DH:V's first chapter cross the atrium (the large, open-ceiling, two-storied room with a statue and pool in the middle), they head downstairs and then get annoyed by the enemy who is scripted to run between the pillars at the bottom (I call him Dashman). We can negate this script by not using the stairs and instead jumping from the top floor to the bottom. However, in an effort to reduce fall damage, I have McClane jump down firmly onto the base of the statue. There are some irregular objects in the game that do not cause fall damage, and this statue's base is the first of several I use in my full run. Of note: McClane does not auto-jump off of this base, so you have to force the jump (what other games simply call "jump") in order to not waste time falling into the water. A potential optimization here would be to jump backwards once you've landed on the statue base. Regardless, you'll find Dashman in his corner awaiting a script that will never come.

The rest of this chapter is simply movement and reload optimization and enemy patterns. Now, this run is not as perfect as I'd like it to be -- for example, I would like to be able to one-cycle (one ammo clip) the final set of enemies just prior to rescuing the daughter (the eight standard enemies as you round the corner into the helicopter area just before the hostage battle). As is, I try to line up the first three enemies to conserve ammo, and I want to line up the two enemies on the raised platform, but they're a little trickier. If we came up with a reliable strat for shooting the hostage taker w/o wasting ammo on the flower pot to stun him, that would help immensely.

However, I think this will help the community begin practicing while I finish recording my run (it should be submitted to Beef by this weekend).

Thanks for reading!

Hi! I've spent the last year routing this game as an occasional hobby and having finally reached my goal per level last week I decided I would begin recording it. Now, that time is around the 50min mark, but it is using the Dolphin emulator (I have a physical copy and a Gamecube, but since I test each route/glitch in-hardware and since no one had claimed the game I thought that emulated runs would be acceptable while building a community). If you would be willing to allow emulators for even the short term you and I could collaborate on building a really strong set of runs and guides for this game. I have carefully documented the routes and exploits for each stage, and though the game isn't the best game ever, the movement tech, routing potential, and perfection of exploits could be really fun.

As you are the mod, I understand that your decision is final; however, I have put a lot of time and strategy into this game and I honestly believe that with a little flexibility the game could become pretty popular for speedrunning.

Thank you for your time :)