Figured out the hardware discrepancy: it's lag. Not a solution, just some more information.

⚠️FLASHING LIGHTS WARNING⚠️

It would be nice if we had some sort of precedent to reference, but I can't think of any examples of a game that 1) has a glitch that dramatically alters the game's physics, 2) has an IL leaderboard, 3) is only faster with the glitch on some ILs but not others, and 4) has variegated glitch effectiveness between devices. Bonus points if the glitch can't be conveniently turned off. I was thinking of comparing to Melee and Elden Ring, but their glitches are always faster. The closest example I can think of would be Betsrighter and crouch-fly in Portal 2, with crouch-fly maybe being the best analogy to blue glitch.

I'll wait for approval first, but I want to go ahead and implement the filter in the meantime. It'll give everyone a chance to try it out and give me a way to track down all relevant runs later if I need to.

Just to note: playing on a specific version of a game is extremely common in speedrunning (The first example that comes to mind is Portal) Downloading an older version on mobile is easy, although you lose your save file in the process.

@Petit_Saturne: What are these "rules" that are being changed?

The reason I disallowed the World 7 glitch was because all it does is break the results screen. Your best time recorded in the game's memory is still tracked properly, and anyone watching the run can see how much time each room took. It's more similar to glitches in Mario Kart 64 that show a time of 0 seconds on the initial results screen but never get saved to memory.

Regarding the PC discrepancy, we already have a filter for platforms that can separate them from mobile runs.

@retro6892 I should point out that there are hardware differences between mobile devices, but is it confirmed this glitch doesn't work on PC?

One more problem with making a separate category is the novelty of the glitch. Because the glitch is so new, we don't fully understand how much time it saves — or loses — throughout the course of the game. Calling it game breaking enough to warrant its own category — on the level of sm64 star door skips, wrong warps, or even intended mechanics that cut out large chunks of a game — seems both premature and an exaggeration of its potential as we currently understand it. (It also doesn't change the objective in any way, so that argument would'nt work). We also know fairly conclusively it's slower in many levels, and this is a game with a prominent focus on IL records.

More personally, I don't like the idea of having to jump between categories when trying to submit my own speedruns, since I'll always want to do so on the faster category whenever I can.

Tags are what are used for filtering. If you select "Filters" on a board, you'll have a number of options to toggle such as platform performed on, emulator usage, and obsoletion. The idea is to add a tag for the blue glitch for filtering. We'd likely use the same options as emulator: Hidden, Shown, Exclusive.

The issue with a blanket ban on all glitches is that runs that have them, like 1-4 and 2-1, would still be in competition with the blue glitch. And that's assuming we can come to a decision on what counts as a glitch (one of the main reasons I personally dislike glitchless and NMG categories). I think a better idea would be to isolate just the blue glitch as a separate category and not have a true glitchless one.

The other problem is that this is a small speed game with a lot of ILs. Making a separate category would mean creating 266 more leaderboards that will mostly go unused, especially with the hardware dependency.

Third, the glitch does not save time in all levels. Separating the leaderboards would force anyone who only wants the fastest strats, like me, to have to look at two boards instead of one.

The idea I've considered is adding the blue glitch as a filter. That way runs with and without it can exist on the same leaderboard for easy comparison and better organization, but can also be separated with a toggle for those that want it.

It seems the hookshot disables geometry collision.

Well, I was able to replicate this, but I'm not sure what to do with this information.

Anytime I've ever needed to practice a trick, I would just work on it in whatever level the trick is in — sometimes in story mode to skip the previous rooms. Otherwise, it shouldn't be difficult to recreate an obstacle yourself in the level editor, especially if it's static. If you mean the wall spikes, you can just make a wall, place some spikes on it, then put a checkpoint below for quick healing.

If you want a practice map for other tech, Bghty has a discord link in a video description, but it's more of an obstacle course than something for practice drills.

If you were messing with the level editor at all, it was the exact same glitch. I made a follow-up video on it, but in short it only removes abilities and changes the theme to World 1.

I can understand the logic behind making sub-categories, but doing so to create a separate leaderboard for one single run is, in my opinion, a little silly. Not to mention this glitch has already been reported and will likely be patched out in the future. Even if it's not, this wouldn't be the first instance where a version difference could have split the leaderboard but didn't. There's also the option of downloading an older version of the game and running that in the meantime (the IL rule of needing to play on the latest release is an artifact from before speedrun mode that could potentially be removed). Suffice to say it's far too soon for discussion on complicating the leaderboard.

I've confirmed the glitch was introduced in version 1.2.12 and is not present in 1.2.11 (or at least is not so easily encountered). Looking over the patch notes again I found "Fixed minor visual glitch related to the Companion" which may or may not be relevant. There are of course the unspecified "Other improvements/fixes." Still unsure how to avoid it.

The run on the leaderboard was performed on an older version of the game: 1.2.11. I believe the relevant patch note afterwards is "Fixed cat being able to take damage during a room transition" for 1.2.12. This fixed a related issue we had in World 3 but may have inadvertently created a worse problem in 8. As for why that world specifically, I would assume it's because of the Companion. I'll look into it more later.

After some testing, this glitch no longer works to the extent it did and therefore cannot be used to save time.

Awhile back, I discovered a glitch wherein I removed the cloud ability from 2-3 using the level editor (). I've since come to the realization this could potentially be used to give or take abilities in any room in the game, potentially multiple rooms at once. I wanted to get some feedback on whether this would be too game-breaking to be allowed, especially since it involves manipulating the game outside of normal play. Of course this assumes it saves time like I think it will. My personal take is to allow it since everything is done in-game, and it's not unlike other games' menu strats like Portal 2's SLA or title screen RNG manip in SMB1 (and many others I'm forgetting or unaware of) that are allowed. However, I wanted to get others' opinions first before trying to implement it.

Are there any tools or resources that can be used to learn more about this game and how it works? I think it would be beneficial for discovering new strats and better understanding old ones, but don't have the means myself.