Hey guys, a post was made here a while ago and then disappeared asking for a solution to an issue with a particular cutscene that was buggy and had a chance of being unskippable or having a particular inconsistent issue.
I didn't save it while it was up, but I was wondering if anyone had any video/better knowledge of the issue that might be making it harder to run. I'd like to see if I can replicate the issue and if its something that is worth trying to find a work around to make it easier for runners.
Hi. Sorry that was me who posted about it. I then felt a bit stupid about bringing up such a minor issue so I deleted it.
So yes this happens on the PS2 / PSN version of the game for me. I'm not sure about the GC version. The cutscene occurs when you enter the level "Bear's Path", which is the fourth and last level of the forest zone.
Crashes, in general, occur when you try to skip any of the cutscenes of this game, however this one is a bit of an issue because you'll have already completed 3 levels if it happens, so it's quite stressful especially when you feel like you've got a good flow going.
The PS2 version is the absolute worst about it. It does seem to crash the majority of the time for me. I used to chalk this up to me having a bad disk, but when I got the PSN version I found that it happened quite often too. Not nearly as much, but about 10% of the time.
It's an awkward issue because the likelihood of a crash seems to depend on two factors: how long you watch the cutscene for before you press X, and pure luck. If you watch it for five seconds then it's far less likely to crash when you skip it. It still might, but it's not as likely. However, skipping immediately will nearly always result in a crash. I tend to wait one second for Merlock to say "Well..." and then skip. This isn't foolproof but it gets me by most of the time. I've never had it crash if I watch it entirely, although this doesn't happen often I'll admit.
My concern was about whether we should discount the cutscene time entirely from runs? Mainly because I wouldn't want the game to dissolve down to "who is brave enough to press X the soonest for the level 4 cutscene?". Instead maybe let runners watch it all, so that there is no risk of the crash... or... I'm not really sure tbh. It's not the end of the world for me if we just leave things as they are to prevent a fuss, it's just something I wanted an opinion on.
Also it could just be me having faulty hardware. I doubt it, but i've only experienced this myself so I can't rule it out.
Its all good Marsh! If its that frequent of a problem I definitely think its worth looking into. I happen to have the PS2 version so I shall try to replicate the crash. If you have some footage of it that would also be great!
Given that it happens on both of your versions I doubt it would be faulty hardware, but I want see if I can replicate it just to be sure. The change in likely hood of a crash between the PS2 and PSN versions of the game, to me, seems like an error with loading. Since the PS2 isn't exactly known for having the best load times and it seems the longer you wait the less likely the crash.
I wouldn't want the major time save of the category being whether or not your game randomly crashes on a cutscene either. I'm sure if we needed to we could cut the time from the beginning of the cutscene to the end of it out of the run, but I would like to verify the problem first before we jump to it. Since we would need to manually retime all the runs.
If anyone else runs these versions or the gamecube version and have experienced this it would be great if you could say so in this thread. Any footage of it would be great as well.
Thanks for getting back!
I can probably get some footage later today of the PSN crashes, but I might have to upload them tommorow.
Hopefully we can work something out about it.
Here's a clip of the crash happening on PSN. I only had to try twice for this to happen:
Its a little late, but I did finally get around to testing it. I did three new files and got to the same point on the ps2 ntsc version of the game running on a slim ps2 and each time I was able to successfully skip the cutscene immediately without crashing. I'll give it a few more attempts, but if anyone else has the game, especially the pal version, I would like to see if you have the same error or not. For me, I would press x to skip the cutscene, it would cut to black followed shortly by the load screen.
