Weirdest Snailiad glitch + rules suggestions
3 years ago
Latvia

I just found a new glitch in Snailiad, and boy is it a weird one... So you might know this bug in the game where if you press "escape" just as you reload from a checkpoint, it freezes the game. That itself isn't anything very interesting, but when you reload the page and load the game from the last chekpoint, you may notice that you don't spawn on top of the checkpoint as usual, but instead appear just next to it on the right side, which also makes you not trigger the chekpoint. When you now reload again, you move even more to the right! And when you do it again, and again... Well, you might guess what happens. Here's a video I made:

You can also go into walls and through closed doors with this glitch, but going through "illegal" places will not end so well – you'll be stuck in an endless dying loop that will also softlock the game, which can be escaped by reloading the page and loading the game from Snail Town.

This glitch can not only be used to go through doors(which can also be done with zipping), but also for saving a lot of time. You might know that when you reload from the last checkpoint, the game also rewinds the time back to the exact moment you last touched the checkpoint(or collected an item). That means that every time you reload in this glitchy state, no matter how far you've travelled from the checkpoint or how much time you've spent, the game time will always reload to the moment when you touched the checkpoint. So you can, for example, slowly move all the way to the other side of the first room in Mare Carelia and your time will be the same as when you touched the checkpoint. The same can be done with the first two rooms in Spilaris Silere.

However, I think this glitch should be banned from regular glitched runs for these three reasons:

  1. Pragmatic reasons – it is very annoying to perform as it requires a lot of time but almost no skill. It would also make the gap between the Game Time and Real Time much, much bigger. If we allowed this glitch, to achieve the best possible time, runners would have to spend multiple minutes just reloading the game almost every attempt.
  2. Technical reasons – to do this glitch, you have to crash the game and reload the page. Although it isn't specified for Snailiad, I think doing these things on a speedrun of a game is pretty questionable(it is, for example, not allowed to crash or restart the game in Celeste speedruns).
  3. Rule that I think should be implemented – it should be forbidden to reload from the last checkpoint without collecting anything in the middle. Right now, you are technically allowed to keep restarting from the last checkpoint until you do the segment to the next checkpoint perfectly, which won't cost you more time as each restart rewinds the game time back to when you first reached that checkpoint(if you haven't collected anything in the middle). I think it's quite obvious that this is what practising a speedrun usually looks like, not actually performing it, so although probably nobody would do this anyway, it wouldn't hurt to add an official rule that forbids doing this in Snailiad speedruns. The only exception to this rule could be reloading from the checkpoint just as you touch it to refill the hearts, which Lucas McCallum does in his speedruns.

To wrap this up, I would like you to read this reddit post by Bismuth where he scores speedrunning Snailiad in different categories: https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/2aoe7o/how_would_you_score_your_games_in_different/cixukaw/ Although this post is very old, I still find it very informative and mostly accurate, except for the glitch part ;) Moreover, in the glitch section he says: "There are no proper glitches that I know of, except from crashing the game by pressing escape on the first frame when you start the game (fun fact: this is not useful for speedruns)." Well, guess what, you'll never know what can turn out to be useful for speedruns!

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Beanofan likes this
England

I agree, it should probably be banned. Re-loading you game in the middle of a run should not be allowed, however re-loading your save without collecting anything might be annoying if you click the wrong button in the menu (Re-loading from save point when meaning to go to snail town or the other way round) as that would mean you can't just re-load your save to correct the mistake and the run would be dead. However, exploiting the reloading to keep retrying a section defiantly should be banned.

dimusnail likes this
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