Hi everyone, I'm just documenting an edge case where you die at the end of BCP after killing the last animal. This happened in a run that was submitted, so it raises the question of if the run is completed.
My ruling is that the run is valid. For reasons discussed below. I am, in fact, supreme dictator of the SSSV speedrunning community and my word is law, so I don't care what you have to say about it. However, if you want to discuss it here or in the discord or wherever, that's fine.
When you die at the end of a level, you still complete the level. This can be reproduced easily in Swamp of Eternal Stench by walking the gorilla into the teleporter tree stump before gorilla jumping to the teleporter as Evo. Evo lands on the teleporter, completing the level, and takes fall damage, resulting in a death. When the level ends, Dan cries like you lost the level, but the level is marked as complete and you move on to the next level just as you would normally. So level completion apparently trumps death. Furthermore, the runner reported that re-entering BCP caused it to play out like it had been completed: with a "best time" displayed. For these reasons, I believe the level was completed and therefore the run was completed.
The runner deleted the file to start another run and could not confirm that the file select screen read "zones secured: 31", but I strongly suspect that it would have said 31 and not 30. This would be the ultimate proof but I don't think that's really necessary and I don't feel like trying to reproduce the thing because I'm lazy. Deal with it.
A fun side effect of the BCP death-completion is that apparently the game crashes instead of running the credits. The runner also reported that the game started freezing on Smashing Start, so maybe it broke the runner's cart too. Hooray!
It could be worth trying in a TAS hint Mcill you have a finished TAS to edit it on to see if there is a time difference because if it skips credits (like the glitch currently done does) and it isn't as frame perfect (but it could be) then it may be worth trying? Definitely is acceptable in other games, so why not ours.
Timing ends on the level complete jingle anyway, so any time save between the jingle and the start of the credits isn't counted. Rather than TAS it we could just watch the video and compare it with another run. It looks pretty much the same to me. TASing would just be to replicate and confirm that the death/victory thing actually happens, and maybe to explore possible repercussions of it from a game crashing perspective. I'm already confident that it happens and I don't have the know how to explore the implications, so I'll pass for now.
So this happened to me at the end of a run just a week ago. I looked at the file afterwards and everything points to the level having bee completed successfully:
"Bad Ending" but still an Ending so... Count it?
It's not like it can be done consistently at the moment.
