Sorry to spam videos but here are some cheesy strats for the crypts in episode 5. I still don't know how the dirt works (or if it's completely random), so this might be a strat that depends on RNG or close to RNG. Either way, this might still be useful. Also, I messed up crypt 3 pretty badly, but ideally you wouldn't have the statues break ever.
Even with the dirt ball damage, crypt 4 you won't get hit at all by dirt, so that one is nice.
This saves no time, but it also won't lose any time. So, it's just cheese strats to make it easy.
After timing stuff this should save somewhere between 1-2 seconds, its faster by just thinking the basic laws of navigation.. you can also sqaure boost to the balcony where Carmelita should come out from the window and GHJ on the rope.
And I timed some routes for ep 7 and it turns out that doing Bearcave Bugging before Laser Redirection is about 2.5 seconds faster with current transmitter routing (possibly 5 seconds faster if the transmitter phase can somehow be re-routed in order to end the mission to the 4th transmitter location).
Current route: Safe House --> Laser Redirection = 19.5 seconds Laser Redirection --> Bearcave Bugging = 5 seconds = 24.5 seconds in total.
Faster route: Safe House ---> Bearcave Bugging = 16 seconds. Transmitter 6 (current route) --> Laser Redirection = 6 seconds = 22 seconds in total.
How to do a 2:33 Cairo
So this absolute clusterfuck of strats somehow saves like 2-3 seconds (SSD) in Episode 5 runs... and if same job order is used then 5-6 seconds in full-game runs but there the current route with the treasure and paraglider stuff make it probably save no time at all.
Or then just use the other pretty fast strat known as Korean PSN Sly 2 where that cs is almost 5 seconds faster... If you can, I mean... majority of runners can't....
Or then just get the treasure as Sly and still save time overall for PAL/NTSC.
Eventually when time goes on and speedruns of this game get more optimized we'll start to see this happen constantly in full-game runs as well. Getting killed by the train like this fortunately only loses about 5 seconds.
Left top corner: Best pace I've ever had after the 4th hack. Train hasn't even passed by Bentley yet. Still very close though from being killed by the train.
Right top corner: Basically 1-2 frames away from being killed by the train.
Left bottom corner: Killed by the train.
Right bottom corner: Killed by the train even though exiting the hack happened later than in right top corner clip. This is because I exited the hacks later than in other clips because of mistakes. This affected the train cycles because the train changes its direction every time you exit a hack just like the fans do in ep 8 so your performance won't clearly determine if this death occurs.
You can go off ledges quicker if you use a normal square punch a bit before you're dropping down
This video probably isn't new strats but it's some statistics and analysis of some strats on how to make ghost hacks more consistent and less brutal. I will also make a follow up video, currently talking with Zryu about methods to get 100% (it looks like he's testing this however, so I will let him post if he has been working on this a while which it seems like he has) This may have already been studied, but I figured it would be good to document this really tightly and keep it in a place where people can see it.
