Today I had a break through with the Forced Respawns while practicing for today’s speedrun. They are totally usable now. 100% reliable.

I mentioned in the above post that I thought there would be a way to get the game to update your position recognizing you in first place and moving your respawn point to your current location. That ended up being true. During one of my practice runs I was driving along side the Course Road when I noticed my position in the race updated to first place. The lightbulb went off in my head, so I went into the woods and crashed to test my theory, and it respawned me in first place with the lead I gained from the shortcut. It worked. You just have to get close enough to the course Road without getting close enough that it activates the cheat fail. Once it updates you into first place, turn away from the road and go crash somewhere. Ironically that ended up being the hardest part, because I use the crotch rocket bikes with really good handling and they never seem to want to tip over without actually smacking into something, sometimes I was able to do was sort of E-break turn and lay the bike down, but usually I ended up having to drive a number of seconds away to run into a tree. you want to do it away from the road because if you’re too close you run the risk of triggering the cheat fail. If you follow those parameters, the forced respawn works 100% of the time. After I made sure it worked on all of the maps I have Shortcuts for, I began a speed run. The shortcuts worked flawlessly except for one where I lost focus and did something stupid, but I need to work on my level four and five races that don’t have Shortcuts. I took 30 minutes off my best time and brought it down to 2h9m ish but first place is still half an hour away. I had to repeat far too many races to be a first place contender, but I’ll work on that. I’m sure one of you guys has what it takes to apply these techniques and destroy the world record. Good luck.

Hi. Don’t know if im the first but ive discovered how to beat the mechanic in the game that fails you in big game races when you “cheat” by taking huge shortcuts. I will recap the discoveries i talked about in my last post “questions about shortcuts” while filtering out what is no longer relevant. Here is everything ive learned:

The “Cheat Fail” as ive come to calling it can be circumvented allowing for giant time saves on certain levels. Normally if you try to take a big shortcut, the second you emerge back onto the road (thats actually a part of the course or is some cases directly adjacent) the game brings your bike halting to a stop and chastises you for cheating with a message that says “cheaters never prosper” before taking you to the “Wrecked” screen and asking you to cough up 1-3 thousand dollars. This mechanic can be beaten allowing you to trigger the end of the race without being labeled a cheater. I’ll explain what you need to know to accomplish this but first let me define a few terms:

Cheat Fail - When the game decides you’ve cheated and ends your race and demands your money

Course Road - a section of road that is a part of the designated path for that race. These roads will trigger the Cheat Fail if re-entered wrong after going off road for a lengthy shortcut.

Non-Course Road - roads not on the race’s designated pathway, can drive freely on these without the risk of triggering the Cheat Fail

Progressive - The direction you would need to travel on a Course Road to be making progress towards the finish line.

Regressive - The direction you would need to travel on a Course Road to be losing progress towards the finish line.

Flashy Crash - The name i gave to a maneuver where you purposely crash into one of the big yellow or orange flashing arrow signs in order to respawn yourself on the Course Road with a huge lead and the ability to once again drive freely on the Course Roads without triggering the Cheat Fail.

Forced Respawn - Basically any other version of crashing yourself into a specific spot on purpose with the goal of respawning back on the Course Road with the lead you acquired from a shortcut.

Win Zone - The area inside and outside of the finish line that when driven across in the Progressive direction triggers the end of the race. The Win Zone extends quite a ways outside of the poles of the finish line, I haven’t measured it but feels like maybe 80-100 feet in the game

Danger Zone - The area on either side of a Course Road that if driven inside of in the Progressive direction, the Cheat Fail will be activated. This feels like about 50 feet in the game. The fact that the Win Zone is about double the width of the Danger Zone is one of the keys to defeating the games anti cheat programming.

Ok, here’s how to defeat the anti cheat programming:

The “Cheat Fail” only gets triggered when you renter a Course Road traveling in the Progressive direction. So if you renter that same Course Road facing the Regressive direction, the Cheat Fail will not be tripped. At first glance this doesn’t seem very useful since we need to drive in the Progressive direction to finish the race but we can use this mechanic when crossing course roads or to temporarily drive on a course road in the Regressive direction to get to a Forced Respawn point.

Let’s talk about Forced Respawns. If you can crash your bike close enough to the Course Road you want to respawn on WITHOUT accidentally triggering the Cheat Fail in the process by pointing the bike in a progressive direction, then you will respawn just meters from where you crashed keeping the huge lead you gained from your shortcut and you be able to drive freely on the course road again without risking the cheat fail. But there’s a catch, the game still tracks your bike when its flying around during the crash. (i think the cheat fail is activated by tracking the bikes direction but im not 100% sure, the riders position during the crash could factor in too, ive only been at this a day and just using trial and error.) so if in the chaos of you ramming your bike head on into a tree, fence or flashy sign it happens to point in a direction the game doesn’t like, it will label you a cheater and end your race. This is the hardest part of defeating the anti cheat programming.

Its also possible to fail a forced respawn by not being close enough to the course road (or some other unknown factor) when you crash, if this happens, you wont necessarily trigger a cheat fail, you’ll just be teleported back to where you deviated from the path to start your shortcut; this usually makes the race unwinable. I want to find a way to have the game update your position to first place before performing a respawn so this problem is averted but I haven’t found out how to do that yet.

Not all shortcuts require Forced Respawns but the ones that do are currently the bane of my existence. There are four shortcuts ive worked out so far that require Forced Respawns, i got to hitting them about 75% percent of the time in practice but during my Speedrun attempt today with these new strategies under the pressure and fatigue of having fought lunatics on motorcycles for an hour just to get to my first attempt, i failed both of my first two Forced Respawns and ran out of money and got a game over ending my run. Unlike losing a race where you just lose time, activating the Cheat Fail will cost you the money you need to by your next bike or end your run completely so there is risk. However, i really think performing these shortcuts is easier than surviving or staying in front of the onslaught of the other riders constantly trying to beat you to death right before the finish line. If you successfully complete a shortcut, you get away from not just the other bikers, but most time you get away from spawning cars. So you can haul ass because there is no one in your way but the game also runs faster because its loading much less content and has no reason to lag.

Ok. I better get to the point. Basically, successfully using a shortcut as a time save in this game means triggering the end of the race without triggering the Cheat Fail (despite deserving it). Since the Win Zone that triggers the end of the Race is roughly twice the size of the Danger Zone that will end your race with a cheat fail, if you drive in the progressive direction through the the part of the Win Zone that does not overlap with the Danger Zone, you will win the race without being called a cheater.

There are three ways of doing that ive found.

1. The Off Road Method - On maps where the course is layed out so you can drive off road to the finish line faster than the other riders can finish the race, you can drive straight there as long as you dont enter the danger zone. I use this on 3:2 and it save about 15 seconds. Its also pretty easy since there is no forced respawn, you just cant drive too close to the course road or you’ll enter the danger zone and trigger the cheat fail.

2. Forced Respawn Method - this describes shortcuts that wouldn’t be viable if you couldn’t get back onto the course road traveling progressively to finish the race. I use this on 5:7 “Crash and Burn” and others. Sometimes the shortcut involves going off road, other times it involves using Non-Course Roads but either way you need to do a forced respawn to be able to finish the race with a time save. Once a forced respawn is successfully completed you can just play the game like normal exempt you wont have people trying to beat you to death every 5 seconds. You dont need to do anything fancy at the finish line, you just cross it like normal.

3. The Roundabout Method - Some races you can use Non Course Roads to drive to the finish line from THE OTHER SIDE. This takes a bit of maneuvering when you reach the finish line since just driving through it wont trigger then end of the race. You have to drive off to the side far enough away to be able to turn around without crossing into the danger zone and then drive through the win zone just like you would in the Off Road Method. These are the easiest and my favorite. The hardest part is remembering the right combination of non course roads to take to arrive at the finish line. MARATHON falls into this catagory and you can beat it in around 1m21s easy this way. Thats the single best time save i have to offer here and hilariously its the easiest. I use to kinda dread marathon but now i laugh my ass off it.

So thats it. To make a shortcut work you have to trigger the end of the race by driving through the Win Zone in the Progressive direction and you have to do that without triggering the Cheat Fail by driving through the Danger Zone or by entering a Course Road in the Progressive direction. If you cant drive straight to the finish line from the other side or take a off road route, then you can find a shortcut route that cuts off some time and then figure out where you can do a Forced Respawn that is consistent enough to be worth it. At first i always crashed into the flashy signs since they are at all the intersections i would be coming back onto the course road from and they are close enough to the road to usually work but lately they’ve been super inconsistent and ive opted for driving regressively to a fence or corner of where two buildings meet instead. If we figure out a consistent way to do them the game will be ours. For best results ive been limiting my speed to 100km per hour but too slow and you might not crash. Angle matters too. Im trying to design setups where i can hit it the same every time but its hard.

Good luck everyone. Id love to take first place but this game is mentally demanding and i dont usually do well on second attempts in a day and Im running out of time before the real world keeps me from attempting these speedruns for a while. I feel good with the idea that i helped push the boundaries of what’s possible in one of my favorite games.

Ok… one last thing.. probably. If you crash your bike basically on the road super ahead of everyone cuz you just took a shortcut and you haven’t triggered the cheat fail, then apparently you can be respawned about where you crashed keeping your lead and allowing you to now drive the course road again without risking the cheat fail. Don’t know how consistent that is, learned it by accident but considering the alternative to a respawn is driving slowly on the dirt, might be another huge time save.

Ok, this game is about to get destroyed, decided to go for bigger fish and analyzed the level 5 maps for possible worm holes. I just beat marathon in 1m23s on my first try. It’s a different game beating levels this way and I love the old game so it may be time for a “no major shortcut” category or something. Gonna stop posting now and get to work preparing for runs tomorrow. I’m not the best player here but there are huge time saves here for the picking.

Found a route through 3:1 twisty land I finished in 1m43s. It’s more convoluted than 3:2 but currently saves 37 seconds. More optimization possible.

It works in big game too. Ok, I don’t know exactly how the game determines whether or not you “cheated” when you take a short cut but I was able to figure out this much:

1. It only decides you’ve cheated when you renter (or just get too close to) a road that is apart of or very close to the races designated course and you are traveling in the direction the game expects you to be during the race. This means that you can renter roads that would normally trigger the cheat auto fail heading the WRONG DIRECTION and be fine but the second you start heading back toward the finish line on that road the cheater auto fail will be activated. You can use this to cross roads that would normally trigger the cheat fail and then once you are across the road you can turn back the right direction and continue the shortcut off road.

2. You do not need to be ON the road when you cross the finish line to trigger the end of the race, i haven’t tested to see how far off the road you can be and still trigger the end of the race but it is a bigger than the distance you need to stay away from the road to keep the cheater fail from triggering. This is the key to getting around the game’s anti cheat programming. You can’t renter the road during the shortcut (except heading the wrong direction) but you can trigger the end of the race by riding 50 or so feet off the road parallel when you cross the finish line. This will only be useful on certain maps where you can make a sort of worm hole from the start to the finish that cuts so much distance off the race that despite being limited to a lower speed than if you just ran the race on the road, you can still save enough time to make the shortcut attempt worth it. I say attempt because you can get too close to the road triggering cheat fail or have the wrong angle crossing certain roads or just loose the optimal path through the green abyss. I don’t think this would work too well for maps primarily in the city or especially not maps that the race is a fairly straight line. The maps that have “wormhole potential” would be curved and long enough (get your head out of the gutter lol) that the distance between the start and end points could cut at least a third of the distance of the race away if driven in a straight line through the grass. So far I’ve only confirmed this on 3:2 smack and run but will look into others next.

One last note. I like the way the game is played currently where we mostly race and fight the ai the way the developers intended but I had a lot of fun trying to test the rules of the game to see how they could be broken, someone else somewhere (or here) has likely figured those rules out before me but this is the closest to blank canvas I have for uncharted territory in trying to break a game and I’m excited to see what else can be came up with ✌️

Please let me know if there’s something you’ve found or know of I’ve missed in regards to these shortcuts. Thanks.

I got proof of concept now for a time save short cut on 3:2 smack and run. Was able to finish in 1:44 where the 1st place speedrun by joe that runs the level normally finishes in 2:00 or 2:01. It worked in thrash mode, gonna see if I can refine it anymore and then take it to big game for a real test.

One reason I ask is, if it’s just a matter of getting TOO far ahead, there are huge shortcuts that would be possible if you just wait a designated number of seconds before re-entering the road. Or if it’s a matter of the developers anticipating shortcut routes and programming an auto fail when you take that route there might be ways around it by taking a less intuitive or predictable route, maybe even doing a circle or something else peculiar in the middle of your shortcut to trick the programming. I’ll try to test these theories but if this information is known I’d love to hear it.

Hi everyone. First of all, don’t understand for the life of me how there aren’t dozens of players speedrunning this game, its one of my top three favorite games of all time. Ok, here’s my question:

Has anyone figured out what the mechanic is behind the game making you instant fail the race when you make too big of a short cut? Does the game have set routes they anticipate players trying that could perhaps be worked around or is it triggered by a measurement of how far ahead of the closest player you are when you pop back onto the road? I could also picture a version of the mechanic where it times how long you’re off road and if you emerge in first after too long off road they fail you.

Right now im using trial and error to scout for shortcuts through level 3 race 2 Smack and Run. Ive only watched one or two of your guys’ speedruns, im guessing this isn’t uncharted territory, but i wanted the fun of exploring for myself however this would be a lot easier if i understood the mechanics behind when the game lets you use shortcuts and when it doesn’t.

My time on this game is miles behind what’s been done but this the smallest speedrunning community of the games i run and perhaps my best shot at finding uncharted territory in ways to beat the game faster and that kind of excites me. If no one knows how the shortcut mechanic works on this game perhaps ill look into finding someone who has experience looking into the game’s code to find out what it says. Thanks guys, have a good day.

Way to go mr frosty

Then how would you define a glitch? You haven’t offered any actual logic, unless you believe that others believing something automatically makes it true.

The way I see it, silly kicks would be a glitch because its using a MECHANIC in the game the developers didn’t intend. A trick is fair game because your using the mechanics in the game that the developers put there on purpose just in creative ways that reach an objective in ways they didn’t realize would be possible. When you silly kick you are using a hidden mechanic in the game that wasn’t put there on purpose (continuing to hold A prevents the game from updating the state of Mario from on flat ground to Mario on a slope thus allowing you to continue gaining forward momentum by kicking). This is the same kind of exploit as backwards long jumps to take advantage of the developers not capping Mario’s backwards speed; both silly kicks and BLJ’s take advantage of a hidden mechanic in the game that if the developers knew was there they would have patched, a glitch. BLJ’s involve clipping so i could see the argument that that makes them more of a glitch but from my perspective they are both glitches.

Again, I don’t really want to speedrun SM64 without silly kicks, they are just way too much fun to get rid of. I’m just to trying to make the point that in my opinion, a true glitchless run wouldn’t include silly kicks and if we leave them in we’re just picking and choosing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with picking and choosing, if there was we wouldn’t have category extensions but there seems to be a lack of definition to what exactly a glitch is. If i had to define it though, i would say a glitch is the exploit of a HIDDEN mechanic in the game that when used defeats the purpose of level design (breaks the game). This is also why i think perfect swimming into the jet streams is not a glitch. While it does break the level design, it does so with mechanics in the game you are expected to use. This is the same for exploiting the lack of ceiling in HMC; it defeats the level design but only using existing mechanics in the game that you are expected to use. This is just my two cents and I’m a relative newcomer here so feel free to disagree with me but i think my logic is sound.

As someone who hasn’t even learned bomb clip I like this except that I think silly kicks is more of a glitch than a trick and I don’t really want to do runs without silly kicks. Also I’m with the others that swimming into jet stream isn’t a glitch.

This gives me a lot to work with, thanks a ton. The audio issue I’m having is it will cut out for half a second every two seconds or so, this makes it really hard to communicate with viewers but my video is fine. I’ve been using twitch studio so maybe I’ll try other software and see if it changes. I’ll check back here when I either get it to work or run out of ideas again. Thanks.

Here’s the link to the capture device required to use the medialink app

https://www.create-medialink.com/shop

I finally found this, but the capture device he's using is like $350, at this point id try it but if anyone has ANY alternative im all ears.

I’ve been pulling my hair out cuz I want to stream on twitch but I live in remote alaska where the internet speed is trash. I thought I found a way around this when I bought a 5th gen iPad Pro, the internet speed I get from the tower are 5 times faster than I get from a hard line connection from my homes internet. I knew that you could use adapters to plug USB A into the iPad and I guess I assumed that meant that the many streaming apps built for iPad would allow you to access and use the game footage plugged into it but I haven’t found a single one yet that does. It’s hard to find a solution on a google search because it uses all the same keywords as someone trying to screen capture their iPad screen to something else. It seems odd to use an iPad as your streaming station but between the m1 chip and faster internet speeds it seems like my best option if I could get it to work. I’m tired of the audio in my streams constantly studdering. Any help someone could provide would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

It was the 3D all stars, perfect, thanks

Where would I submit a sm64 run on switch? Someone told me it was moved to sm64 category extensions but I didn’t see it there.

Hi everybody, im a gamer from Alaska. I finally got my Mario 64 120 star down to 3:26:10 on switch but im not sure if the run would qualify as you can't see my hands the whole time and I used an external timer. there's plenty of room for improvement so im not in a hurry to submit a run but im excited to work towards posting runs im really proud of. later dudes.