There are a few known glitches. Try these combos: Use: a Ring, Wings, or otherwise die. When: entering a staircase or door, or when defeating a boss, or going underwater.
Dying seems to cause you to no longer trigger enter/exit triggers, but you can still scroll by walking. This can let you exit a building to get to garbage terrain. Possibly an interesting exploit
Using wings during a transition seems to set you to be in a "warping" state, which more or less makes you intangible and unable to scroll the screen. This is probably useless.
Using a ring while in a transition will carry the monsters to the next screen with you! This also looks potentially like a promising technique.
The record holder uses an "undocumented pause feature" to give immediate access to the final boss. This is known as a developer "debug" feature to help them test the game.
In other words: it's a cheat, and cheats are not allowed in most any% runs.
Guides for this game say that dropping the key is random, but actually it isn't random.
In truth, the game uses memory address 0x41B to track how many Key Guardians you've killed. It uses memory address 0x419 to track how many Key Guardians you need to kill before a key is dropped.
On the first level, you must kill 4 key guardians. It doesn't matter what order you kill them in. The 4th will always drop the key.
On the first level, the key guardians are the Green Skeletons, or the Orange Goblins. Regardless of what else you kill, or how much frame delay, the only thing that effects key drop is the guardians killed. You can tell they are key guardians, because unlike every other unit, these do not respawn when re-entering the screen, and killing them increments 0x41B.
This mechanic doesn't seem to be recorded in any of the FAQs. Now that you know about it, you can route your levels based on the locations of the key guardians and always have reproducible results. Note that some guardians only appear when entering a screen from a specific direction.
For example, in the first level, if you drop into the first pit, there is no goblin. But if you go to the right and then quickly turn back to the left, the goblin will appear.
If you let the woodpecker peck you, you can get 2/3 jumps midair. I'm not sure it's useful, just wanted to share.
Why is the top listed time called "Cheat %"?
Any% is generally assumed to be without cheats...
The PSX game needs it's own category, because it's a totally different game. It's 3D, not 2D.
It seems, since the levels are totally different, that each should have a category. Is the blue one the "medium" difficulty one? I'm not sure.
There are some raindrop guides on right walls, but how do you do it on left walls (i.e. like in the Hell Temple Hard Mode run)?
Go into first person mode while on the train in the first level. You float while the train keeps moving, then you game over immediately!
Probably not useful, but I felt like keeping track of this because it's funny as heck.
Getting into a battle while walking through a door allows you to bypass the door trigger. This might allow for many interesting out-of-bound glitches, as well as wrong-warps.
Does the OOB clip not work on N64? I would think you'd have less loading times, and could easily get sub 15 as a result?
I think this game is hard enough that it's not really plausible in RTA. But I made a quick demo of what a TAS of this game might look like. I just did the first half of the first level in Level 3 difficulty. I basically ignore the palette, and utilize ledge-grabs in order to make jumps while avoiding instant deaths. Level starts at 1:57
I found on Jurassic Path 1, you can actually drive past the starting line and the lap doesn't count... That got me thinking that like most racing games, there are probably ways to shortcut the game. But I didn't put much effort into finding any.
I'm guessing the checkpoint system is probably not very well programmed.
Sharing some research I did, I found that it's possible to get Sandals (and seemingly every item including uniques) from the very first barrels of the game.
Therefore, there is a strategy you can use where you start the game, break the closest set of barrels, and if you don't get a Sandal or a 2H weapon (As recommended in the speedrunning guide as the most important item drops), then you simple quit and try again.
When I tested it, I got a sandal after maybe 10 tries. This is confirmed. Considering this is a 10% speed boost, this alone would be good.
I didn't get a 2H weapon in my limited tests, but by ram hacking and trying 64 different item drops in order, I found one 2H weapon. It seems there are 640 possible drops before it cycles back around. My drop table notes are here https://pastebin.com/g2E7xDGG .
This means if you break 4 barrels, you should see (on average) every item once every 160 tries, including every unique item. However, I might have misunderstood something about how the RNG works. It's possible that there might be something that prevents you from getting a 2H weapon dropped before you reach a certain level, perhaps.. I'm not sure. I didn't see evidence of that, but others who are more familiar with the game may have noticed something like that.
Currently afaik, no runs have tried using this technique, so you should consider this as a possible route to a new gold record ;)
