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Super Mario 64 speedrunners trying to figure out how to beat the game without ever pressing the A button to jump have just figured out a major new strategy that cuts the better part of 26 hours out of one particularly time-consuming level.
The A button challenge is a long-running endeavor among Super Mario 64 superfans, but in recent years it's largely been the field of tool-assisted speedrunners - players who break games open by programming a precise series of controller inputs that are effectively impossible for humans to replicate. If you're familiar with the A button challenge, it's probably because of the infamous Watch for Rolling Rocks video where one such TASer explained how to build up Mario's speed for 12 hours and send him through a series of parallel universes in order to collect one particular star.
Up until this week, TASers had used basically the same sort of strategy in Lethal Lava Land to collect the star titled Elevator Tour in the Volcano. To dramatically oversimplify it, you would push one of the bully enemies into a particular out-of-bounds position, continually run into it for around 20 hours to build up its speed, and then use its momentum to knock Mario across a few hundred parallel universes to collect the star. The whole process took around 26 hours all told, but you're probably better off watching the truncated 12 minute version on YouTube if you're curious.
Now runners have discovered a new method. Just get a bully stuck in a particular wall and bounce off of it to send Mario careening into a conveniently placed pole and then a series of lava waterfalls that would bounce him into the star. Obviously, I am once again dramatically oversimplifying the process, but runner supermarble94 demonstrated that it's possible in the video below.
As with most developments in the TAS scene, this was a collaborative discovery that builds on years of theory-crafting by a wide community of players. You can follow the video link to read supermarble94's much more technical breakdown of the whole endeavor, but the important part is that this video is only 59 seconds long. Not bad for a level that previously took nearly 26 hours.
A button challenge TASers are still trying to figure out how to eliminate the last few jump presses from the run, and the biggest developments in the scene are more about finding new routes to bypass button presses rather than a big time save like this. Yet I can't help but think cutting a full day out of a run is a pretty major win in its own right.
