I feel the same about HealthyGamerGG's videos: detailed, insanely knowledgeable, references across neurochemistry/biochemistry, psychology, gaming, human behavior, culture and religion (and how they've changed over time), etc.
That's peak YT for me
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKWKICUqWU
Specifically their series of crashing Paper Mario in innumerable unusual ways, which has become a meme.
Unfortunately it has been inactive since 2020.
EDIT: Fixed link
Actually it seems like your link just forwards incorrectly to a different channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@Stryder7x is the correct one, yours for me goes to https://www.youtube.com/user/Stryder7x
"I have a PhD in Mario 64 speed running."
It says a lot about a game like SM64 that it manages to still fascinate and captivate decades after its release while a dwindling number of mainstream games made today share that level of player enthusiasm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXbJe-rUNP8
It's over five hours long. I put it on in the background or to pass the time. The amount of knowledge and abuse of bugs these guys are performing is insane.
Bismuth is also just a generally high quality YouTuber.
https://youtu.be/kpk2tdsPh0A?t=640
His mind is so clear. I love how there's so many super super smart people on the internet! :)
The explaining video is great, but the underlying goal just seems absurd to me.
I think you could argue that the "underlying goal" for most people's hobbies are pointless.
as i said in the first version of my comment, “ This is what happens when you have the mind of a von Neumann and no great national project to work on. Give this guy a UFO . he could figure it out, at least how to use it!”
But I removed that because I thought it was too reductive and dismissive of peoples individual enjoyment, and it took a too utilitarian approach towards our daily activities. I don’t think we should reduce everything to a utilitarian collective good view point.
At the same time I have that perspective too, but I definitely think there’s value in the pursuit of these things like this person has done.
I hope to be able to share nuance and multiple perspectives on HN without angering, or having to engage with anyone particular zealot of any one particular side.
Lots of bugs have specific names. It would be crazy not to name any.
Changing your position so that you're in the same spot but you're also in a completely different location, all at once. I think the term fits pretty well.
https://youtu.be/_hjRvZYkAgA is my current favorite.
Because Mario64 doesn't care about releases, the runners don't distinguish releases, you can always choose not to release A and so if you're doing this run (fewest A presses) you would only ever release in order to press A again. In a live setting commentators might briefly explain what a 0.5 A "means" but without this explanation to head off questions you'd likely have about why they care.
Just reading this, it doesn't make sense to someone not familiar with the game why you wouldn't only hold A the last time you press it. It also has to be noted that holding A makes Mario do different things from not holding A.
Is that really true though? If it cares about holding, such as in gliding in the air, then it necessarily cares about not holding, such as being in the air but not gliding, and the way to transition from being in the air gliding to being in the air not gliding is to release.
Is that wrong? I've only ever played M64 for like 5 minutes, but it's been on my list and I keep urging my children to get into it as a way for me to find the time to get into it too.
I think it's possible that if the next level requires .5 a presses but, for example, you are falling with a wing cap in the current level, you have to decide between bumping that half a press into a full a press or losing time when falling with the wing cap. I just don't think it's a common case though because you could use a different route where the held A won't affect you. It looks like in the A Button Challenge (ABC), there are only 5 half a presses: https://ukikipedia.net/wiki/A_Button_Challenge
0.5 is really about the idea of having an A press span multiple levels.
Is that true? Mechanically it's true, but I don't know whether the game code actually knows this is true. It depends whether the N64, and the SM64 code specifically, tracks the button state and the events separately.
Compare the situation with Left + Right in TAS Mario 1. The TAS has no problem telling a console that both left and right are pressed, but obviously a real human player cannot press both directions, they're opposites. Nevertheless this does "work" in the game and so although no-right-plus-left is an interesting benchmark to compare against RTA where live human players couldn't do the trick, the TAS records allow both pressed at once.
On the surface, yeah, it’s immediately like, “what the heck is 0.5?” But it’s just semantics.
By the way, if you want to see more of that content you should check out their more active secondary channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UncommentatedPannen
If you're interested in Super Mario 64 speedruns, the video[0] "The Story of the Greatest Super Mario 64 Speedrunners" is great.
So, fuzzing tests [1] seem to be in order for Nintendo games... :-)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_fuzzy_lop_(fuzzer)
They've been doing exactly this with Tears of the Kingdom: patching pretty much every glitch that gets found, no matter how likely it is to affect casual players or whether it arguably makes the game more fun. I wouldn't be shocked if they had people lurking in the glitch hunting/speed running Discords just so they can learn about glitches and fix them ASAP.
There is a video on YT with a speedrunner walking the Portal team through the speedrunning community's hacks, and there is a part where this is touched on.
I think the A button challenge focuses on reducing the number of A-presses above all else, so it's not a speedrun proper. There is a really fun type of speedrun called low% where the goal is to complete the game with as low a "completion percent" as possible (e.g., minimum items collected, quests and bosses completed, etc.) and do it as quickly as possible. But a run that's technically slower with a lower% will "beat" a run that's faster with a higher%.
That's where you get Twilight Princess speedruns that can take more than 24 hours to complete. Although I believe the current record is actually just under 16:
(For those who don't want to watch an entire video: the secret sauce here is a glitch with Link's "item get!" animation that verrrryyyy slooooowlyyyy pushes him backwards in space every time it loops. So if you open a chest and leave the animation running for hours on end, you can phase backwards through walls and bypass the need for keys/progress checks/etc. Which is perfect for a low% run where the goal is to bypass as many things as possible.)
That being said, like other lines from this video, it's definitely become a bit of a meme in the community.
It rubs up wrongly against common sense, which is why people call it out; when you press a digital button with only two states, you'd refer to that action as a button press in any other context. General game logic refers to a digital button press as a button press/keydown event or state/key press; there's no "half", it's Boolean. And it's doubly confusing if you don't know that the N64 doesn't have pressure sensitive buttons, in which the term "half-press" would make more sense.
Not really. The speedrun is to optimize for fewest total A-button presses. This metric is known from the controller's perspective in the sense that if you sniffed the communications between the controller and console, you could know the number of A-presses. Given this metric, the term half A-press makes total sense once it is understood. To reiterate the video, in a single level run, a half press rounds up to 1, but in a full game run it rounds down. How else would you communicate that without "obtuse jargon"?
> if press, hold, and release are different actions, and those are meaningful to the speedrun, and you care about what a general audience thinks about it, then just count them separately
If you want to distinguish between the actions taken based on the state of the a button, that is fundamentally different from tracking the number of button presses since it requires knowledge of the game state. Not only does it make much harder to define but it's also much harder to track without advanced tooling (how do you know if the game state was modified in an important way or not if someone presses the button for eg 2 frames vs 4 frames?). I'm not sure how I see this would make it easier for the general audience to understand either since now they also have to understand the game state rather than how many times a button was pressed. Also, this makes it entirely disconnected from the physical world, when presumably the idea of the challenge was to use the buttons on your controller less.
There's nothing stopping speed runners from tracking it this way I suppose but complaining about how a community plays a game is a bit odd. Although it is a nintendo game so I guess complaining about how the hardcore fans play it is pretty much expected.
Besides, the sheer magnitude of difference between advancing a highly contested real life science subject versus breaking ground in an obscure challenge in a 25 year old video game is massive. I know it's not that obscure but it sure feels that way sometimes...
The youtuber does a bit of complaining about how people keep asking something he's ostensibly answered. Even does that "well, akshyually, I said that right here in the man page (comments section) if only you would RTFM".
This is important: if the user (customer, patron, etc.) is repeatedly doing something "wrong", then it's not they who are wrong, it's you, your design, your inadequate explanation, etc.
On top of that, the whining and blame directed at the user for not conforming to your own internal model is just so unwarranted and does nothing to help your case here. It's pure self-cope for not doing a better job at explaining, designing, etc.
Empathize!
I know it's hard for nerds to do this, especially when they so often feel the opposite, that they not only don't lack empathy, they feel they have more than the average person. How wrong they are! Consider that maybe you're wrong and the customer is right. Adapt to their world view rather than trying to get them to conform to yours. You might be so deeply immersed in your domain that what you consider common wisdom is a foreign language to others. Again, empathize! And you use that empathy to improve your communication, design, etc.
I think engineers and designers really need to hear this stuff because there's just so much user-blame, whining, bad interfaces, and bad communication out there that doesn't have to be bad, if only the nerd-engineer would cultivate some empathy and humility.
The thoroughness of this video seems to me to be proof that he wanted to get these newer viewers up to speed. In fact it's basically a love letter to the uninformed viewer. The "complaining" at the start is just lightly poking fun at these newer people while also serving the double purpose of informing them about the explanations in his description boxes. Given the lasting popularity of this video, I don't think too many people took offense.
Absolutely, and it shows in how many people I've recommended this video to who know nothing about sm64 who absolutely love it. (I also know nothing about sm64 and absolutely love it.)
> The thoroughness of this video seems to me to be proof that he wanted to get these newer viewers up to speed
Yep and he literally says it right in the video, "but maybe what you guys need isn't a paragraph, maybe you guys need an example". He admits his previous attempts were maybe not getting across and adapted. Teaching at its finest. The TJ Henry Yoshi callout was clearly for comedic effect, and if I were TJ I'd be pretty happy to get an answer this thorough, understandable, and entertaining.
edit: listening to it again, even calling it a callout as I did above is kind of incorrect. "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, hear me out." He didn't say "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, this is where you're wrong" or "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, what didn't you understand about the paragraph?", he just asked for a listening ear for another chance to explain his perspective in a different way.
There is nothing quite so irritating as someone who confidently criticizes you out of ignorance. You see this all the time when professionals showcase their work on video sharing sites, the comments will be filled with people who pipe up insisting that the creator is doing something wrong rather than asking questions or seeking to understand. "There is no such thing as a half press" as popularized by TJ "Henry" Yoshi is a case of the former, an ignorant outsider lecturing the person who demonstrably knows what they are doing.
Empathy and humility are two way streets. In the comments section, you are a guest and should behave as such.
