Lately I've had... kind of a lot of time on my hands. There's a million reasons why, some of them depressing, some of them entirely my own fault, but regardless, this excess of time has lead me to watch a lot of archived Awesome Games Done Quick speedruns. I've mostly stuck to seeing stuff I haven't seen before, but there are a few runs I find myself watching over and over again.

Siglemic's 120-star runs through Super Mario 64 fascinate me. Watching a game I love be so expertly played is fun on its own, but seeing the ways to break it has made me see SM64 in a whole new light. Since then, I've fumbled around in the game, trying to get to stars in ways the developers never intended, and it's brought an entirely new type of enjoyment to my experience.

Now let's be clear about something: I am not good at Super Mario 64. I'm not good at video games in general, but even with all the time I've sunk into this game over my life, I still can't even beat the final boss consistently. But watching it played like this...

I want to do it too.

I have no intention of actually being competitive here. I don't want to go for a world record, I don't want to speedrun full-time or anything. I legitimately don't think I'll ever have the skills to do that, and Mario 64 is such a popular game that record times are extremely tight. But that's okay. I figured I would set a few goals for myself and once I've met those, I'll be satisfied.

My first goal is to be able to beat the game with only 16 stars. Yeah, that's the lowest amount needed in order to complete the game. Through a series of glitches, it's possible to clip through a number of different doors that would normally block your path until you got more stars.

Once I'm able to do that, I'll work on movement optimization and nailing down some of the more difficult tricks. After that, we can start looking at getting good time.

Anyways, I thought I'd chronicle this little journey. There's every chance in the world I give up entirely and this series ends abruptly, but for now, I'm excited.

The First Trick: Lakitu Skip

Okay, so this technically doesn't really help me hit the first goal I laid out for myself. This trick is just a time-saver at the beginning of a run, but it's a cool-looking one and every SM64 runner worth their salt can do it consistently.

What this trick entails is long-jumping along the bridge in front of the castle in such a way that you avoid triggering the cutscene where Lakitu explains the camera controls to you. It's a pretty precise jump, requiring you to land on the exact edge of the bridge's guardrail.

Land too far from the edge and you trigger the cutscene anyway. Land too close to the edge, and Mario hangs from it, and climbing up then triggers the cutscene. It's not the most difficult thing in the world, but it's definitely not simple.

Thanks to the magic of emulation, I was able to use save states to make the repetition more bearable; without them, a second attempt at this trick would involve resetting the game and watching the opening cutscene again. And again. And again. [Heads up, I not only own this game, but I own it multiple times over. I own two copies of the N64 cart, I own it on Wii Virtual Console, and I own it on Wii U Virtual Console. If I had access to my Wii U right now, I would be playing it there.]

After about 9 or 10 tries, I got it. Awesome! It's doable. Knowing that this simple trick isn't totally beyond my capabilities is a real confidence-boost for me in regards to this endeavor. I reloaded and tried it again. No dice. It took me about 9 or 10 attempts to get it again. Then again. That time it only took me about 5 tries. I definitely don't have it down with any consistency, but for the sake of actually having something to write about, I moved on.

The Next Step: Let's Find 15 Stars!

There are still a number of tricks I need to learn to make this process even remotely speedy, but my current goal is to get through the game with 16 stars, not to do it quickly. I figure I'll buckle down and learn that stuff once I'm confident that I can even finish this thing.

I chose my stars based on a route I saw suggested for beginning speedrunners, though I didn't really look at the strategies for getting those stars quickly. We'll save that for later. Anyways, the route basically asks us to get one star on Bob-omb Battlefield first.

This star actually requires a pretty tough trick to do optimally. It's called the "bomb clip" or "clippy" and it involves grabbing a bomb as it's about to explode and using it to clip through the gate to get to the star. I tried it a few times, but couldn't quite nail it. I figured I'd put some more time into mastering it later, and got the star the casual way.

The next place of business is Whomp's Fortress, where we get 4 of the available stars before moving on. According to runners, this is actually one of the scariest levels to speedrun, even if it's a pretty basic stage to play casually. All the falls that are possible can make for huge time losses if you aren't careful.

Fortunately, the first star you're meant to get is one I already know the fast way to get. "Shoot Into the Wild Blue" normally asks you to open the cannon and launch yourself to where the star waits, risking death if you miss. Thankfully, a simple wall jump gets us there risk-free.

The next star is the Whomp fight. There's only a few things I really needed to get down for this one. The first is the ability to skip most of the middle-lower part of the level with a well-placed wall jump, launching Mario off of the bricks to the floating island right here.

The only other thing to note about this stage is that if you're mid-ground-pound animation when Whomp tries to crush Mario, he goes straight through him. The ground-pound animation then finishes right as he lands, hitting Whomp and speeding up the fight significantly. It wasn't long before I won the fight, and took my third star as a reward.

That's about all I had in me for today, so I put the controller down. I plan to practice Lakitu skip a little every day, but I'm not going to blog about those little practice sessions unless I make significant progress. Otherwise, expect me to post about my acquisition of the remaining stars in my next entry. If that ends up not needing a lot of editorializing, than I can start documenting my attempt to nail the most important glitch in the run: Mips Clip. But until then... uh, I don't exactly have a sign off. Maybe I'll figure one out for the next post? A lot of mysteries await us next time.