Mastodawn

mcc Jun 27, 2023

Speedrunning is kinda cursed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEQWT9rSkfM

Did you know this? Apparently if you bought a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 in the US, depending on when you bought it the "bros" in the logo is either aligned left on the label or right.

*If the logo on your cart is aligned right, you can't get a world record under current strategies.*

And until *last year*, nobody realized this was a problem. It was believed the versions were functionally identical.

(image source reddit user stang189)

Mario 3 Version Difference Is Faster VS Slower!?

YouTube

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mcc Jun 27, 2023

If this video confuses/bores you: Read this post then jump to 10:19.

In warpless SMB3 runs, there's an early (second world) instance of randomness where a hammer brother can run either right or left, and if it runs left you can skip three entire levels and save an entire minute:

https://smb3.bf0.org/smb3mechanics/2018-08-22-early-hammer/

Getting this randomness is important, so players use a "manipulation"– they play in a very precise way (in Mitch's case, literally miming along to a video of a TAS) to get exact random numbers.

Early Hammer

An in-depth description of Early Hammer and Hammer Brother movement

SMB3 0r4ng3

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mcc Jun 27, 2023

Infosec-minded people watching this video will have a slow-dawning realization that what this speedrunner is haltingly describing is a timing attack performed on the video game. The version difference would not have been a problem if Nintendo had used constant-time algorithms in their end-of-level score check arithmetic. There's some DJB shit going on here.

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Glyph Jun 28, 2023

@mcc @mikeymikey earlier today, without having seen this toot, I was struck by the fact that speedrunning is effectively security research where the researchers get annoyed and think the target is cheating when patches are issued to fix vulns. I wonder if there’s a future where it’s a more typical vulndev endeavor, where glitches are bountied, the runners get *credit* (and maybe money) but the credit is not expressed as WRs, and glitchless runs become the standard.

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too many names Jun 28, 2023

@glyph I'd be surprised if that happened. The long tail of game enthusiasm greatly exceeds the support life cycle of most games.

But now you have me wondering about long term monetized games like WoW and their general approach to this today 🤔

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Glyph Jun 28, 2023

@mikeymikey yeah I don’t think it’s likely, more that I think it’s culturally interesting to see the interplay of developer intent for crafting an experience, even a competitive experience, and how runners react to it, which is an artifact of this economic reality rather than anything inherent to the medium

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Glyph Jun 28, 2023

@mikeymikey like, if you could imagine a world where, due to some unforeseen legalistic rules interaction, someone discovered that if you balanced your racket on the net, some automated score counter would decide that you were getting a point every second in tennis. Like, the ITF wouldn’t just shrug and say “well, I guess racket-balancing is any% tennis now, we’ll just invent a new category where you actually still have to hit the ball sometimes”. They’d change the rules!

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Glyph

@mikeymikey don’t get me wrong I still think speedrunning is interesting, I don’t particularly want to see its weird culture of collaborative software-artifact breaking go away, but I also don’t see developers agreeing to this social contract of “we will always make vulnerable versions of games available for continuity”, in fact quite the opposite, nintendo clearly wants you to patch and never downgrade. It seems like it’ll come to a head at some point for newer games.