INSANE Perfect Dark Strategy Found After 20 Years!

hello you absolute legends i've said it before and i'll say it again perfect dark is broken when it comes to first-person shooters on the n64 it's always goldeneye 007 that is praised as the console's crown jewel but to someone who has devoted thousands of hours into both games i can definitively say that perfect dark is better in almost every way and really this should come as no surprise it was released three years later was developed by the same team and uses a more advanced version of the same engine perfect dark took everything that was great about the classic bond entry and built upon it to produce a deeper more complex and in my opinion more fun game to play don't get me wrong i completely understand why goldeneye is considered to be more iconic when it was released it was light years ahead of any other shooter ever seen on consoles thus it made a much bigger splash but a part of me is saddened that its spiritual successor was never able to inspire the same kind of excitement or popularity ultimately this contrast trickles down into the speed running realm with the amazing world record setting goldeneye taking their fair share of limelight but perfect dark has amazing world records as well and i would argue that the more complex level designs and gameplay mechanics lead to far more interesting strategies goldeneye is simple but rock solid with not a single instance of out of bounds being usefully implemented into a speed run perfect dark on the other hand couldn't be more different almost every level has been broken in some meaningful way that leads to gameplay that is almost unrecognizable from the game's original intent as the years roll on and i asked myself when will the madness end the game breaking strategies never ceased to be discovered even in 2021 over 20 years since the game was released a new crazy glitch was found that completely revolutionized the way a level was played a level that was one of the few remaining bastions of what the average person would consider to be normal gameplay in this video we are going to take a look at this mind-blowing new strategy and how it has changed forever the way speedrunners navigate the level in which it resides i've seen a lot of crazy things figured out in this game but this is definitely one of the most bizarre strategies yet i really hope you enjoy this video is sponsored by skillshare i am a huge advocate for learning and skillshare is the perfect place for you to grow and to develop skillshare offers thousands of inspiring classes for you to explore new skills or master your existing talents it is never too late to unlock your full potential and there is no better time to start than now whether you've been thinking about getting into design web development animation or marketing skillshare has it all these days one of the toughest challenges preventing productivity is a limited attention span and too many distractions so i strongly recommend you check out the course managing attention in the digital age by kevin siska now skillshare has allowed me to offer a free trial of skillshare premium to the first 1000 legend to click the link in the description so please make sure to take advantage of this opportunity and start exploring your creativity today [Music] infiltration is the seventh level in perfect dark and out of every possible playable level this is almost certainly my least favorite of all time to speedrun on perfect agent the most challenging difficulty it is brutal and incredibly difficult to survive one of the most historic world records of all time was a one minute and 52 second run by the first dominant champion paragon x9 one of the reasons this time was so monumental was purely because of just how difficult a level is to play when using the quickest strategies in the medium difficulty special agent the level was horrendous for a different reason and in order to understand why we need to take a look at how the level is designed most of the action takes place in the initial outdoors area it's here that depending on the difficulty you need to complete objectives like attaching a comms device to a satellite dish or destroying robot interceptors in the outdoor section there is one universal objective that needs to be completed for every difficulty which is attaching explosives to and destroying a radar console once this is done our objective is now to penetrate the deeper areas of the base this is done through a large elevator that can only be activated after collecting a keycard from a programmer somewhere close by and it's this programmer that causes such a headache for many players myself included when the level begins he is programming one of the interceptors and after a period of time he will complete this action and head to the radar console the interceptor he originates next to is quite out of the way so in order to be as efficient as possible we want to time things so our paths cross right next to the elevator this way we can take him out pick up his keycard and activate the elevator immediately the problem with this is that in order to time things up correctly we have to wait an entire minute in the opening cinema while the cinema is playing the programmer is already working away at the interceptor but the in-game timer itself doesn't actually begin until you start playing the level waiting a minute before each attempt is such a drag not only is it boring and ruins the flow but it also raises the anxiety levels of the player as any single mistake means that you'll have to sit through the entire opening cinema again it's for this reason that i very rarely played this level and is one of the few that i've never personally attained the world record for but of course this is perfect dark we are talking about and whenever you have levels with vertical components to their design there is always a fantastic chance of finding a glitch to exploit it not only does the large elevator take us down but there is also another lift we need to catch after that which takes us down even further this is where we finally reached the end of the stage if it were possible to get out of bound somehow we could skip both elevators not have to wait for the programmer to get the key card and ultimately save heaps of time not only in the game itself but also just in general with such an alluring possibility infiltration was always an obvious choice for a large amount of exploration of any out of bounds clips that could be performed people searched and searched for years and nothing could be found other levels were being broken left right and center but infiltration held strong much to my dismay but then by the grace of god something beautiful happened on the 1st of february 2021 the speedrunner eliminator jr uploaded a video titled infiltration special agent 127 beating the existing world record by a second and best of all he didn't watch any cinema something amazing had been found [Music] the catalyst for this new breakthrough was actually the reimagining of an out-of-bound strategy used on a different level crash site back in 2016. the legendary strategic genius brian bosshart found that you could clip out of the level while riding a hoverbike by taking advantage of a really low frame rate anyone who has played perfect dark before knows that one of its flaws is the inconsistent frame rate and when there are a lot of things going on at once it can get really really bad this slowdown can be magnified even further by switching weapons which creates huge lag spikes and it's a technique used in both perfect dark and goldeneye to warp through tiny gaps and of course you can turn on high res as well a feature that slightly improves the graphical quality and is a feature that simply no one used because it slowed down the game too much the basic idea required three key ingredients the hoverbike a really really low frame rate and a ramp or sloped surface glitching through the slope was what enabled players to leave the geometry of the level another important thing was that while on the hoverbike you don't actually fall down like you normally would unless there is solid ground beneath you so if you got out of bounds with nothing below you could fly around as much as you like luckily there is a hoverbike on infiltration and people had tried using it in the past to find a way to perform a clip but no one had been successful when the potential for a hoverbike clip was brought up again in discord at the end of january this time the speedrunner henrik nogren performed some tests henrik has created many tool assisted speedruns in the past and is extremely proficient with emulators so emulation was the platform he used to look around the curious thing about perfect dark emulation is that it's really bad and the stability of the frame rate is counterintuitively lower than what you would see on console when henrik attempted to clip out of the level on a very sloped corner with the use of save states lo and behold he was able to do it from here the floodgates were opened and it's miraculous just how fast a simple clip like this can be turned into a complete strategy over the next 24 hours a team of speedrunners worked together to solve problems and find ways to make this strategy work i won't go into every specific detail about how it was created but we will cover the main beats the very beginning isn't too dissimilar to the old strategy with the exception of shooting or punching a guard in order to grab a grenade the grenade is thrown into the area after the clip which will take out some proximity mines that litter the area we then head to the area where we need to attach the comms rider to the satellite in the past we would need to do this as well however we would simply duck into the area throw the comms rider and then leave but now we also need to get on the hoverbike that is located nearby once we are on the hoverbike and have attached the comms rider it's time to head back in the tunnel we begin switching weapons quickly which drops the frame rate dramatically normally at this point in the run guards will spawn up ahead and run out at the exit of the tunnel which also slows things down immensely with the two combined factors the fps is atrocious immediately after exiting the tunnel a sharp right hand turn is performed and we clip through a small slope and are now out of bounds this is where things start to get really weird once out of bounds movement is really peculiar you aren't free to move around like you normally would be so only very short jagged movements can be performed one of the problems that needed to be overcome was the objective of planting the explosives on the radar console in order to do this you need to get off the hoverbike but it wasn't obvious if you would be able to get back on however the runner akama arts uploaded a video showing that it was indeed possible it's a lot more finicky than it looks though because the hoverbite can only be seen or mounted at very specific angles after the explosives have been placed and we are back on the hoverbike it's time for some disorientating movement through some out of bounds sections we need to find a way to clip back into the level just before the exit but before that there is actually an objective called gain access to hanger lift the curious thing about this objective though is that it doesn't complete when you use the lift itself but rather when you exit the lift and enter the hanger so despite the fact that we never use or enter the lift we can still complete the objective by making some kind of contact with the hanger in the area immediately outside of the lift it's also very lucky that the hanger roof is so high as well there is no danger of falling back into the hangar from here because once you're out of bounds it's actually not possible to drive the hoverbike through walls to get back in there is only a very specific area that you can drive back into the standard geometry of the level and it's a bit further up above some pipes that connects two areas the pipes are useful because they don't have walls but they do have solid ground which means you can easily fly above them and when you do you automatically drop down to their level once on the pipes we can simply drive back into the hangar from here now that we're back in we can't just exit the level though as the final door is locked in order to have it opened we need to be standing on a particular section of the catwalk so this is done first before turning around and heading to the finish this new strategy has absolutely destroyed the world records for this level on agent the world record has gone from 110 to 104. people weren't even sure if this new strategy could be used on agent because the old strategy didn't even go near the hoverbike but evidently it was special agent went from 128 to 108 and perfect agent went from 137 to 119. i've had a play around with this new glitch and it's definitely not something that i would want to spend a long time grinding it's very tricky to manage and movement when out of bounds is incredibly frustrating but it's still awesome to see the level get broken in such a way perfect dark has gotten to the point where people are now starting to raise questions about the possibility of creating a new competition that excludes out of bounds exploits this kind of thing has been done before with a game like mario kart 64 where there are two different ranks for shortcuts and non-shortcuts i think this would be a fantastic idea if it could be executed in a good way this new glitch is not only good for speed runs but it also allows us to have a bit of fun as well infiltration is the first level of three set inside area 51 and the entirety of the base is always fully loaded so we can actually use this out of bounds trick to explore the rest of area 51. it is a bit weird though because some of the things that should be there aren't like elevators and guards however in this section which is the beginning of the next level rescue we find two characters one is jon joanna's spy partner and a random guard these two npcs are stored here because they are used in the final cut scene they don't react to us in any way even if we shoot them but what's interesting is that you can shoot the weapon out of their hands i thought this might provide an opportunity to have some fun with the ending cutscene so i spent some time figuring out a way to shoot away the guns and then make it back to finish the level it wasn't as easy as you'd think though because i couldn't find a way to fully enter this area and then get back on the hoverbike so i had to find places where i could shoot them from out of bounds i did eventually make it work though and this is the result agent over here there you are i was beginning to wonder if if what if you've been discovered yet and frankly if this is how you work i'm amazed that you lasted longer than five minutes i was tidying up one of your loose ends my loose ends i'm sorry i didn't realize you wanted him to shoot you ancient dark over here there you are i was beginning to wonder if if what if you've been discovered yet and frankly if this is how you work i'm amazed that you lasted longer than five minutes i was tidying up one of your loose ends my loose ends i'm sorry i didn't realize you wanted him to shoot you man if i knew about glitches like this 20 years ago my 14 year old self would have loved spending hours and hours playing around with stuff like this now congratulations to the perfect dark speedrunners on all of the new world records and i guess the question i'm left asking is which level will be next thank you so much for watching new legends i hope you were having a fantastic day and i will see you in the next video you

Channel: Karl Jobst

Views: 333,259

Keywords: n64, speedrun, perfect, perfect dark, karl jobst, perfect dark speedrun, crazy glitch, video game glitch, perfect dark glitch, speedrun world record, nintendo, nintendo 64, nintendo speedrun

Id: wRFpNJaa5_I

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TGWDS]

r/uselessredcircle