Mario Kart Wii: The Ultra Shortcut Revolution

[Music] mario kart wii has some ridiculous shortcuts grumble volcano coconut mall for speed runners they're certainly no secret i covered many of these in a video a couple of years ago tricks known as ultra shortcuts however since then a revolution has taken place since 2019 ultra shortcuts in mario kart wii have been discovered at a rate never before seen many of them are only theoretically possible using inputs so precise they can't normally be done but they break the game in ways unimaginable the most this is the story of the ultra shortcut [Music] revolution [Music] so what is an ultra shortcut well naturally it's a shortcut that skips a large portion of a track but as you'll see in a minute there's actually a bit more to it than that from 2008 through 2018 courses like mushroom gorge wario's goldmine and dk jungle parkway had shortcuts discovered so players could complete them in under a minute they were performed in a variety of ways in mushroom gorge you ride on a wall around the finish line in wario's gold mine you bounce off a pipe to the track above and on dk jungle parkway you fly high in the air and clip through a wall to the end of the track over the course of about a decade massive shortcuts like these were discovered at the rate of about one per year on a variety of tracks slowly but surely more and more of the game's 32 courses had ultra shortcuts discovered for years that was the state of mario kart wii [Music] and then in 2019 a revolution began for a multitude of reasons ultra shortcuts were discovered more rapidly than ever before they all had to do with the game's faulty checkpoint system and to see how it works we're going to look at one of the most broken tracks in mario kart wii this is sherbert land [Music] this course is a massive loop and obviously the programmers didn't want you to skip any significant portion of it so they built an intricate checkpoint system into every track to try to prevent that on screen now is the checkpoint map for sherbet land all of the blue lines represent normal checkpoints which are used to tell lakitu where to place you if you fall off those can be ignored the green lines on the other hand are key checkpoints these are the ones that really matter and you can think of them as boxes that extend all the way until the next checkpoint the red starting line also acts as a key checkpoint the game wants you to drive through all of these without skipping any in order to give you credit for a lap the way it does this is with a counter that updates as you drive through each key checkpoint on sherbert land there's eight key checkpoints and the finish line which counts as region zero so as long as your counter is at region eight when you cross the finish line you'll get credit for the lap the game also has a fail safe to make sure you don't skip any key checkpoint regions the only key checkpoint regions that are loaded at any time are the region you're in the one in front of you and if you're in the key checkpoint box itself the region behind you is loaded too a region has to be loaded for your counter to update to it so say you're here in region 1 and you try to skip ahead to region 3. well the only other region loaded is the one in front of you region two so when you drive through region three it won't be loaded and the game's counter won't update and since you'll drive through the finish line with the counter at one instead of eight the lap won't count so skipping any large portion of the track isn't doable another fail safe the game has involves the finish line if you ever go from the box right in front of the finish line to the box right behind it the game will subtract the lap from your total that way you can't just go through or around the finish line to the end and complete it for a free lap so since you couldn't skip any key checkpoints the only possible shortcuts seem to be small corner cutters the game's checkpoint system did its job but it had one flaw one major game breaking flaw if you start any shortcut from key checkpoint region 0 right in front of the finish line the key checkpoint box behind you is still loaded region 8. so you can skip a massive portion of the track and as long as you start it in that first box your counter can still be updated to region 8 and the lap will count shortcuts that abuse the specific glitch are classified as ultra shortcuts and sure enough sherbert land has one that's possible this is the sherbet land ultra shortcut [Music] it involves doing a trick known as a wall clip by backing up using a mushroom and doing a wheelie to get at least 5 frames of airtime and adjust your bike's rotational angle you can run into the side of certain objects to clip high into the air this has a variety of uses across the game but back in july 2015 a player named blaze figured out that you could wall clip off of the finish line pole and land far enough back to respawn a bit behind the finish line you can see from the checkpoint map what's happening you start in the box in front of the finish line then need to land in a specific spot in this checkpoint to respawn then since key checkpoint 8 is loaded you need to turn around and go touch the box to update the game's counter before driving forward to the finish a lap could be completed in under 20 seconds for a few years people took turns lowering the three lap world record and by late 2017 it was a 143 by a runner named guy the biggest issue with the shortcut however was that it could only be done once per race since the act of respawning takes your mushrooms away which are required to get the wall clip in the first place so if you could somehow do this ultra shortcut without respawning then that would be huge and it seemed like that should be possible by angling your bike to the left more you could make it back to the track without a respawn but doing so would cause the lap to not count because of yet another fail-safe the game has the 95 rule the game actually keeps track of how much of the course you've completed when you enter each checkpoint or at least the game's best estimation of how much you've completed if it ever sees you skipping more than 95 of a track from one checkpoint to the next it won't count the following lap now the game actually isn't that great at tracking this in most cases in courses like grumble volcano for instance where you're clearly skipping more than 95 of the track by going on the rock the game only registers you as skipping about 83 percent so the trick works but on sherbert land since you have to cross over this checkpoint to land on the track the game thinks you went from zero percent to 97 meaning the 95 percent rule was not satisfied and the lap wouldn't count for years the 95 rule prevented the non-respawn ultra shortcut from happening but in may 2019 a tool assisted speedrunner known as swear got an idea the game's percentage of completion updates any time you enter a checkpoint so you could drive ahead to the next checkpoint then re-enter the first checkpoint from further ahead at about two percent completion then if you managed to wall clip and land on the track while your completion percentage updated to 97 the 95 rule would be satisfied and the lap would count so swear got to work at creating a tool assisted speed run of sherbert land a tool-assisted speed run or a tas is a type of speed run where the player uses tools like slow down save states and frame by frame to create higher levels of gameplay than humans can normally perform on may 21 2019 he and fellow tassers akari cf luke and thomas released their three out of three sherbet land tasks with one mushroom used on each lap to just barely land on the track and half the ultra shortcut count a run clocking in at just 35 seconds so the focus turned to doing this normally in real time or rta on may 16th bryce managed to hit the no respawn version but used two mushrooms in the process and could only do it once getting a new world record of 140. just over a month later taylor would improve the record to 129 by doing the two mushroom no respawn method on lap 1 then using his last mushroom to do the wall clip again and land in the water for a lap skip this same method would be improved over the following months down tool 116 by arthur which is where the record stands today as of now nobody has hit the one mushroom no respawn lap skip in real time even once arthur got pretty close in october 2020 with his front tire hitting against the edge but he couldn't make it so given that doing this three times in a row like the tas does seems out of the question right now it looks impossible but who knows what the future of sherbert land landholds these sherbet land developments can be considered the first major events of the ultra shortcut revolution over the following several weeks in mid-2019 discoveries went dormant for a bit while players worked on improving various world records but in july seemingly out of nowhere possibly the craziest day in mario kart wii history took place remember how i mentioned before that ultra shortcuts in the past had been discovered at the rate of about one per year well during these 24 hours there wasn't a new ultra shortcut discovered there were three of them call it a ridiculous coincidence call it a culmination of years of effort from the community whatever it was the end result was incredible on july 11th and 12th new ultra shortcuts were revealed on n64 bowser's castle shy guy beach and koopa cape bowser's castle was first being revealed on july 11th and it looked quite similar to the one on sherbet land this shortcut was first theorized by a taser known as cf and successfully tasked by luke with help from a handful of others it began by doing a humanly impossible trick known as rapid fire hop abuse the game needs your bike to be on the ground for at least two frames to update its rotational angle by alternating pressing and releasing the hot button every frame or 30 times per second you can ensure that your bike is only on the ground for one frame at a time so your bike's rotational angle will never update this can only be done in a tool assisted speed run then once you get near this wall you can release the rapid fire hop abuse causing the game to quickly update your rotational angle and slam your front wheel into the ground you'll briefly fly into the air allowing you to get over the wall next to the finish line by then doing a wall clip you'll fly high in the air and down into the lava this ultra shortcut works just like the one on sherbet land these checkpoints extend out a bit into the lava so it's possible to land in them even without making it to the road so once again you can land out of bounds respawn on the course then go back to hit the last key checkpoint and finish the lap but ultimately even though the shortcut was similar in structure to sherbert land the rapid fire hop abuse made it tas only it was impossible to do this humanly the second shortcut on the other hand was humanly viable but it has quite the background this same day the n64 bowser's castle ultra shortcut was discovered a player named breaks in posted this gif of wall clipping off a bomb right away cf realized the massive potential this had if you could clip off a bomb right in front of the finish line and land somewhere back here you would then be able to touch the last key checkpoint and get an extremely fast lap the bombs in shy guy beach operate on a cycle with bombs landing and exploding at the same times in the same places each time you play and coincidentally right when the race begins a bomb lands in front of the finish line exactly where you'd want to clip off of it so naturally that's what the players were aiming for but every time they tried the bomb would explode just too soon luke was able to get close with the tasks but it exploded frames too early every single time so cf's original task was for the second time the bomb landed there but that meant waiting for over 3 minutes that ruled out any hopes of beating the three lap world record but you could still beat the single lap record by driving to the end of the first lap then waiting until three minutes on the timer you could quickly start the second lap then wall clip off the bomb to the end of the lap and smash the fastest lap hold record and later the same day that's what players were doing justin became the first player to set a world record with the ultra shortcut with a 20 second lap and he chose to spend his three minute wait by eating an entire pack of oreo cookies i am eating with no milk by the way a couple weeks later this method would be improved in a task by ej by starting the clip sooner you could clip off the back of the bomb to shave a fraction of a second although it was more precise this method would ultimately be brought to rta runs as well the current lap record is a 16.9 by jack gloosing one of the most bizarre looking tricks in the game so those were the first two shortcuts both discovered on july 11th they both involved wall clips flying high into the air to skip a lap but just a short while later the third ultra shortcut in 24 hours was discovered and this one was the craziest of all welcome to koopa cape [Music] the credit for this one goes to blaze being revealed in a task on july 12th you start by going to the half pipe in front of the finish line and tilting the nose of your bike down then you start the rapid fire hop abuse to keep your back wheel in the air as you move forward by releasing it you'll get slammed into the ground again and launched high in the air the rapid fire hop abuse alone makes this humanly impossible but in case it didn't this next part would likely take care of that too by angling your wheel up while in the air you can then do a wall clip and land inside the barrier while still technically being on the track then you maneuver close to the finish line with extreme precision and fall off the course when you respawn you're behind the finish line and can finish the lap as this trick stands right now it's certainly not humanly viable getting across this gap seems to be impossible without rapid fire hop abuse so until the way around that is figured out no human will ever perform this outside of a task so those were the three ultra shortcuts discovered in rapid succession including the no respawn shortcut on sherbert land that made it four ultra shortcuts discovered in 2019 never before had the game seen a period of discovery like this there had been years in the past with multiple ultra shortcuts found but never had there been four separate ones the next several months of 2019 came and went without any new discoveries calming the scene for a little while and then came 2020. 2019 may have been an incredible year for mario kart wii but 2020 really was the year of the ultra shortcut and it all started just nine days in on n64 mario raceway this one has to do with the wall in the center of the course players knew for a while that if they could somehow get inside of it they might be able to maneuver around in it to get a lap skip issue was it has a massive invisible wall that extends upward in the sky any attempts to get up inside of it would be blocked by this wall but in early january 2020 a player named jaden pointed out that a section of this wall by the mushroom extended out past the wall and the bottom here has no hit detection so if you could somehow go through this section of the invisible wall you could land inside to set up a lap skip and a player named snoop figured out how to do that in a task wall clipping off of this mushroom from there she then had to get to the end of the lap you essentially have to go around the rest of the course while in the wall but still touching the road doing this is beyond precise you have an incredibly tight space to work with there's a point midway through where you have to turn more than 90 degrees to the left and a player named charlie figured out that to turn that far you have to go extremely slowly and do a standstill mini turbo while in the air this tedious movement continued for a while but snoop eventually got to the end of the lap she then backed across the finish line used a mushroom and fell off the track then respawned and drove to the end for a 19 second lap this incredibly precise portion of the shortcut was developed by jello puff you have to go from this box right in front of the finish line to this box back here without touching this box between or the lap won't count it requires a perfect angle but it can be done this obviously can only be used for lap runs since the setup takes far too long and the best known task is a 16 second lap published by ej but with contributions from a plethora of players but here's the crazy part technically nothing here is humanly impossible there's no rapid fire hop abuse and that wall clip at the start can be done even the movement inside the wall as insanely precise as it is technically none of those moves are strictly humanly impossible so will it ever be done conventional speedrunning logic says that anything theoretically possible will be done eventually but it's hard to say if that applies here most in the mario kart wii community don't see it as a humanly possible trick even though none of the moves themselves are technically impossible right now it just seems a little bit out of reach the next shortcut on the other hand is absolutely out of reach this is dry dry ruins let's start by looking at the checkpoint map as with most of these shortcuts the goal is simple you go from the box in front of the finish line out around the finish line and out of bounds then respawn turn to hit the last key checkpoint and drive forward to finish the lap the key to doing that is getting around the finish line but here's the problem around the course is a massive invisible wall highlighted here in blue you can't get around the finish line checkpoint without getting past this wall and it just goes up and up so that was the big challenge figure out a way to get past the invisible wall blaze took it upon himself to solve it there wasn't a way to go through the wall but blaze had another idea he was gonna try to go over it enter the super grind [Music] a super grind is a form of rapid fire hop abuse you do the normal hop inputs on every other frame but add in alternating between neutral and a direction on the control stick this causes your horizontal speed to build up as well as changing your bike's rotational angle so when you eject off the ramp you get sent high in the air by then doing a wall clip off of the rock you go even higher and can eventually make it up over the invisible wall and out of bounds the rapid fire hop abuse makes this impossible to do humanly but on january 16th blaze managed to get a 27 second lap in a task that made it two ultra shortcuts discovered in january 2020 just one month into the year and two more tracks were already broken the discoveries did slow down for a few months after this as february and march came and went without any new ultra shortcuts but in april the third ultra shortcut of 2020 was revealed and this one had been in development for a long time this is bowser castle 3. to start we have to go back to july 2019 when justin came up with a rough idea for an ultra shortcut that would barely save any time at the end of the lap you could hop up on the wall and wall clip to cut this corner of the track issue was you'd be skipping the second to last key checkpoint your tracker would be at 5 then wouldn't update the 6 and since region 7 isn't loaded the lap wouldn't count but luckily justin had a way around that skipping the first key checkpoint too this might seem counterintuitive but think about how the checkpoint system works by skipping region one the game thinks you're still in region zero meaning the last region is loaded too so skipping region 6 is inconsequential since the only other region loaded is region 7 and the counter updates once you get there allowing for a successful lap this same idea of skipping the first checkpoint to allow for a later skip was already used on maple freeway so it wasn't a new concept justin's idea for skipping the first checkpoint involved while clipping off the finish line pole but that ultimately wouldn't end up working the angle you would need to approach the pole wasn't viable for a wall clip so that idea was ruled out the next day benny theorized another method it was actually possible to wall clip off of certain blocks you can very precisely fall off the side of these blocks then do a wall clip off of them to get launched far forward and as snoop figured out this method was viable but only if you use the spear the fastest bike in the game even with the second clip later the lap was still slower than the non-shortcut record since the spear's poor drift costs too much time the non-shortcut task to beat was 36.656 if someone could get a time under that then this would officially be a new ultra shortcut esteloy 62 and curio would later prove that the first skip was possible with the flame runner the bike typically best for getting fast times that opened the door to maybe turning it into an official or shortcut but when akarian monster lowered the non-shortcut task down by half a second in october that put a bit of a damper on things but a few months later a group of tassers came back they felt that if they could just find a bit of time to save they could make this ultra shortcut a reality so they got to work the time to beat was 35.936 [Music] [Music] on april 26th the final task was published a 35.743 just ahead of the non-shortcut lap record ej was technically the first person to beat the non-shortcut tasks after finding the faster way to turn for the second skip but the final product had contributions from esteloi curio mallio marth monster rocky and snoop a remarkable journey from many members in the community culminating in a new ultra shortcut by the slimmest of margins the third of 2020. now none of these three had been done humanly but just seeing ways that a task could break courses was amazing still though there wasn't anything new where you could pick up a controller and perform it that's what the discoveries of 2020 had been missing but in july an interesting development was made to an old one waluigi stadium had an ultra shortcut from back in 2015 you did a massive jump up high to skip the first keycheck point then performed rapid fire hop abuse to clip through a zipper and skip part of the course it was an impressive shortcut but the rapid fire hop abuse made it tas only end of story right well for years players have been working to make the shortcut humanly possible one of the earliest efforts was from a player named sam f his idea was to jump in the air hit off the top of the finish line banner and pass through an invisible wall to later in the track this finish line banner is technically a horizontal wall and whenever your bike contacts one it's temporarily able to pass through all other walls although sam couldn't make it to the track with his method using the banner for the invisible wall would be explored years later in january 2020 justin and benny came up with a variant of the original task method you'd do a mini turbo for speed reach the top of the banner and use it to clip through the invisible wall all without using a mushroom then upon reaching the track rather than doing the rapid fire hop abuse to clip through the zipper you do this believe it or not this second part of the shortcut was viable it was the shroomless banner clip at the start that the community was unsure of even with the precision of a tas you'd just barely have enough speed to make it to the track so this version was put on the back burner but then half a year later jello puff proved that sam's original method was possible to do in real time the key was using the bullet bike and using a task to perfect the angle and drift once again nobody knew for sure if this was too precise to do humanly but the inputs themselves weren't impossible players tried to do this for a few days but ultimately nobody was able to hit it back to the drawing board until ej came out with this method five days later [Music] it was similar to justin and benny's method but had much more leeway you would use a mushroom to make it up to the banner then clip to the left and have your front tire hit the dirt by then hopping your bike will bounce to the right just enough to make it to the course you could then turn around hit the last key checkpoint and finish the lap right away people figured this would be humanly possible the question was who would pull it off first well just three days later that question was answered the player's name was logan and he managed to time the hop perfectly and land out of bounds to get a 148 three lap record this was effectively the same as the task version but he had to waste some time getting picked up rather than landing right back on the course this record would eventually be lowered to 143 by not having to respawn but there's still potential to take quite a bit of time off of it it's possible to do this shortcut three times in a race using one mushroom per lap but given the difficulty of doing this just once it's a bit of a long shot there's also been attempts to hit sam's original method which would be faster but nobody's been able to yet if either of those two tricks are hit waluigi stadium's record could still be crushed but as it turns out the improvements to old strategies weren't done let's take a look at ghost valley 2. [Music] this one is pretty small but looks impressive the original ghost valley 2 shortcut was discovered in 2009 and involved doing a wall clip off the finish line pole to skip further in the track but six years later this shortcut would be improved by of course none other than blaze after landing from the first wall clip you could turn around and do a second one off of these blocks skipping to the end of the lap the checkpoint map shows how this works by leaving from the finish line box the game still thinks you're in region zero so skipping to later in the track is no issue as long as you go back to hit the last key checkpoint the game thinks you drove the lap normally and counts it the only issue with this shortcut was that it only saved a fraction of a second since you used all your mushrooms and couldn't do a normal wall clip on the other laps even though the second part was humanly possible doing it fast enough to save time was tough for years nobody was able to do it in a 3-lap record but finally in october 2020 logan did it beating the old record by just a tenth of a second and to this day nobody else has been able to pull off both wall clips in a world record speed run so that makes five ultra shortcuts or ultra shortcut improvements pulled off in 2020. these shortcuts have a wide range of human viability some are tricks humans can regularly perform like shy guy beach or ghost valley too others will never be pulled off in their current state courses like dry dry ruins have tricks that make them impossible one of those tasks only shortcuts was n64 bowser's castle i mentioned before how this trick involved rapid fire hop abuse to get over the wall alternating tapping the hot button on every other frame 30 times per second isn't humanly possible so any trick that requires this can't be done outside of a task but remember what i said before the rapid fire hop abuse made it tas only it was impossible to do this humanly was impossible keyword was in november 2020 tasser cf came back to take another look at n64 bowser's castle looking for a way to bypass the rapid fire hop abuse and sure enough he found a way to make the ultra shortcut humanly possible this is the barrel roll [Music] this was a trick discovered the same year the game came out back in 2008 but wasn't fully explored until many years later you have to go up on a wall then do a wheelie while you slowly fall over the edge if done properly your bike then enters a state where the game won't try to correct the bike's rotation as long as you stay at a low speed then while on the barrel roll state you can line yourself up with the finish line bowl by using a mushroom the game will try to quickly correct your rotational angle and just like with rapid fire hop abuse this causes your bike to snap back to normal allowing you to go over the wall and clip off the finish line pole the end result is exactly the same as with rapid fire hop abuse difference is now you don't need to button mash like a tass but doing this trick was still unbelievably precise you needed to get the correct bounce be lined up perfectly with the pole then get a big enough clip to make it all the way to the checkpoint three variables that despite technically all being possible needed a miracle to all line up in the same run who is crazy enough to try to get all of that they answer of course it was logan this was the same guy who first pulled off the waluigi stadium shortcut outside of the tass and who first got the double wall clip on ghost valley 2. he had also gotten dozens of other records over the course of a few years so he certainly had the skill needed to do this but this was one of the hardest tricks ever discovered in mario kart wii these were his attempts in the winter of [Music] 2020 [Music] no way no way no way come on give it to me no i crossed backwards i crossed [Music] i don't think they care about shortcuts we i think we just did it i think we just did it oh no ow no i thought that was it what no [Music] turn out on this i need a new track never mind no come on please one time oh come on [Music] logan's long grind had finally paid off you could see the top 10 times in the world at the start of his record video everyone had a low 231 or 230 except for logan he was alone with a 220 a full 10 seconds ahead of the rest thanks to the ultra shortcut to this day nobody else has been able to pull it off as more time has passed more old ultra shortcuts thought to be impossible have had new methods discovered koopa cape is an example of this recently justin found a way to implement a barrel roll to do a wall clip and get out of balance without needing to do rapid-fire hop abuse this setup would later be improved by ej but despite this it's still unclear if it will ever be executed outside of a task the precision needed is beyond nearly every other ultra shortcut in the game and although players have tried nobody has come close to hitting it yet now there's still one more course we have to talk about and you probably know which one it is this is rainbow road this shortcut's legacy is unrivaled rainbow road's ultra shortcut is a trick that perfectly exemplifies the community's effort and this story around it is simply incredible it all started back in march 2016 when tasser estolo 62 posted a video to youtube rainbow road new ultra shortcut this video was a task where estelloy went forward then turned around in front of the railing she then got some speed and hopped barely balancing on the outside of the railing by using a mushroom and performing a spin drift where you drift to the right while holding left she managed to spin far to the right while getting a lot of air time to move further ahead she then angled the nose of the bike down to get a nose dive causing a big bounce that threw her over the edge finally once she was halfway to the other side she used a mushroom for speed and held back on the controller to fall slower she made it across and had just cut out almost the entire lap now these inputs on their own are super tough but the locations of the checkpoints means this is even more precise than it looks when you move forward to go behind the railing you leave key checkpoint zero and enter keycheck.1 however you need to ultimately leave the track from region zero for the lack to count so one of the hardest parts was making it back far enough to nick the corner of region zero before flying off the edge but if you managed to pull that off all you needed to do was drive forward through the last key checkpoint and the lap would count chaining all these inputs together was beyond precise for years nobody made any real progress on pulling off estoy shortcut on the task side of things however there was one possible improvement see estello used all three of her mushrooms to make it across the track and shortly after it was discovered that you really only needed to use two of them one right before the spindrift and one to provide speed to make it to the other side unfortunately even using just two mushrooms meant you could only do this shortcut once per race since you just have one mushroom left over but what about taking it a step further what about doing this shortcut with just one mushroom well if that was possible that would mean you could do the shortcut three times once per lap to finish the race in under a minute for years it seemed out of the question but in late 2020 tasser started taking a closer look at it on november 21st cf made a task that used one mushroom before the spin drift then just barely made it to the track without using a second one he did it but the lap didn't count the reason why was because he didn't go far enough back to enter region zero this step was much harder than it looked going far enough back involves delaying when you launch off the edge as long as possible which means your mushroom will run out faster cf used the quacker to help him since it gave better bounces at the cost of a slower speed but still wasn't able to make it far enough back what this run did do however was inspire malio to start attempts of his own maglio is a well-known tasser of paper mario mario kart wii and various other games in late december 2020 he turned his attention to rainbow road trying to become the first player to create a one mushroom task of the ultra shortcut he didn't know if it was possible so all he could do was sit down with the tas and try over and over oh my god this might actually happen holy holy [ __ ] that's so close oh my god this is happening this is happening this is happening hello summoning salt how are you all right now i have to make it [Music] [Music] on december 28 2020 malio proved that the one mushroom ultra shortcut was possible rainbow road's ultra shortcut could now be done on each lap the course is done mario kart wii did its best to make players drive normally but thanks to the efforts of so many in the community it was overcome rainbow road has been fully broken but what about on the non-task side of things this three out of three one mushroom method is considered a hundred percent humanly impossible partly because of its precision but partly because malio briefly did rapid fire hop abuse as well that rules out any human ever performing the rainbow road ultra shortcut three times in a race and beating the course in under a minute at least for now but what about the normal ultra shortcut well after esteloid discovered it this trick was assumed to be humanly impossible community members proclaimed that it would never be done because the precision was way beyond other ultra shortcuts each step of the trick had its own set of insanely precise inputs that would need to be performed for years after its discovery few serious attempts were made at landing it but as more and more of these other incredibly difficult and precise ultra shortcuts were hit rainbow road's legacy just grew bigger and bigger it became the holy grail of mario kart wii shortcuts so by 2018 the quest for the rainbow road ultra shortcut began one of the first serious contenders was king alex a player with a long career who's held numerous records over the years he posted a video in august 2018 of some of his closest attempts there were some nice runs but they all either didn't have enough rotation or had too small of amounts they all ended in him falling well short of the track in 2019 he did more attempts this time the closest ones died because he hit the outer bounce planes these were close to reaching the road but once he hit the plane all of them stopped dead in their tracks still these runs looked close enough to the task that some serious excitement was brewing in the community by late 2019 more players were trying in november a player named taylor had probably the closest call so far making it really close to the track but ultimately taylor 2 fell short in april 2020 esteemed world record holder justin had an attempt that looked extremely close but he hadn't gone far enough back to hit region zero so four years after the ultra shortcut was discovered even though there had been somewhat close calls players still weren't quite doing all they needed to do to hit it but in november 2020 players would get some help when cf released his task with the quacker i mentioned before how this helped get a three out of three tasks since the quacker gives bigger bounces but this improvement would also help with the normal shortcut a bigger bounce meant there was a higher chance of making it to the road which did help a bit so now there was new life for the rainbow road ultra shortcut more players than ever before were going for it each of them wanting to be the one that would go down in history as the first to pull off the most legendary shortcut in mario kart wii and on december 6 2020 arthur did this [Music] [Applause] but the lap didn't count he had just missed going back far enough to reach region zero a youtuber named windbag4 posted a demonstration that had a green line to represent where arthur needed to go for the lap to count as you can see he barely missed nicking it so the checkpoint didn't update this tiny distance was how close arthur came to making history the very next day a player named core became the second person to cross the gap of rainbow road but he too didn't go far enough back it seems that he was a few pixels closer than arthur to hitting region zero but he still didn't reach it that was two players in the same week who made it across the gap but just couldn't get the lap to count and a short while later a third player made it across happy with sugar he too reached the other side of the road but wasn't far enough back to get the lap skip and unlike arthur and core sugar would go on to repeat this feat five more times leaving him with half a dozen skips that didn't count the lap yeah you all see that [Music] it's number six it's not not a lap count don't get too excited that was the real hard part of this ultra shortcut making it across the gap was tough but doing it from region 0 that was another story despite all of these close calls none of them were able to get the lap to count weeks passed 2021 began and still nobody had pulled it off at this point the rainbow road ultra shortcut had stood to test the time for 5 years thousands of attempts from dozens of different players in my first mario kart wii video i made a sincere statement the rainbow road ultra shortcut would one day be pulled off the only question was who was going to be the author well turns out i was pretty close do [Music] oh my god oh my god guys keep keep that guys oh wait wait wait wait guys i did it i did it i did it i did it i did it i did it [Music] if you enjoyed it would mean a lot to me if you could share the video with one to two other people it goes a long way on youtube also the pages for those who help me make this are in a pinned comment so check them out if you're interested thanks [Music] you

Channel: Summoning Salt

Views: 2,164,744

Rating: 4.9633579 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: mAh4IJysiLU

Length: 52min 22sec (3142 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Skgr]

Everyone else in this comment section is saying how this video is boring, and that was my first reaction upon clicking on it and seeing how long it was. A 50 minute video on an old Mario Kart game? Ain't nobody got time for that!

...But then I ended up watching the entire thing.

[u/Erenito]

I feel like this video was missing the human stories of perseverance, frustration and triumph that made me fall in love with speedrunning and his videos in the first place.

[u/afcaMouz]

His first video on the ultra shortcut was the first thing that came to mind after I saw the post on LSF when Arthur beat the Rainbow Road shortcut and was somewhat hoping for an update on this.

Not one of his best videos considering so much of is centered around TAS speedruns but pretty much anything this man makes is a must watch for me.

[u/FlyingIctus]

I see the tenor of the comments and I totally understand - for a lot of people speedrunning is most interesting when people are working within the general bounds of the game as intended.

That said, this shit is exactly up my alley. I've been fascinated by glitches for as long as I can remember, they're why I love speedrunning, and watching a game get completely broken to the point that it's almost recognizable is my absolute favorite thing about speedrunning. This is my bread and butter and I loved it!

[u/BorisAcornKing]

he's an interesting and engaging presenter but im kinda tired of him having turned into a mario kart focused channel. there are a lot of interesting speed games out there, but 6 of his last 13 videos have been lengthy presentations on the same game series. mario kart just stops being interesting after a certain point.

[u/LiarInGlass]

I love everything Summoning Salt puts out and will watch every video of us when I notice they're out, but I'm on board with most of the others in saying I'm a little tired of the Mario Kart stuff. I love Mario Kart and it's always fun to see, but I'm ready for some different games covered. I want to see some different games soon.

[u/BlahBlahSeagull]

I love summoning salt but knowing that most of the tricks aren’t actually possible kind of takes the fun out of the video his videos are best when it’s people pulling off insane stunts and not when TAS are doing it all

[u/JanetYellensFuckboy]

This guy's videos are so niche, I have absolutely no reason watch them. But his analysis is so technical, I find them absolutely fascinating.

[u/Sparkmovement]

Like some of the other comments, it might just be that I am sick of watching mario kart. But this was the first summoning salt video that couldn't hold my attention & I stopped it.