Super Mario Bros. 3 Speedrun World Record Explained

on october 22nd 2018 mitchflower power achieved a new world record by completing super mario brothers 3 in 10 minutes and 44.416 seconds when watching the run some things might seem odd or even suspicious why does he wait here why does he slow down how does he jump on a wall what makes the speed one so good let's answer all of those questions and more this is the super mario brothers 3 world record speedrun explained first of all the category this is 80 no wrong warp the any percent part means that the goal is to finish the game by reaching this screen no matter how much of the game was actually completed the use of warp whistles is allowed so the goal will be to get two warp whistles then to use them both to warp to world 8 and then to beat world 8 as quickly as possible for speedruns that complete more of the game there's warp less and 100 if you want to check out these runs you can find the link in the video description the no wrong wire part is a bit more complex to explain in short there's a glitch that under certain circumstances can force the game to read the value of variables in memory as if it was instructions of game code with an extremely precise setup there's a way to set values for those variables that translate into instructions that tell the game to skip to the end screen immediately this is a wrong one and that specific instance is called the credits warp it's a fascinating albeit very different speed run and will be covered in a separate video [Music] um as you may have noticed mid slowed down here but then mario is moving much faster there's a crucial mechanic in mario brothers 3 called p-speed the meter at the bottom of the screen fills up when mario is running when it's full mario will run faster jump higher and if he has the super leaf or the tanuki suit be able to fly the meter only fills up when b is held and mario is running on the ground at top speed mitch wants to fill up the p-meter as early as possible to make use of that faster movement speed he barely doesn't have enough space to fill it all the way up while jumping over the goomba so as soon as he reaches p-speed he jumps and does a quick left tap to dodge the piranha plant doing it this way is still faster than jumping earlier and filling up the meter later bouncing on these enemies is simply done by jumping right before touching them in the last three frames before getting hit i play too hard here the hammer brother moves before mario can start moving this happens every time when going back to the world map while at least one hammer brother is there each hammer brother chooses one direction to go in then it checks if the spot under it is free hammer brothers can't stay on a stage a mushroom house or another hammer brother in that case they keep moving only going back the way they came from if they're in a dead end interestingly hammer brothers cannot choose to go towards a spade game a pipe or completed level and if they move to a matching card game both the hammer brother and the matching card game will move to try to find a free spot this can lead to situations where a hammer brother is trapped or where two hammer brothers watch together for a very long time or even worse where a hammer brother in a matching game are stuck together forever soft locking the game world 1 will be loaded a total of 4 times once after each of these 4 stages so the hammer brother has 29 different possibilities to move between 4 and 8 tiles of total movement every time it moves by more than a single tile the additional movement costs a bit over half a second because of the mechanics behind the choice of a direction to go in the possibilities are not equi-probable the optimal pattern only has a 3.5 percent chance of happening the likeliest scenario is that it moves seven squares in total and the expected average is a little over six squares in this run the hammer brother moved by two one two and one for a total of six squares which is a little bit better than average there's only a 22 percent chance of getting a better pattern than this there are many more random elements in this run and the chance of all of them being perfect is astronomically low not getting the optimal hammer brother pattern is not a big deal [Music] in this level p-speed can only be acquired a bit later it's theoretically possible to fill up the p-meter from the beginning but that requires extremely precise inputs that are too hard to execute in real time the fastest strategy to beat the level as demonstrated by the tool assisted speedrun for this game is even crazier instead mitch goes for a strategy that is much easier at the cost of a fraction of a second somebody tripped over the cable and plugged the server damn right they did yo angel wind what's up [Music] mitch will need a super leaf to fly up to the second warp whistle so he needs a mushroom first the fastest to get is here because bumping on this block from the side allows him to grab the mushroom faster and keep more momentum than he would have kept from a regular block many of you may already know this but after holding down on white blocks for four seconds mario falls behind the background which allows him to get behind the black wall at the end of the stage hidden behind it is the secret exit that rewards him with the first warp whistle by timing it correctly mitch was able to start moving and build up as much speed as possible right before the 4 second threshold holding this koopa shell also left him run through this goopa letting him reach b speed without losing his mushroom or having to jump i thought you were saving bits for a loot crate yeah don't be spending your bits you gotta save them moving on the overworld map is not as simple as it seems the first movement after loading the map can be buffered by holding the desired direction for every subsequent movement attempting to move too early results in mario being unable to move for the next 24 frames which at this level of play is a major mistake additionally when moving by multiple spaces in any given direction holding the d-pad makes mario move every 16 frames but only after having to wait for those 24 frames first so to move around optimally mitch actually needs to time his d-pad presses perfectly in this run he will need to move on the overworld map 38 times so it adds up very quickly this is the second of the two whistles needed to reach world 8. whenever mario jumps with b-speed a counter runs for a little over 4 seconds if it reaches 0 before mario lands and regains p-speed the p-meter will reset preventing mario from flying any further the counter always starts when mario jumps no matter his power web state so this is why he can fly up even though he didn't have the leaf at the moment he jumped as long as this jump timer is active mario's speed is not taken into account so mario can turn around without resetting the p-meter this also means that it's possible to reset the p-meter by repeatedly bouncing until the timer hits zero even without the super leaf i read that part burns yeah that sucks using a whistle will take you to the warp zone depending on which world it was used in mario will be placed in the next row unless he was already in world 8 but you can use a second whistle when already in the warp zone to go directly to the last row this is the fastest way to reach the final world from the start of the game the band-aid the band-aid strat this is the first of four auto-scrolling levels in world 8. unfortunately there is no way to speed up these levels significantly so all mitch has to do is to avoid losing time the main thing to look out for in this level is lag which can easily happen when too many enemies are on screen at once so he tries to clear out enemies and prevent bombs from exploding the stories the stories were too embarrassing twitch chat was like shut it down shut the mfp chat down uh i'm guaranteed one of the hands most likely there is one way to reach the pipe faster and that is by clipping inside of a block and letting the wall push mario to the right and partly off screen as you can see in this comparison with the tool assisted speed run however this is way too difficult to achieve and involves a high risk for a low reward if mario gets pushed off screen he will be crushed and die he can only get pushed a maximum of 22 pixels forward given that auto scrollers move by one pixel every two frames this trick can only save a maximum of 44 frames if done perfectly which is not even three quarters of a second this part is where reducing lag is the most important getting rid of these bombs is crucial to avoid a slowdown and time loss why are we doing pickup lines uh i didn't know we were on the pickup lines i'm not a pickup line person i don't know if i've ever used a pickup line on someone before in this room there are two key details to note first the chest only spawns when all enemies are dead and their projectiles are off screen the boomerang row can move forwards or backwards if it moves forwards it will throw its boomerang from further left so the boomerang will take an extra 22 frames to go off screen delaying the chest by the same amount fortunately it went backwards in this run however the boomerang broke can also choose to delay its throw by 15 frames which is what happened here so of the four different possibilities mitch got the second best outcome here's the second detail when the chest spawns it will be placed at one of these two points it always appears at the furthest of the two so to reach the chest faster mitch made sure to keep mario in the right half of the room while building up speed to the left crossing the middle point right as the chest spawned i've never really done pickup lines before i've always found them to be super like too much whether they work or not i you know that's not up for me to decide i don't really care or like has nothing to do with me i just always thought that me doing them was like weird i don't know i'm just not a pickup line kind of person this fire flower is one of the toughest power ups to grab and keep in a 2d mario game even though mitch makes it look easy he needs to grab it for the upcoming battle against boom boom because using fireballs is faster than stomping on him three times in fact mitch needs to keep this fire flower through the entirety of world viii the remaining auto scrollers in the run have very little going on so they're going to be fast forwarded through if you'd like to watch them in full the unedited speedrun is in the video description [Music] when coming out of the pipe mario can't move to the right until he touches the floor mitch uses this to his advantage by letting go of the d-pad with his left hand so he can match the b button with both hands this lets him throw two fireballs the maximum that can be on screen at once as quickly as possible when fireballs hit a target they go out in a puff of smoke only when that puff of smoke has completely disappeared can a new fireball be thrown however if we look closely you can see that he actually threw the third fireball 11 frames after the first one fully disappeared this is actually on purpose boom boom can sometimes jump over fireballs causing them to miss so mitch intentionally delays his fireballs by about a fifth of a second to make sure that never happens after that he throws the final fireball only a couple of frames after the third one fully disappears you can tell how fast a boom boom fight was visually by looking at where he is compared to the floor texture an optimal fight ends with boom boom centered on this line as you can see mitch barely lost any time to an optimal fight the tool assisted run can actually kill boom boom even faster but humans simply can't attain that level of perfection yo i did it without bumping i finally did it how do i press b so fast i used both my thumbs how did mario go over these squares without being grabbed once well the short answer is look when mario goes over each one of these three squares he has a 50 50 chance of being grabbed by a hand and forced into the stage each of them is a pretty large time loss so to have a chance at the record mitch needs to be lucky enough to avoid being grabbed all three times this results in a 1 in 8 chance this is by far the most important element of luck in the run other factors can cost small amounts of time here and there but these hands cause 7 runs out of 8 to come to a dead end right there this boom boom fight also went very well for mitch he executed this strategy pretty much perfectly i'm surprised i got no bump [Music] bumpless here mitch intentionally slows down and waits before jumping to kill this piranha plant this is because piranha plants take aim for a short time then fire either up or down depending on where mario is relative to them if mitch had jumped earlier the plant would have fired up and hit mario so he made sure to wait until the plant fired its fireball down before he jumped and he kept his precious fire flower there's a special property of the p-meter that i haven't explained yet and it's especially relevant here the p-meter builds up only if mario is running at full speed on the ground and b is held but it doesn't check for these conditions at all times it only checks once every 8 frames here mitch needs to throw a fireball to kill the paratroopa which means he needs to release b if he's not holding b when the p-meter checks for the conditions or if he lets his speed drop the p-meter won't increment instead it will decrement by one arrow and reset its timer to 24 frames effectively delaying p-speed by 32 frames there simply isn't enough room to get p-speeded that happens so mitch needs to release b when the p-meter is not checking for it and repress it fast enough to not lose any speed according to his input display he released it for only two frames here mitch slowed down intentionally mario gets a card at the end of every numbered stage the card always cycles between a mushroom a flower and a star usually running at p speed and jumping into the card will give mario a star this is what happened in the first two levels matching three stars gives you five lives with this long fanfare so he wants to avoid it and get the much shorter single one up instead so he delays his jump just enough for the card to cycle back to the mushroom mario has momentum in this game so i can hold the d-pad let go quick shoot and go back to d-pad without much of a difference being made [Music] oh god damn it what a surprise i can't believe i kept p speed but both times both both no hands runs got the bad rng here you can see mitch's slowed down considerably and was visibly annoyed what happened he had to slow down because of the angry sun optimally this section would look like this however the sun affects how you need to approach this part the sun swoops down after spinning in the corner a random amount between two and five times if it spins three times or more there's enough time to bounce through this section near seamlessly but if it spins only twice there is no way to get past it without slowing down it did spin twice here so it would have hit mario had he followed this route this forced mitch to slow down unfortunately losing about half a second in the process this is possibly the biggest time loss in the entire speedrun which speaks volumes about the quality of the run itself again though considering the 1 and 8 chance at mitch just overcame this is not the end of the world [Music] my slide [Music] this room is very tricky to get through this quickly without getting hit especially this jump to avoid the roto disc which has a two frame window mitch's capture card missed the frame where mario is on the ground but you can see that mario is still in midair on this frame and two frames later he already jumped again the layout of this room makes reaching p-speed extremely tricky mitch intentionally stays on this backwards conveyor belt to maximize the time spent running at full speed the small time loss from the backwards momentum of the conveyor is largely outweighed by the benefit of reaching p-speed before leaving this platform similarly because he has to jump between these two platforms anyway he stays on this forwards moving conveyor as little as possible this one tile gap is crucial if the p-meter happens to check for the three conditions while mario is above the gap mario won't be on the ground so the meter will not increment so the three or four frames where mario is over the gap need to fall in between two of these checks it's hard to tell precisely when the check is made because the p-meter doesn't always visually update at the same time but it possibly incremented exactly on the frame where mario landed on the ground here mario somehow kept p-speed through the door how is that possible normally because mario is stationary coming out of the door the p-meter is reset however by jumping shortly after exiting the door mario will jump before the p-meter resets because mario is now in the air the p-meter is relying on the jump timer instead of mario's speed so it doesn't reset once he lands he does briefly lose p-speed but since he's already going almost at full speed it doesn't take long for him to get it right back this door is only there while the p-switch is active thanks to p-speed conservation mitch is able to make it in using the far p switch otherwise he would have had to hit this one instead p-switches also stopped conveyor belts so if he had hit the closed switch he would have had to wait out its timer before being carried under the spikes in the final moments of the p-switch because the conveyor is stopped anyway mitch takes some time to build up momentum to slide as far as possible under the spikes jumping here lets mario accelerate to a higher speed which translates to an increased sliding distance that outweighs the benefits of the conveyor's momentum optimally this would be the best strategy however in this run it would have been a few frames faster to simply go to the right it all depends on exactly how long is left on the p-switch timer right on now remember the world record presses a on bowser's castle at 9 52. [Music] remember 9 52 on the a press in bowser's castle is the world record if you look closely you can see that boom boom is a little off to the left which means mitch lost some time on this fight his fireball timing was again top notch but he lost time here because when throwing the last fireball mario was standing a bit away from boom boom so the fireball traveled for longer before hitting him this is a very minor time loss though overall the boom boom fights in this run went very well looks like i'm pretty par with it [Music] okay this part needs a deep dive there are three major things happening here the wall jump the thwomp kill and the wall clip let's start with the wall jump when mario hits the side of any block he moves partly inside the block and gets pushed out on the next frame so after running into a wall he can be found inside of the wall for a short time everything from ground to pipes to walls is broken up into individual blocks this piece of the wall is in no way different to any ground block mario can stand on if on the first frame mario is found inside of a wall he's on top of a block that makes up that wall he can stand on it for that one frame so he can also jump from this position note that as opposed to super mario brothers mario doesn't need to be exactly on the top pixel of the block of the 16 pixels that make up each block a wall jump is possible for 6 of them but this is not as simple as a frame perfect jump to be able to stand on the block mario needs to be at least this far in 3 pixels inside the wall mario's position is calculated with more precision than the visual resolution of the screen the smallest unit of distance the game commonly uses is 1 16 of a pixel which is called a subpixel consequently mario's speed is calculated in subpixels per frame so a speed of 16 is exactly 1 pixel per frame and mario's top speed without a full p meter is 40 or 2 and a half pixels per frame at that speed he will alternate between moving 2 pixels and 3 pixels on every frame this means that assuming mario is coming into the wall pixel perfectly at full speed there's only a 50 50 chance that he will move 3 pixels into the wall if his subpixel position is in the lower half he will move by 2 pixels instead which is not enough to stand inside of the wall from any random starting position only 8 out of 40 subpixels allow mario to wall jump so by running at full speed into a wall and jumping at a random part of it the chance of having the opportunity to perform a one frame wall jump is only 7 percent here mitch was possibly not moving at full speed we can't measure exactly how much speed he had but it seems to be somewhere between 36 and 40. every unit of speed below 40 makes the wall jump increasingly unlikely with the absolute minimum speed being 33 just one subpixel above 2 pixels per frame mario's subpixel position is entirely out of mitch's control as it's never set to a fixed value at any point other than the very start of the run on top of that mitch needs to time his jump very perfectly while mario is stumbling in the air because of the star power making it very hard to see where he is exactly relative to the wall all of this makes the wall jump the single hardest trick in this run by a long shot it's particularly inconvenient that it's right at the very end of the run after 4 auto scrollers in a 1 in 8 chance the next part is this thwomp kill mitch needs to keep his fire flower for the bowser fight so that's why he uses the star that he got in this level to get through the swamp the star expiring seems like a pretty close call but just how close is it well we can use bios flashing as a reference it turns out that the last frame of invincibility is exactly two frames before mario returns to his normal color which happens to be this frame that's right this one kill was frame perfect one frame later and the star would have had expired the wall clip is a bit different by duck jumping into this pixel and releasing down mario stands on the block and uncrouches this puts his upper half fully inside of the ceiling in this case instead of ejecting mario to the left the game slowly pulls mario to the right until he's out on the other side the easiest and most famous way to do this is using this one of block as simply jumping onto the block and uncrouching will get mario to the other side of the wall mario is moving at the same speed so the odds of mario ending up 3 pixels inside the wall are again about 1 in 5. it would seem that the wall jump from just a few seconds earlier would give some insight on the subpixel value of mario's position but this value is so finicky that tiny factors such as the exact subpixel when hitting the wall jump the slightly irregular acceleration mechanics and having to duck before the jump are more than enough to throw any guess out of the window as a result the subpixel position is again effectively random bowser's castle has a pretty complex layout there are two different paths and two different arenas this door leads to this section of the subworld in this arena and that door leads to that section in the second arena however because there's only one subworld these are all connected by taking this door and going through the wall mario ends up where this door normally takes him this cuts most of the level but prevents mario from going through this section with the speed overall it saves about 5 seconds here mario ducks to fit under the ceiling without hitting it however if he was moving at full speed he would have still hit it so mitch intentionally presses down earlier and slides on this statue while sliding mario gradually loses speed and this tiny slow down is just enough to barely miss the corner the usual way to defeat bowser is to force him to destroy the floor until he falls down but using fireballs is about 25 seconds faster bowser takes 35 fireballs to kill mitch positions himself perfectly so that bowser would jump right next to him allowing him to fire the last few fireballs faster what what and just like that super mario brothers 3 was beaten in 10 minutes and 44 seconds the timing ends on entering the door specifically on this frame mitch stopped his timer at 10 44 47 but upon retiming the run it was found to be a 1044.416 with this run he beat the previous world record set by kirua in 2017 by just under one second sorry about that scream so what else can be done to improve the record well although mitch got very fortunate patterns there's always room for faster hammer bros in a better sun pattern together these could save a bit over a second also although his map movement was astoundingly accurate mitch did slowly lose frames over the course of the run compared to frank perfect gameplay he lost a total of 25 frames in the 38 overworld moves and 31 frames entering the 16 stages of the run this sums up to 56 frames not even a second off absolute perfection keep in mind that being early even by a single frame is a large time loss yet miz somehow did most of the actions on the map within one frame of perfect other than that there are a few little things here and there that add up like the boom boom fights the world one levels and 8-1 for instance there's almost always frames to squeeze out of these sections but it's hard to estimate exactly how many there is some time left to save by adding more tricks to the run the 1-2 sliding strategy is too precise to pull off in real-time runs the issue with it is two-fold first actually reaching the maximum sliding speed is nearly impossible without either getting hit by the goomba or hitting this wall second mario slows down when he touches the ground requiring frame perfect jumps to preserve his speed a sub-optimal speed carries through the entire stage so these compounding speed losses make this trick not only extremely hard to pull off in the first place but also even harder to save any time with it the tank and navy auto scrollers can be sped up by up to 44 frames using this block clip although very hard it has been done in real time before and it is considered a somewhat viable option to save time on the record considering that getting out of the block one frame late is instant death it's fair to assume that runners would air on the safe side and jump a bit early saving about 30 to 40 frames per clip at most or a bit over a second if going for both the first one is much harder to pull off though due to this precise jump on the cannonball to reach the final tank in bowser's castle there is potential for a strategy to build up p-speed here that would involve turning back between the p-meter checks but without precise knowledge of which frame the p-meter is checking on this would be a ridiculously risky endeavor even with that knowledge it would still be incredibly hard to slow down just the right amount to always be at full speed every 8 frames while saving enough distance to fill up the p-meter before leaving the ground it is a possible area of development but it looks unlikely as of now finally the holy grail in rare instances bowser can have this much lower death animation and fall down faster compare this with the regular animation that mitch got in his run surely this would save a lot of time right well it turns out it only saves 1 second it also requires hitting the final fireball on bowser frame perfectly at the same time he starts his animation to jump it also needs to be a low jump because if he does a high jump instead this happens in that case the fanfare is delayed by almost a minute and a half needless to say performing a frame perfect kill on the random bowser pattern so you can risk the entire run on a coin flip to save one second is the last thing anyone wants to do to beat this record all things considered we can see that super mario brothers 3 has not quite reached its limit just yet but it's incredibly close the tool assisted speedrun by tampa maru and lortong clocks in at 10 23 but almost nothing in this run can ever be pulled off by a human if someone pulled off a run with perfect luck perfect map movement both auto scroller clips and a fast bowser death it would just be barely enough to break the 1040 barrier it's unclear whether or not this will ever happen as of right now nobody is actively trying to achieve such a feat i personally think a 1039 is simply too hard to be done but i'd sure love to be proven wrong [Music] you

Channel: Bismuth

Views: 543,217

Rating: 4.9264145 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 4WoMl-fEPtc

Length: 32min 20sec (1940 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/xMF_GLOOM]

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