[Simply] - Did you see that? Let me play it back one more time to see if you caught what happened. You might be thinking, "Seems normal. Just looks like Mario doing a kick." But this kick is not a regular kick. This is called a Speed-Kick. (hype music) If you don't know how Mario movement works, there's only two main buttons: A and B. And Z, and R... but- A and B are basically how you do moves. A is typically to jump. B is the punch. B could be a kick. Or, if you're going fast enough, B becomes a dive. But this is why it is called a Speed-Kick. If you have a lot of speed and you do the right inputs you can kick instead of dive when you have a lot of speed. To do a Speed-Kick, as Mario is landing from either a long jump--or most typically-- a roll out, and he has all of that speed. While holding A and holding neutral, and pressing B at the right time, you can get a kick instead of a dive. And this has all sorts of really cool uses. Like being able to conserve the speed that you have, being able to then tie it into a big double jump; There are many applications of a Speed-Kick. So, in the grand scheme of things, speed-kicking isn't that old of a technique. This is actually some cool info you might not know about; For a long time everyone thought that the BLJ's were discovered in the year 2000. However, @MidoriSM64 tweeted almost two years ago showing a japanese strategy guide published in 1996 showing BLJ's. The same year the game came out. It wouldn't be until 2010 --fourteen years later-- until runners discovered speed-kicking. And it was discovered by accident. A member of the community named @AnavrinSM64 made a free-run TAS --which is basically playing the game frame-by-frame you can do whatever you want. It's how very crazy things are done in the game-- accidently discovered the Speed-Kick. The first recorded instance of a Speed-Kick being used in a world record was Siglemic's 70 Star world record of 49:09 achieved in November 20th, 2012. Although it didn't really do much for him here --in fact it probably lost him time-- it showed that a human could pull off a Speed-Kick in a run. Here is a not-so-successful attempt of a Speed-Kick from Siglemic's 1:44:01 which was achieved in January 21st, 2013. This little clipped showed that runners --at least Siglemic, the best runner at the time-- didn't know a crucial aspect about speed-kicks. I'm gonna come back to this in a second. An actually very practical use from Siglemic was shown in his 120 star world record of 1:43:53 achieved on April 22nd, 2014. Where he does it at the end of-- at the time the new Whomps 100 coin route-- allowing him to get a big enough double jump to just barely clip up on top of this hill and get the remaining coins for the 100 coin star. And this technique was largely unused by every player unless it was for single star attempts. As the sentiment for most players was, "It didn't seem worth it." As, it didn't seem super necessary most of the time or most of the time you wouldn't get a very good Speed-Kick. So it didn't really save time. But as the old saying goes, "You don't know what you don't know." Coming back to what I mentioned earlier, players learned something very interesting about the Speed-Kick. @AnavrinSM64 had already known this back in 2010. However, this wasn't common knowledge. But instead of having to hold neutral for the kick, you can hold ESS position. If you don't know what ESS position is, it's a reference to Ocarina of Time's ESS --which is an Extended Superslide-- or HESS (Hyper-Extended Superslide). In which holding the control stick just ever so slightly off of neutral, allows Link to slide out of a bomb explosion. So once runners learned that you can hold ESS instead of holding neutral, it made speed-kicks not only easier to do, (because you had more wiggle room) it prevented Mario from completely stopping if you failed the Speed-Kick. He would just do a little walk, or just a slower Speed-Kick. And now you could hold the stick a little bit left if you wanted your Speed-Kick to go a little bit left or a little bit right. And it's still hard to do, but it was a lot more forgiving. Unfortunately I don't really have the exact moment that this was found out. This was kinda one of those things that spread word of mouth; from player to player. I, myself, didn't know that you do that with a Speed-Kick for many years. I wanna say probably not until maybe 2016/2017. But it's hard to know when the majority of players knew. But nowadays in 2023, you see top runners doing speed-kicks all over the place. They make it easier to get big double jumps and, in some situations (in terms of spacing), they are the perfect move to use. As players get better at the game, their abilities improve and thus, they're able to do more hard complicated strats that previously people thought were impossible, or inconsistent. A great example nowadays is Tsukishima Cycle. It's done by runners in 16 star; 70 star; 120 star. It is the fastest way to get all of the red coins in Dark World. And it basically requires a Speed-Kick here to make a very short jump to build into the triple jump wall-kick off of this slope. You could in theory do a single jump if you're fast enough, but the Speed-Kick makes it much easier to make the timing. All this talk about hot techniques and players getting good and doing stuff fast might make you think, "Well, is that it?" and the answer is... I don't really know. But I have a couple of ideas- at least one idea of a technique that every runner knows about- maybe not every runner but- most runners know about but no one does in runs. This technique is called: Front-flip- or at least that's what I call it. It's actually a side-flip but you do it forwards. In fact, if you do it right, you can do a side-flip in any direction. However, the inputs for it are very, very tough; very tight, and very hard to replicate. However, that's how runners thought about speed-kicks at one point. They're used all over the place in TAS gameplay. However, we're yet to see them being used in runs. So, y'know, just sitting here on my armchair, just kinda groping the chair... just... y'know... touching on the chair- I don't know why I'm saying any of this but- Thinking about it, if I had to guess any direction where Mario's gonna go next in terms of expanding on the movement and the possibilities... a front-flip mastery would allow a player to speed up in a lot of spots. Uhm, I can't really give you a list of that at the moment because.. because... it's hard to imagine. But I do believe that it is a very real possibility in the future that we'll see in runs at some point. And I hope you have a good day, and thank you for watching! Bye!
