the current state of metroid dread speedrunning:
(from this WR any% run done on the current patch)
I’ve tried to keep up with speedrunning developments for this game, even if I haven’t touched it myself for months, and the past month/week/day have had a dizzying amount of discoveries made.
Last November, Japanese speedrunner bomuhey ran into this odd glitch where they somehow faced the screen:
This glitch was regarded as a sort of holy grail by the community, because it would allow speedbooster to be activated anywhere, and the speedbooster was capable of clipping through the floor.
Speedbooster clips relied on interrupting the flash shift animation with a shinespark (or is it the other way around?) in such a way that you fall through the floor. Normally, this would instantly kill you, because the game instantly kills you if you’re OoB. However, firing the grapple beam gives you a small grace period, which allowed people to clip through single-tile floors.
Eventually, a few months ago someone found a method for a two-tile shine-sink clip. That was enough for the route to be revised to skip the Plasma Beam, which led to the first sub-hour run of the game (though that was done on the old patch where the invincibility glitch was still possible).
Anyhow, within the past three weeks people figured out how to replicate bomuhey’s skew glitch, and it’s amazingly bizarre (warning: inscrutable 18-minute long tutorial/explainer):
I don’t understand quite how it works even after watching this video, but basically by clipping through the floor and aiming in a particular direction Samus enters what is referred to as the “bomuhey skew state.” In this state, by interrupting the turnaround animation with some precise input, they can face the screen (or: be “axis-skewed”) at will, basically allowing them to activate the speedbooster anywhere.
Now, the crazy thing is that this state (where you can make Samus face the screen at will) persists across all loads and transitions except for (a) literally turning the game off, and (b) turning Samus around in a mid-air neutral jump. In other words, you can carry this state from another save file, and as long as you move properly you can always have a shinespark ready in your pocket.
Anyhow, with this knowledge, they managed to find a way to clip through walls — and with wall-clips, they finally managed to take an old party trick where you could enter the escape early and use it to actually skip the final boss:
The idea behind the wall-clips is that by spinning around like a dork (“tornadoing”), you can slightly adjust the angle Samus is facing, so she’ll be running ever so slightly to the left or right (instead of straight into or away from the screen), which somehow allows her to ignore collision (???). There are a bunch of other subtleties to this, but that’s about as much as I understand.
Within the past few days they’ve found a bunch of applications for this, such as a current-patch Varia Suit skip (hilariously slow) and a current-patch method to do the early escape. Regardless, the fact that the current (soon-to-be-obsolete) World Record breaks into a navigation room mid-escape (to save the game (to reset the timer (to have enough time to safely do the final wall-clip))) is really really funny to me, and is why I bothered making this post in the first place.
Now, with all of this new tech the current route basically entails getting the speed booster/flash shift/grapple beam (the stuff needed to shine-sink) in a semi-normal manner, getting screw attack early, and then just beelining straight to the end of the game (skipping 3 areas entirely). With good execution, sub-50 might be possible (at least on the old patch).
All of this is to say that this game’s advanced tech looks very un-fun to perform and I’m glad that there are other people who are sickos enough to do it for my amusement.