The Gold Split - Week #13: Minimalist Link
Week #13 (September 26th): Wind Waker Low%; Rubik's Cube record; Minish Cap TAS; Link's Awakening Glitches; Marathon News; New World Records: Spongebob, Dishonored, Mario Kart DS
Happy Leg Day!
Week #13 is a great week to be superstitious. However, whether you consider the number to be lucky or unlucky, rest assured in knowing that The Gold Split will remain unaffected by higher powers.
In more tangible news, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom releases today and I can hear the sounds of somebody playing it in the living room. And completely by accident, we have a bunch of TLoZ-related news this week! I hope you’re a fan.
Contents
I’d like to cover much more, but many great stories stay confined to the communities for a specific game or series and rarely get out. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should cover, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨
Story of the Week
Most of the time, new discoveries make a speedrun go faster and that makes sense. However, runners of the Low% category must feel a little bit anxious about them. The goal of Low% is to beat the game while completing the fewest objectives and acquiring the least number of items possible.
And in this reference frame, a new discovery could mean the obvious: saving time through a new trick or a route change. But it could also mean that another objective and/or item became redundant in order to beat the game and therefore needs to be eliminated. And only acquiring as few items as absolutely necessary is the ultimate requirement of Low%.
An infamous example of the lengths that Low% runners have to go to is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It was found that the idle animation while picking up an item is missing a frame. And that missing frame moves Link ever so slightly in one direction while ignoring collision with anything. By picking up a rupee in a certain spot close to a closed gate or door, Link will very slowly start moving into it over the course of the next few hours. This strategy is called a Rupee Slide and takes up over ten hours of the game’s current Low% route. These images were taken from Anorakkis' former record:
After that introduction, these are the news: let’s say (hypothetically), that it was assumed that nine items were absolutely necessary to beat a game and that it couldn’t be done with fewer. This run would take roughly one hour, not too different from Any%. But now, a new discovery makes one of these items redundant. It is now possible to finish the game with eight items. Even if that run is infinitely more complicated and takes 13 hours to complete, it is now the new Low% standard and also the new record.
This is exactly what happened recently to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and so far Swiss speedrunner Aloakirby is the only person to complete a run with the new route. It took them just a little over 20 hours, but the run also includes a good seven hours of healthy sleep.
The item that is now no longer necessary is The Wind Waker, a conductor's baton giving Link various powers when conducting the right songs, not too dissimilar from the Ocarina of Time. But more importantly, it was also used to set up glitches and make other tricks more consistent. This is a full list of items acquired during Low% now, at the time of writing:
Bombs
Bomb Bag (30)
Deku Leaf
Magic Meter
Master Sword
Hero's Shield
Fully Charged Master Sword
Mirror Shield
This makes the entire run way more complicated, longer, and reliant on RNG. Due to a lack of space and… well… knowledge, I can’t go into full details, but here are a few of the resulting consequences that stand out. I’ll link the speedrun after explaining the three glitches and add a timestamp for each of them.
All Superswims have to be performed manually
Superswimming is the speedrunner’s preferred way to traverse the ocean. Simply put, it enables Link to swim backwards, and extremely fast. With The Wind Waker, players were able to perform a glitch called Dry Storage, making Superswims consistent and relatively easy to perform. But without this crucial item, they now have to set up each Superswim by using one of the following options, or a combination:
Executing frame-perfect pause-buffering (pausing, unpausing, and immediately pausing again on the next frame) and changing Link’s direction on every pause
Changing Link’s direction by 180° on every frame by flicking the joystick 30 times per second (the game runs at 30 frames per second)
Performed in the run at: 39:25
Speedrunner gymnast86 has a great video on the evolution of the Superswim, and there’s no better time to watch it than right now:
The run now includes a 1-hour long Zombie Hover
A Zombie Hover allows Link to theoretically gain infinite height and also some horizontal movement, while having no health. This sounds great on paper, but there’s two downsides:
Unless Link manages to land in a loading zone or increase their health, they will just die as soon as they touch land or water.
It is necessary to hit the B-button many times per second throughout the entire duration. The faster you can hit that button, the more height you gain. If you don’t hit it fast enough, you lose height.
Despite being able to pause and take breaks, doing this for over an hour is incredibly physically demanding, and nothing any doctor would recommend as a workout. To make matters worse, at the end of this particular Zombie Hover, a frame-perfect trick is required to achieve the desired result. Link needs to land in the water to be teleported to the upper entrance of Forest Haven, but also needs to pick up a heart on land just before. But if Link touches the land before falling in the water, they aren’t teleported.
The way this is achieved is insane, but so cool: at the apex of the Zombie Hover and above the desired location, Link starts to fall. At exactly the right moment during the fall, they pull a bomb out of their pack and hold it above their head, which now starts its fuse. If this was done correctly, the bomb explodes after they pick up the heart lying on the ground below, but before they touch the ground. The force from the explosion pushes them into the water, teleporting them to the entrance.
Performed in the run between: 1:11:10 - 2:20:00
Skipping Puppet Ganon is complete RNG
I won’t pretend to fully understand this, but it involves a complicated Zombie Hover and dropping bombs into a pot from above while being attacked by Puppet Ganon and Keese at the same time. This skip alone took Aloakirby more than eight hours of attempts during their run.
Done successfully in the run at: 9:26:00
This is a condensed version of the full run, shortened to two and a half hours:
But if you are actually curious about the entire run, you’ll find it on YouTube in two parts: Part 1 | Part 2
There is of course plenty of room for improvement. After all, the run still contains seven hours of sleeping and eight hours of attempts at skipping Puppet Ganon. An optimally performed run might only be three hours long. However, it’s very unlikely that many players will attempt to complete it using this route, considering how physically and mentally demanding it is.
Now, apparently it’s technically possible to beat the game with just seven items. But the glitches required to pull that off have been proven too inconsistent even for the most hardcore RTA runners out there. The tool-assisted speedrun even gets away with collecting only five items, and experience taught us that it’s only a matter of time until an RTA-viable route is found for seven and even less items, pushing the limits of Low% even further.
Up to Speed
🏆 The 3x3x3 average Rubik’s Cube record has been broken (2 minute video)
Ten-year-old Yiheng Wang achieved an average time across five solves of 4.09, improving his previous record by 0.16 seconds. In the Average category, the average is taken across five solves, with the fastest and slowest times removed.
⏱️ Tompa’s new TAS for The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (88 minute video)
This week is all about The Legend of Zelda! Tompa has actively created tool-assisted speedruns since 2007, and he released a highly anticipated one just this week: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap in 1:17:21. Over five years of work made this one more than 20 minutes faster than the previous version. The video contains the run as well as full commentary by Tompa and The Minish Cap speedrunner Myth. For full details, check out the run’s TASVideos page.
🏝️ Linkus7 explains Link’s Awakening speedruns (52 minute video)
Just ahead of the launch of the new game in the series, The Legend of Zelda speedrunner Linkus7 published an in-depth video about the glitches in the recent remake of Link’s Awakening and gives a preview of what we might also be seeing in Echoes of Wisdom.
🏃♂️ Kill Him Faster is a tabletop RPG all about the time travel, speedruns, managing a team of athletes, and killing Hitler (3 minute read)
This is not necessarily speedrunning related news, but it’s a brand new sentence and my favourite one this week. I always wanted to see a speedrun of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, but this might be even better.
Marathon News
Finished:
NSG Fall 2024 raised $3,368+ for the Norwegian Association of the Blind and Partially Sighted
Games Done Quick Express 2024 raised $36,402 for the AbleGamers Foundation
Running:
Until September 29th: Long Speedrun Summit 2024 (Schedule)
Upcoming:
Starts Today: Multithon Rivals 2024 (Schedule), raising money for BluePath Service Dogs
Starts September 27th: Speedrun Summit 2024 (Schedule), raising money for Urban Arts
Starts September 27th: SHMUPTEMBER 2024 (Schedule)
Starts September 28th: Hispanic Speedrunning Marathon (Schedule)
This Week’s Top Times
🥇 First Place:
SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (Any%) in 00:41:03.000 by SHiFT
Video • Twitch • YouTubeDishonored (Dishonored: Any%) in 00:30:44.509 by VyLonz
Video • Twitch • YouTubeRed Ball 4 Vol.1 (Any%) in 00:01:47.167 by Starline (She/Her)
Video • YouTubeMario Kart DS (32 Tracks) in 00:52:14.000 by mkdsabel
Video • Twitch • YouTubeThe Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (Any%) in 01:26:49.000 by ToadsWoot
Video • Twitch • YouTubeLufia II - Ancient Cave (No manipulation: Any%) in 00:45:31.000 by eLmaGus
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSerious Sam: The First Encounter (Any%: Singleplayer, Tourist/Easy) in 00:30:31.000 by carbonehell
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥈 Second Place:
Celeste (Any%) in 00:25:39.826 by Isaactayy (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeQuiplash (Bad Ending) in 00:02:01.167 by lilleh (She/Her)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeSuper Mario Bros. 2 (Any%) in 00:08:14.153 by EthanRTA
Video • Twitch • YouTubeZelda II: The Adventure of Link (100% All Keys, 1CC) in 01:13:43.033 by jay_cee
Video • TwitchMinecraft: Java Edition (All Advancements: 1.16, RSG) in 02:19:57.773 by oxidiot (She/Her, They/Them)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
🥉 Third Place:
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Recruit) in 01:33:54.609 by zeuse
VideoFourth of July 2019 (25 Runs) in 00:02:16.832 by CaptNinja6 (She/Her)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeFinal Fantasy XIII (Any%: PC) in 04:26:38.000 by MMM (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTubeRatchet: Deadlocked (NG+ No LC: Solo) in 00:41:44.000 by ItzScaRee (He/Him)
Video • Twitch • YouTube
Fun Fact of the Week
🌕 The game Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon takes your current location and time into account and changes the world according to the weather, time of day and even moon phase at your location. There are in-game options for altering the day/night cycles as well as the weather, but not for moon phases.
The main category allows changing your system’s internal clock, but the No Time Manipulation category simply requires you to wait for all moon phases to occur before you can finish the game. Therefore, the current best time is 22 days, 9 minutes, and 47 seconds.
👋🏻 And that’s it for this week! See you next Thursday, October 2nd 2024. 👋🏻
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