𝐀𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬: 05:33 - Here I mention how a cut in the game music would give away the splice. I am aware that the game music sometimes glitches, however when this does happen the music cuts out entirely. The difference between this glitch and a music cut from a splice would be easily decipherable. 07:15 - Here I mention that it's basically humanly impossible to intentionally have an exact score at an exact point of the run, and likewise with the banana count. I didn't consider that use of the debug menu may allow you to edit these values and keep them consistent, but I'm not entirely sure as I am unfamiliar with the menu myself. 08:01 - Here I mention it's unrealistic to work around the fluency of the monkey head tilt, but it is important to note that when the player has no extra lives remaining, no monkey heads display here. Even though this solves the issue with the head tilt, it also requires dying multiple times, which is a big time loss, and would already make getting a run faster than the world record impossible. Thank you to Gonquai for providing this additional information.
how to make the perfect spliced run find a place to splice the run. cut. edit and replace the part you want to improve with a better clip but here´s the trick. instead of playing as the same monkey, pick a different monkey. The mods will be too busy looking at the fact that it you arent playing as the same monkey that they wont even notice all the other flags
Also, don't forget about the spinning end on the fuse! Rotation on that would be tricky to splice as well. I know other spliced runs have been outed in a similar fashion.
Pause splice is the funniest attempt at a splice. Even if you got away with it, the community will demand to know how you did these section with out pause splices, and then you’d be forced to confess when everyone’s realized “Oh wait! You can’t humanly do that!
monkey ball is defenitely designed for speedrunning. it's filled to the brim with short cuts for you to find and in general it's just the perfect game for it
u failed to mention that the bottom right (the map) has spinning bananas. 5th flag. Edit: haha lol I have 100 likes on this comment didn't even realise
The only reason I'm not giving you a like is because you threw away the chance at making a perfect acronym (by using Sphere) just to make a balls joke. However, I DID laugh.
The only realistic method I can think of is really heavily modifying the game to let you manually set variables like score, head tilt, music progression etc before starting a stage and using that to get footage you can carefully stitch together. It'd be impossible to prove if you did it well enough but also I don't think anyone would ever go that far.
@@greenthunder7982 TAS generally just lets you slow down or stop the game so you can give frame by frame inputs. It doesn't actually affect the computations that make up the game, just how it progresses.
@@Graknorke plus if you are going to the trouble of changing memory values for the monkey heads, why not change the characters top speed or acceleration values by 5-10%? i'm not sure it would be noticable to a viewer yet it would add up over the time of a run
tbh necroing this post, it seems pretty easy to boot up dolphin and cheat engine, disable the music, and then splice between save states by editing the HUD directly. You'd still have to match wr pace on every level, but every level would be permanent. Then record the correct length of music on each stage.
The only way I could think of getting around the pausing would to mute the part that had the noise for pausing and putting in the music and sound effects manually in an editor, but that is a dumb amount of work for a few seconds of time save
You could delete the audio clip used for the pause menu but you would need a GameCube that can play unsigned games ( I think) and the know how to take out the file
A few seconds might be all it takes to jump a spot, especially useful if you want to jump 2nd to 1st place. Editing the sound in and checking the audio data for any splicing artefacts seems plausible.
Seems like if you wanted to cheat here, you'd need to disable all game music, and outright use cheats to mess with the other factors (score, head tilt, banana count, etc). Game music can be re-added in if there's a way to turn it off.
Music can be disabled with debug. You can maybe use this to edit score / banana count as well? Not entirely sure, but the head tilt will be an arse to work around with or without cheats.
@@Goober13md It wouldn't surprise me if someone went as far as removing the HUD (or at the very least the monkey heads), recording all the footage and then re-adding the heads in during editing. Would there be a way to tell for that?
It would surprise me if someone did this, considering actually how much effort it would be. You'd have to keep track of your banana count, constantly. You'd have to calculate your score for every stage, making sure everything was correct. You'd also have to update the score each time you collect a banana, and when your score increases, the number doesn't instantly change; it rolls up, so that would be a pain to edit. If you removed other parts of the HUD like the speedometer, I have no idea how you'd properly edit that back in, and how much time and effort that would take is giving me an headache just thinking about it...
Super monkey ball is extremely hard to TAS, the unpredictable delays due to the CD physically spinning in the console make TAS runs unreliable (it effectively acts as a physical source of randomness)
@@animowany111 So is visual console allowed? (Dunno if it even exists for vc, just asking. If so, it could prevent random lags due to physical hardware)
You seem to have forgotten about the most obvious splice, the entire video is made pointless in the face of my splice. See what I did is put a splice in my run on the 2nd frame of the game loading in, and then completed the rest of the run in the new spliced in take. thus skipping all possible flags, and getting my insanely spliced run onto the board without anyone being the wiser.
"I am aware that the game music sometimes glitches, however when this does happen the music cuts out entirely." Wouldn't faking a music cut out glitch allow you to splice around pauses (since you could mute your game and claim that there's no music because of a/the music cut out glitch)?
If someone actually managed to splice this I wouldn’t even be mad, just impressed. Especially if no one found out and they came out themselves saying so.
I love how the best way to get away with splicing requires a game over, but if you get a game over and suddenly start playing like a god then it's obviously a spliced run XD
There are easy ways to avoid sound issues. You can edit the game files to remove the music for example and put it in using editing software, or remove the pause sound among other things.
The pause menu sound can definitely be removed. Getting hold of the isolated sample, inverting it's phase and then adding it over the spliced run at the right points would result in the removal of just that sound effect
I find this video very fascinating from the perspective of a developer. If I made I game that would be good for speedrunning, I would want to incorporate some of these details to help make it harder to have fake videos.
@@vlc-cosplayer Except that demo files can be altered too. They also change a bit of the dynamic of what kind of speedruns people try to do. Plus implementing a demo system can be trickier than it might look, depending on how the game works. Don't get me wrong though, I love the idea of enabling demos and it is certainly something I would try to do in my games. It just opens up a different can of worms.
It might be wrong since i just like to watch speedruns, but a good way to make a spliced run could be continuously making save states during the same run, so if you fail something you can reload the precedent one and have all the same things displayed
That IS plausible, but savestates can only be done in emulators. And some speedrunning comunities don't allow emulators because they make it easier to cheat, and also because emulators aren't 100% acurate to real consoles, which may or may not influence a speedrun's final time. At least, these are their reasons.
the summary section around 9:00, with those vertical sliding transitions between splice categories, is a really excellent visual aid. really helps the info stick. awesome vid
Seems pretty straightforward: 1. Game audio - As you pointed out, the audio runs on a single uninterrupted loop. To defeat that, play the game with the music off and then dub over the recording with the correct music. 2. Banana count - If you are piecing together a spliced run, it shouldn't be to hard to get your banana total correct for the splice, failing that the option below should work. 3. Score total - Probably the hardest to set, but I'd imagine it'd be possible with the use of an Action Replay or Gameshark device. With some luck, you should be able to set the score, banana totals, lives, and level with the cheat device, then play and record the level "cleaning" 4. Monkey rotation - Your video showed the solution to that, zero extra lives means no monkeys.
I feel like through memory editing scripts you could probably fix a couple of the issues and get a good splice going between the bonus stage transitions you'd need to log the sin / cosine value for the head tilt and the score / bananas frame by frame in your previous segment, make a script that sets the values to the correct ones for the next one, and force the script to run on the exact proper frame when you started using an assembly hook, setting all of the memory values you need to make the run look legit though, since emulators aren't allowed, I'm not sure how possible that is on a real machine
i feel like if someone somehow managed to put together a convincing enough splice, with the amount of effort they would've had to put in to make it work, i'd kind of want to give them a pass...
The score and banana count could be kept consistent using save states. By playing each level one by one, retrying until desired time is achieved and saving your state between levels, you can keep your score and banana count consistent while retrying the levels.
@@Goober13md How can you tell if they're using an emulator? I know some games have graphical differences, but if the graphics remained the same, are there any ways to tell?
You didn't talk about using a TAS, but I assume thats the same problem every game has. i.e. "fixed" by requiring runners to show their hands while playing?
@@wheedler typically emulators are easy to spot compared to legitimate console versions. There's probably a graphical glitch that would tell you it's an emulator
This is a really good video, be proud of the content you make, and try and sound a bit chipper, you sound about 5 minutes away from drinking yourself into non existence. But apart from that it's a genuinely good video
@@dracibatic2433 it'd be difficult to make emulator footage look exactly like captured composite video from a real GameCube. ROM loading on real hardware, however, is harder to distinguish visually.
You're assuming no hacks to the game itself. Setting a score to a certain value,replacing the pause sound with an empty found clip, etc would make a cheater's life a lot easier.
Problemo: they would catch you being too good, even if it is subtle. And they would eventually catch you anyway because of a deep investigation. They would vertify everything including what files you used. You are not allowed to edit the game.
@@YTN1112 how would they look at the files if you were playing on the real console? couldn't you just change them back or something? it's not like you're allowed to use an emulator.
@@n0ame1u1 Even if it wasn't it would be noticeable as "faked" if the quality of the run was too good for a name we didn't recognize. The amount of work that would go into splicing isn't worth the trouble for a submission that isn't great. Hence 'almost' impossible, sure someone could potentially splice an amazing run but then they'd instantly get caught off the fact that some random person submitted an amazing submission. Most speedrun communities are pretty good about this type of scrutiny but yeah, technically it isn't 100% impossible just because it isn't allowed.
What about using TAS things? Like instead of splicing the video output, you splice your recorded inputs, then replay the game. There would be no way to notice such a cheat. Or to put it more simply, make a TAS and say it's you playing.
During an AGDQ, during the TASBot section, they did Super Monkey Ball and mentioned the replay data was now writable. As long as the replay data is not acceptable, then it should be okay.
What? How could replay data help with a speedrun at all? People could fake IL records doing it, can't be sure whether they'd get caught or not, but replays aren't relevant to RTAs whatsoever.
Pretty easy to cut out pause screens while keeping the audio. Just go into your video editing mute the original audio then edit out pause screens. After this get an audio track for that level and put it over the video at the right timing
You could conceivably doctre in your own animation of the monkey heads bobbing and make it consistent manually. It would take loads of time however it might take less time than it would take to actually get good at the game.
You could use memory editing or otherwise modify the game to avoid all of these flags. Build in a save-state system. ... But pulling that off, alone, without anyone noticing is almost a bigger achievement than getting the world record.
Great breakdown. Splicing isnt the only method though. This game could have a tool assisted run done. Frame by frame manipulation. Or if its on original console only there might be a way to program a machine to input perfect commands on an actual controller. That would probably be insanely hard to do though. Im assuming there is a way to test if a game is being played on an emulator or the original hardware, but I rarely do speedruns.
I think the intro's music is a bit louder than your voice. Maybe I have messed up ears but great vid! It explains alot and I love your explanation with the frame by frame analysis!
Only thing I would be wary of here is that SMB:DX is commonly run on xbox. It is possible, although non-trivial, to run trainers on modded original xboxes. Bonus stage edits would be made reasonably viable if you knew what the score, head tilt, and banana count of your previous segment was, and just set it up so pressing white on the controller set the variables to the correct values during the stage transition.
Goober at 9:47: Damn! Finally, a method that looked like it had promise shot down by disembodied monkey heads! Me: XD I never quite heard it put that way before, but OK! LOLF
for the monkey heads, if someone was insane enough they could cover up the game's heads with a looping clip of the heads if theyre careful about it. But it would have to be so frame perfect that it wouldnt be worth it
I'd be curious if it would be possible to mute the video where the pause screen sounds are and overlay the proper music and sound effects. You'd have to look at the waveform to make sure no obvious cuts exist but there should be ways to smooth that out.
Might be possible to get around the audio issue if you splice the song and applicable sound effects over the existing audio, though that would be tedious to get right.
Some/most of these can be gotten around by using modified ISO's on legit hardware. And live-memory modification is possible via a gamecube serial port.
with modern editing software we can't just paste a head to keep lives the same. audio could be totally spoofed too if someone really wanted to spend some time on it. Audio capture enough music to fake the loop then edit in the Banana sounds etc.
I don't know much about this game but a hacked copy of the game that lacks the pause screen sound could be used to work around that in particular. If save states can be made that include how far along the music is and the current head tilt, I could also see that being a thing too.
The only way I could see to cheat would be to create a tas that would be plausible for a human to make. Good for that community that they've avoided cheaters entirely
I think I 100%ed 1 and 2 and GBA, but at a slow and methodical pace. I cannot imagine speed running. But at other times I would try to cheese my way through a single level just to get a ridiculous replay. I need to look and see if I still have them.
instead of splicing could you use a modified hex edited ROM, saved to a cartridge, that had the characters speed increased by 5 - 10%? someone uploaded a GTA San Andreas run that was a WR, but someone very astute noticed that the tyre smoke was a little bit off when the runner accelerated. he then realized the acceleration parameters had been modified slightly (a side effect being more tyre smoke), hence the run was a fake
Because this is a game that is deemed "impossible to splice", there could be a chance that the moderators are lax in their screening of the footage, and therefore could miss a splice in an odd location. I cannot speak for the accuracy of the moderators, but typically, when Someone is sure in their success, they tend to lower their guard just enough to allow error.
why not have your sequence of inputs recorded for each stage and then play them back to back on a TAS or something which will make it all a single run but you have time to do each stage individually? you wouldn't run into any of the problems since the TAS is playing them all back to back like a normal speedrun
You could alter the console with software similar to gameshark or Cheat Engine to get around a lot of these issues, like keeping consistent scores, lives, continues, bananas, etc. But if you're considering that try and find something better to do with your time.
All methods that would allow you to use save states (emulators, custom rom loaders, etc.) are not allowed in runs for these particular games. Even with save states, if the save state method doesn't preserve every aspect of the console at the time of the save, you'll have other inconsistencies become apparent at the splice/state load points.
@@StickThisUpYourAnus That would be even easier to detect, as it would be extremely hard to get a replacement HUD looking and acting exactly right throughout the run.
Maybe splicing a run of the regular game without raising flaga is nearly impossible. But what if one cheat codes, or a modified rom, or an emulator and passes off the video recording as being on-console and as using the unmodified original game? One could, for example, patch out the pause sounds and the monkey heads and add them back later during the edit. Or edit the score before recording a splice. Or use savestates or input recordings so that the splices always start where the previous one was finished, thus matching up the time, score, monkey head tilt and other variables?
What about savestates? Play first half of level perfectly then save then load and play the next bit perfectly, and so on. I don’t know if emulators are even allowed so please tell me what I’m missing.
You could TAS it and then disguise the emulated footage as the real footage. USB Gecko should allow to implement TAS techniques on real hardware. It would require a lot of engineering though, whoever goes through with it might deserve some kind of a prize.
Wow, I wonder if the creators of Super Monkey Ball knew this would happen and came up with precautions. It does seem like the kind of game one would speedrun through after all. I mean cause there's a timer and the game rewards you with extra points if you beat a level quick.
While I know the community for running banana mania is smaller the the original games, it is a much easier game to splice. Pause, mid stage, and stage transition splicing won’t work for similar reasons (pause less so due to the second it takes for music to fade back in), giving a run away instantly). Continue splicing won’t work because there no continues. Bonus stage splicing seems like the way to go since score doesn’t exists in a normal sense, and score is just points for the shop. You could just grind out points to match with a spliced run, but that honestly seems like too much work for a run and would not even work if you’ve bought everything in the shop.
1. I dont do speedruns (never did in fact) 2. Never played monkey ball 3. Why would i splice anything 4 why is youtube recommending this 5. Why did i watch it start to finish anyway
𝐀𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬:
05:33 - Here I mention how a cut in the game music would give away the splice. I am aware that the game music sometimes glitches, however when this does happen the music cuts out entirely. The difference between this glitch and a music cut from a splice would be easily decipherable.
07:15 - Here I mention that it's basically humanly impossible to intentionally have an exact score at an exact point of the run, and likewise with the banana count. I didn't consider that use of the debug menu may allow you to edit these values and keep them consistent, but I'm not entirely sure as I am unfamiliar with the menu myself.
08:01 - Here I mention it's unrealistic to work around the fluency of the monkey head tilt, but it is important to note that when the player has no extra lives remaining, no monkey heads display here. Even though this solves the issue with the head tilt, it also requires dying multiple times, which is a big time loss, and would already make getting a run faster than the world record impossible.
Thank you to Gonquai for providing this additional information.
how to make the perfect spliced run
find a place to splice the run.
cut. edit and replace the part you want to improve with a better clip but here´s the trick. instead of playing as the same monkey, pick a different monkey.
The mods will be too busy looking at the fact that it you arent playing as the same monkey that they wont even notice all the other flags
Isucc genius
*No One Will Ever Know*
no no, you gotta pick a random clip from an entirely different game, like Dark Souls or something.
*SNEAK* 100
check your grammar
Also, don't forget about the spinning end on the fuse! Rotation on that would be tricky to splice as well. I know other spliced runs have been outed in a similar fashion.
I was wondering why he didn't mention that, but I figured it might correlate directly to the timer.
@@Thornskade Pretty sure it does.
It gets reset at the start of each level.
Pause splice is the funniest attempt at a splice.
Even if you got away with it, the community will demand to know how you did these section with out pause splices, and then you’d be forced to confess when everyone’s realized “Oh wait! You can’t humanly do that!
Bit late, but this aged like milk
I'm starting to think this game was designed to be ran by the devs themselves.
Probably. When you play the game you immediately start looking for skips even when you aren't trying to speedrun. It even has a timer. Nuff said.
monkey ball is defenitely designed for speedrunning. it's filled to the brim with short cuts for you to find and in general it's just the perfect game for it
(person you know jumpscare)
@@guy_th18 (me back when i capitalized comments jumpscare)
u failed to mention that the bottom right (the map) has spinning bananas. 5th flag.
Edit: haha lol I have 100 likes on this comment didn't even realise
and the fuse on the end of the bomb spins
I'd never THINK of speed running this game. Love it, but I'm not masochistic
Sounds lots like me
It's so rewarding though
You: Super Monkey Ball
Me, an intellectual: Superior Simian Testicle.
I audibly laughed. Good job.
More like Super-Powered Homo Sapien Sperical Object
The only reason I'm not giving you a like is because you threw away the chance at making a perfect acronym (by using Sphere) just to make a balls joke.
However, I DID laugh.
The only realistic method I can think of is really heavily modifying the game to let you manually set variables like score, head tilt, music progression etc before starting a stage and using that to get footage you can carefully stitch together. It'd be impossible to prove if you did it well enough but also I don't think anyone would ever go that far.
Muting the pause noise would be super easy though. Any idiot with dolphin could extract the game files and replace the SE with an empty file.
@@greenthunder7982
TAS generally just lets you slow down or stop the game so you can give frame by frame inputs. It doesn't actually affect the computations that make up the game, just how it progresses.
@@Graknorke plus if you are going to the trouble of changing memory values for the monkey heads, why not change the characters top speed or acceleration values by 5-10%? i'm not sure it would be noticable to a viewer yet it would add up over the time of a run
tbh necroing this post, it seems pretty easy to boot up dolphin and cheat engine, disable the music, and then splice between save states by editing the HUD directly. You'd still have to match wr pace on every level, but every level would be permanent. Then record the correct length of music on each stage.
@@mikesully110 Changing speeds can be detected by a careful mod.
But the other methods might be undetectable if done correctly.
The only way I could think of getting around the pausing would to mute the part that had the noise for pausing and putting in the music and sound effects manually in an editor, but that is a dumb amount of work for a few seconds of time save
You could delete the audio clip used for the pause menu but you would need a GameCube that can play unsigned games ( I think) and the know how to take out the file
the audio could still be detected as faked
A few seconds might be all it takes to jump a spot, especially useful if you want to jump 2nd to 1st place. Editing the sound in and checking the audio data for any splicing artefacts seems plausible.
Plus mods would be like how did they do that without pause not possible
A few seconds is a lot in some cases.
Seems like if you wanted to cheat here, you'd need to disable all game music, and outright use cheats to mess with the other factors (score, head tilt, banana count, etc). Game music can be re-added in if there's a way to turn it off.
Music can be disabled with debug. You can maybe use this to edit score / banana count as well? Not entirely sure, but the head tilt will be an arse to work around with or without cheats.
@@Goober13md It wouldn't surprise me if someone went as far as removing the HUD (or at the very least the monkey heads), recording all the footage and then re-adding the heads in during editing. Would there be a way to tell for that?
It would surprise me if someone did this, considering actually how much effort it would be. You'd have to keep track of your banana count, constantly. You'd have to calculate your score for every stage, making sure everything was correct. You'd also have to update the score each time you collect a banana, and when your score increases, the number doesn't instantly change; it rolls up, so that would be a pain to edit. If you removed other parts of the HUD like the speedometer, I have no idea how you'd properly edit that back in, and how much time and effort that would take is giving me an headache just thinking about it...
Or modify the rom to remove the pause sound
Or just use save states
> TASing a beliveable run
> Get Input File to play on a modified Controller that is plugged into a real console
> Record the footage
Any questions?
Super monkey ball is extremely hard to TAS, the unpredictable delays due to the CD physically spinning in the console make TAS runs unreliable (it effectively acts as a physical source of randomness)
@@animowany111 So is visual console allowed? (Dunno if it even exists for vc, just asking. If so, it could prevent random lags due to physical hardware)
No, you can see the rules at 1:07, "The use of emulators is prohibited"
@@animowany111 If this counts as an emulator, then it probably isn't possible. Just hoping, no one looses a wr because of random, unpredictable lags
@@animowany111 Splcing is also not allowed. If you are going to break a rule, might as well go all in
One thing I noticed is that the bananas on the game screen and the ones on the minimap spin circles. This would also have to be exactly the same.
You seem to have forgotten about the most obvious splice, the entire video is made pointless in the face of my splice.
See what I did is put a splice in my run on the 2nd frame of the game loading in, and then completed the rest of the run in the new spliced in take.
thus skipping all possible flags, and getting my insanely spliced run onto the board without anyone being the wiser.
You saved 1 frame. Despicable
that would still be detectable, so ppl would be plenty the wiser
"I am aware that the game music sometimes glitches, however when this does happen the music cuts out entirely."
Wouldn't faking a music cut out glitch allow you to splice around pauses (since you could mute your game and claim that there's no music because of a/the music cut out glitch)?
You would be bringing scrutiny to a run you already wouldn't want having scrutiny.
If someone actually managed to splice this I wouldn’t even be mad, just impressed. Especially if no one found out and they came out themselves saying so.
Dunno why this was recommended to me so long after it was posted, but I'm glad I found your channel. :3
I love how the best way to get away with splicing requires a game over, but if you get a game over and suddenly start playing like a god then it's obviously a spliced run XD
If you edit out the pause menu, you can -instead of mute everything- add the track of the map made in another file, or made in a TAS.
think you wanted a "_" not a "-" there to get italics instead of crossed out.
Some Members Of The Speedrun Community: It’s so easy to make a spliced run lol
Monkeyball Speedrun Mods: Oh? You sure?
I feel like they're talking about the fact that some mods don't really notice splicing.
Nice video! But the music is way to loud compared to your voice...
AYYEYAYEAHAHEHEYYAEYAYEAYEYYAYY
Dr. Ziegler&1731 It seems the opposite to me; I can’t even hear the music when he’s talking.
What you don’t fuck with yung lean?
...What?
@@Ljknot ginseng strip is one of his best songs, but eiher way its too loud compared to his voice!
Honestly, a superb video. Only request would be to get a better sounding mic set up, not terrible but; not headphonable.
I listened with headphones. It's fine, just at lower volumes
His mic is mostly fine.
I headphoned it. Over-ears, too.
There are easy ways to avoid sound issues. You can edit the game files to remove the music for example and put it in using editing software, or remove the pause sound among other things.
No one:
Me scrolling through TH-cam at 3am:
TH-cam’s algorithm: Splicing Super Monkey Ball Speedruns - Why It’s Almost Impossible to Cheat (G109)
The pause menu sound can definitely be removed. Getting hold of the isolated sample, inverting it's phase and then adding it over the spliced run at the right points would result in the removal of just that sound effect
probably almost all of this can be covered up with the debug mode, and maybe save states
donnaken15 Both in which, are against the rules of this run.
@@GriffinKneesock the point is to find a way to cheat dumbass
I find this video very fascinating from the perspective of a developer. If I made I game that would be good for speedrunning, I would want to incorporate some of these details to help make it harder to have fake videos.
@@vlc-cosplayer Except that demo files can be altered too. They also change a bit of the dynamic of what kind of speedruns people try to do. Plus implementing a demo system can be trickier than it might look, depending on how the game works.
Don't get me wrong though, I love the idea of enabling demos and it is certainly something I would try to do in my games. It just opens up a different can of worms.
Great video!
It might be wrong since i just like to watch speedruns, but a good way to make a spliced run could be continuously making save states during the same run, so if you fail something you can reload the precedent one and have all the same things displayed
Some emulators can do a "rewind" effect, which would be even better than save states since you don't run the risk of save stating into a mistake.
That IS plausible, but savestates can only be done in emulators. And some speedrunning comunities don't allow emulators because they make it easier to cheat, and also because emulators aren't 100% acurate to real consoles, which may or may not influence a speedrun's final time. At least, these are their reasons.
the summary section around 9:00, with those vertical sliding transitions between splice categories, is a really excellent visual aid. really helps the info stick. awesome vid
Thanks haha. Normally anything that involves animation I make in PowerPoint rather than in my video editor.
Seems pretty straightforward:
1. Game audio - As you pointed out, the audio runs on a single uninterrupted loop. To defeat that, play the game with the music off and then dub over the recording with the correct music.
2. Banana count - If you are piecing together a spliced run, it shouldn't be to hard to get your banana total correct for the splice, failing that the option below should work.
3. Score total - Probably the hardest to set, but I'd imagine it'd be possible with the use of an Action Replay or Gameshark device. With some luck, you should be able to set the score, banana totals, lives, and level with the cheat device, then play and record the level "cleaning"
4. Monkey rotation - Your video showed the solution to that, zero extra lives means no monkeys.
Couldn't someone just use save states and edit them together as if they made less mistakes?
That's what I was thinking. Just stop the recording and save state.
I feel like through memory editing scripts you could probably fix a couple of the issues and get a good splice going between the bonus stage transitions
you'd need to log the sin / cosine value for the head tilt and the score / bananas frame by frame in your previous segment, make a script that sets the values to the correct ones for the next one, and force the script to run on the exact proper frame when you started using an assembly hook, setting all of the memory values you need to make the run look legit
though, since emulators aren't allowed, I'm not sure how possible that is on a real machine
Using a modded copy
i feel like if someone somehow managed to put together a convincing enough splice, with the amount of effort they would've had to put in to make it work, i'd kind of want to give them a pass...
@@bobito3861 do me a favour, look up the word "joke" and get back to me
@@bobito3861 that explains why you seem to be taking such weirdly grave offence to a flippant shitpost in the comments of a TH-cam video
Liked as soon as I heard Ginseng Strip 2002, and enjoyed massively your video. Keep it up!
S A D B O Y S
Y U N G L E A N D O E R
ICE ON MY FEET I KEEP SLIPPIN'
I came to comment this but it's already here
Sbe boisssss
So the only thing you can splice is the contune screen in which it won't really help you at all. That means that you have to get gud.
The score and banana count could be kept consistent using save states. By playing each level one by one, retrying until desired time is achieved and saving your state between levels, you can keep your score and banana count consistent while retrying the levels.
just checked, emulators are banned so no save states
Emulators are banned for this game.
@@Goober13md How can you tell if they're using an emulator? I know some games have graphical differences, but if the graphics remained the same, are there any ways to tell?
@@Aimlesswaves. it may not be too noticeable, but someone will notice
@@Goober13md cheats are banned in speedruns
Play without a HUD and add in your own HUD after the fact and add in your own background music.
Faking the HUD in editing would be an insane amount of work, but removing the background music and adding it back in later is actually pretty easy.
You didn't talk about using a TAS, but I assume thats the same problem every game has. i.e. "fixed" by requiring runners to show their hands while playing?
Well, even then, the current ruleset forbids the use of emulation, so...
I don't think the current ruleset applies when considering possible ways to cheat.
@@wheedler typically emulators are easy to spot compared to legitimate console versions. There's probably a graphical glitch that would tell you it's an emulator
@@seana3052 dolphin is becoming more and more accurate. Some games are nearly perfectly emulated. I definitely think it woulf be possible
Getting this notification brought back memories I thought didn’t exist
Dam. And I would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you meddling kids
This is a really good video, be proud of the content you make, and try and sound a bit chipper, you sound about 5 minutes away from drinking yourself into non existence. But apart from that it's a genuinely good video
Like the Yung Lean beat in the background
Completely zoned out for the start of the video because the young lean instrumental is so good
what about making a tas and passing it off as a regular one?
No iso loaders or emu's allowed
Can you pass off an emulator run as legit though?
Theres no way to tell the difference, so they can't enforce this
Dylan Hammond is that true?
@@dracibatic2433 it'd be difficult to make emulator footage look exactly like captured composite video from a real GameCube. ROM loading on real hardware, however, is harder to distinguish visually.
You're assuming no hacks to the game itself. Setting a score to a certain value,replacing the pause sound with an empty found clip, etc would make a cheater's life a lot easier.
Just play the game slower than realtime and speed it up to normal speed.
Problemo: they would catch you being too good, even if it is subtle. And they would eventually catch you anyway because of a deep investigation. They would vertify everything including what files you used. You are not allowed to edit the game.
The video is about splicing, not cheating in its entirety.
@@YTN1112 how would they look at the files if you were playing on the real console? couldn't you just change them back or something? it's not like you're allowed to use an emulator.
@@YTN1112 "they would verify the files"
confirmed ignorant
I'm rewatching this video after your more recent video about cheaters being caught in super monkey ball. Very interesting. :)
0:11
"Narcissa Wright" lol
Loving the yung lean track in the background
such a classic. hearing it brought me way back, weird nostalgia.
Not sure how accurate the emulator of this game would be but has anyone tried to get away with TASing parts of a run?
Emulators are banned currently, so no.
@@Goober13md Splicing is also banned. The question is, is it possible to detect?
@@n0ame1u1 Even if it wasn't it would be noticeable as "faked" if the quality of the run was too good for a name we didn't recognize. The amount of work that would go into splicing isn't worth the trouble for a submission that isn't great. Hence 'almost' impossible, sure someone could potentially splice an amazing run but then they'd instantly get caught off the fact that some random person submitted an amazing submission. Most speedrun communities are pretty good about this type of scrutiny but yeah, technically it isn't 100% impossible just because it isn't allowed.
@@Goober13md splicing banned currently, so it's impossible to fake ANY speedrun!
wait...
@@silverboxxer debugging
What about using TAS things? Like instead of splicing the video output, you splice your recorded inputs, then replay the game. There would be no way to notice such a cheat. Or to put it more simply, make a TAS and say it's you playing.
During an AGDQ, during the TASBot section, they did Super Monkey Ball and mentioned the replay data was now writable. As long as the replay data is not acceptable, then it should be okay.
What? How could replay data help with a speedrun at all? People could fake IL records doing it, can't be sure whether they'd get caught or not, but replays aren't relevant to RTAs whatsoever.
Pretty easy to cut out pause screens while keeping the audio. Just go into your video editing mute the original audio then edit out pause screens. After this get an audio track for that level and put it over the video at the right timing
While it is "easy" to do, editing software can still show inconsistencies.
You could conceivably doctre in your own animation of the monkey heads bobbing and make it consistent manually. It would take loads of time however it might take less time than it would take to actually get good at the game.
You could use memory editing or otherwise modify the game to avoid all of these flags. Build in a save-state system. ... But pulling that off, alone, without anyone noticing is almost a bigger achievement than getting the world record.
Great breakdown. Splicing isnt the only method though. This game could have a tool assisted run done. Frame by frame manipulation. Or if its on original console only there might be a way to program a machine to input perfect commands on an actual controller. That would probably be insanely hard to do though. Im assuming there is a way to test if a game is being played on an emulator or the original hardware, but I rarely do speedruns.
Yung Lean in the background really sells it.
Love the yung lean loop in the background
Great video! I hope you do more of these! 1 more thing tho, can you lower the background music a bit? Its sometimes hard to understand you.
I think the intro's music is a bit louder than your voice. Maybe I have messed up ears but great vid! It explains alot and I love your explanation with the frame by frame analysis!
gratz on the classic Yung Lean, great choice
Only thing I would be wary of here is that SMB:DX is commonly run on xbox. It is possible, although non-trivial, to run trainers on modded original xboxes. Bonus stage edits would be made reasonably viable if you knew what the score, head tilt, and banana count of your previous segment was, and just set it up so pressing white on the controller set the variables to the correct values during the stage transition.
Ginseng Strip 2002 as bg music? Yes please.
Aged like milk.
0:36 holy shit that bio is so powerful
5:30
Mute BGM
Add it back post.
can you do it ingame without disabling all sound?
Alpharad Gold gang
Let's go 😎
Hi jo
Goober at 9:47: Damn! Finally, a method that looked like it had promise shot down by disembodied monkey heads!
Me: XD I never quite heard it put that way before, but OK! LOLF
Speedrun vid ft monkeys and the best yung lean track
Excellent
This is the comment I was looking for. Yuuuuung lean in the club. 😎
Great explanation. Very helpful. Awesome video.
for the monkey heads, if someone was insane enough they could cover up the game's heads with a looping clip of the heads if theyre careful about it. But it would have to be so frame perfect that it wouldnt be worth it
I'd be curious if it would be possible to mute the video where the pause screen sounds are and overlay the proper music and sound effects. You'd have to look at the waveform to make sure no obvious cuts exist but there should be ways to smooth that out.
Might be possible to get around the audio issue if you splice the song and applicable sound effects over the existing audio, though that would be tedious to get right.
tl;dw: the game score essentially tracks exact the number of frames of gameplay.
Except that's far from the only reason
Some/most of these can be gotten around by using modified ISO's on legit hardware. And live-memory modification is possible via a gamecube serial port.
What if you emulate it, then? You could use save states
You arent allowed to use emulator
@@DiscountMiku this video is about cheating
with modern editing software we can't just paste a head to keep lives the same. audio could be totally spoofed too if someone really wanted to spend some time on it. Audio capture enough music to fake the loop then edit in the Banana sounds etc.
I don't know much about this game but a hacked copy of the game that lacks the pause screen sound could be used to work around that in particular. If save states can be made that include how far along the music is and the current head tilt, I could also see that being a thing too.
The only way I could see to cheat would be to create a tas that would be plausible for a human to make. Good for that community that they've avoided cheaters entirely
Interesting video. I liked how detailed you were, without being Too Detailed. Your mic is kinda bad my dude, perhaps grab a new one?
You can always use a modifier on your console to customize your score and Banana count. This is an easy way to get around those issues.
This is probably the best game to speedrun.
if you listen closely between level theme transitions, there's a little fadeout during the transition
I think I 100%ed 1 and 2 and GBA, but at a slow and methodical pace. I cannot imagine speed running. But at other times I would try to cheese my way through a single level just to get a ridiculous replay. I need to look and see if I still have them.
What about Super Monkey Ball 2? You'd think they'd be easier to splice since the music between stages always changes to the stage select song.
i wish more games had GonGon's steely-eyed severed head in the corner to scare off cheaters
instead of splicing could you use a modified hex edited ROM, saved to a cartridge, that had the characters speed increased by 5 - 10%?
someone uploaded a GTA San Andreas run that was a WR, but someone very astute noticed that the tyre smoke was a little bit off when the runner accelerated. he then realized the acceleration parameters had been modified slightly (a side effect being more tyre smoke), hence the run was a fake
Because this is a game that is deemed "impossible to splice", there could be a chance that the moderators are lax in their screening of the footage, and therefore could miss a splice in an odd location. I cannot speak for the accuracy of the moderators, but typically, when Someone is sure in their success, they tend to lower their guard just enough to allow error.
why not have your sequence of inputs recorded for each stage and then play them back to back on a TAS or something which will make it all a single run but you have time to do each stage individually? you wouldn't run into any of the problems since the TAS is playing them all back to back like a normal speedrun
You could alter the console with software similar to gameshark or Cheat Engine to get around a lot of these issues, like keeping consistent scores, lives, continues, bananas, etc. But if you're considering that try and find something better to do with your time.
It would be amazing to see an intended route Speedrun where you complete expert as intended
Save states wouldnt be detectable right? Asking for a friend
N0
All methods that would allow you to use save states (emulators, custom rom loaders, etc.) are not allowed in runs for these particular games. Even with save states, if the save state method doesn't preserve every aspect of the console at the time of the save, you'll have other inconsistencies become apparent at the splice/state load points.
@@evknucklehead How about using an action replay to remove the hud and superimpose a correct one during editing?
@@StickThisUpYourAnus That would be even easier to detect, as it would be extremely hard to get a replacement HUD looking and acting exactly right throughout the run.
Maybe splicing a run of the regular game without raising flaga is nearly impossible.
But what if one cheat codes, or a modified rom, or an emulator and passes off the video recording as being on-console and as using the unmodified original game?
One could, for example, patch out the pause sounds and the monkey heads and add them back later during the edit.
Or edit the score before recording a splice.
Or use savestates or input recordings so that the splices always start where the previous one was finished, thus matching up the time, score, monkey head tilt and other variables?
What about savestates? Play first half of level perfectly then save then load and play the next bit perfectly, and so on. I don’t know if emulators are even allowed so please tell me what I’m missing.
4:15, Using a program like arss.sourceforge.net/ you could edit the spectrograph and remove the pause menu sound.
You could TAS it and then disguise the emulated footage as the real footage.
USB Gecko should allow to implement TAS techniques on real hardware. It would require a lot of engineering though, whoever goes through with it might deserve some kind of a prize.
Wow, I wonder if the creators of Super Monkey Ball knew this would happen and came up with precautions.
It does seem like the kind of game one would speedrun through after all. I mean cause there's a timer and the game rewards you with extra points if you beat a level quick.
While I know the community for running banana mania is smaller the the original games, it is a much easier game to splice. Pause, mid stage, and stage transition splicing won’t work for similar reasons (pause less so due to the second it takes for music to fade back in), giving a run away instantly). Continue splicing won’t work because there no continues. Bonus stage splicing seems like the way to go since score doesn’t exists in a normal sense, and score is just points for the shop. You could just grind out points to match with a spliced run, but that honestly seems like too much work for a run and would not even work if you’ve bought everything in the shop.
Either no one has spliced their entry or lots of people have but they are just really good at it
1. I dont do speedruns (never did in fact)
2. Never played monkey ball
3. Why would i splice anything
4 why is youtube recommending this
5. Why did i watch it start to finish anyway
1 & 2. You should
3. To cheat
4. TH-cam randomly recommends random videos to millions of people
5. Because it's interesting