New York, USAHi all, wanted to share some tech that was recently found by incobalt which features a cool glitch which managed to shave roughly 10 and a half minutes off my PB. I'm unsure of how moderators want to handle this, but for what it's worth this trick works in both DOSBox and ScummVM.
So what's the trick? This is, in short, a way of making any travelable location in the game available at any time. For simplicity, I am going to refer to this as 'warping'. Here are the steps to reproduce:
- Obtain a save file that already has a later location you'd like to travel to earlier than expected (warp).
- Either start a new game, or load a different save that you wish to apply the warp to. This trick works in either case.
- Play through your game until you are about to exit a location. Save this game.
- Load up your other save file, meaning the one from step 1. Travel to the location via the menu.
- Load the previous file from step 2. Leave the area to bring up the travel menu.
- The location from the other save will be available to you.
Pretty cool!
That said, there is an interesting limitation to consider, and that's the fact that the Ruined Church location is locked until Underwood is killed, which makes the routing kind of interesting. I managed to put together a run here:
The route I'm using is here: sparky's for money -> warp to louis for pool hall location (skipping long visit home/terminal) -> pool hall for gun -> warp to boathouse for Underwood kill -> warp to carpark for cutters -> warp to Church -> rest of game as usual.
Anyways, I've submitted this as an any% run for now but totally understand if this needs to be it's own category etc. Either way, a cool trick and s/o to incobalt for the discovery!
Have added my swordfighting video to the guides section, for some reason I thought it was already part of Leo's playlist but I may have misremembered. Thanks for the flag!
The only other thing I can think of to mention stratwise would be Shmoovement, which I'm not sure has a proper guide on SRC but has been discussed at length in the SA discord. In short, it's the idea of rapidly entering in LMB or Enter inputs while traveling left or up on certain screens while moving the mouse to force Guybrush to take 'bigger steps' and therefore move faster. It probably deserves a proper video guide but I don't know if anyone's gotten around to it, but can be done on most SCUMM games. Someone may have made a video but I can't seem to find one. The initial write up from mike is here: https://discord.com/channels/428276474852671508/428303733466726419/1103590547836383256
The big bit with that it is greatly varies in success screen to screen, game to game, so it's one of those things where if you see a lot of wiggling/swirling of the mouse, someone is probably trying to schmoove.
yeah, cursor selection is the way i (and others) usually do conversation selections in SCUMM games as (CoMI aside) the locations of the text will be consistent and therefore are easier to preempt. there's basically two schools of thought, as you can also be very quick with keyboard only but it takes some skill to do and has the added benefit of more certain accuracy. it's really up to you what's more comfortable/fast. and yes can confirm the game only allows a single keyboard input at a given time, that's another advantage of cursor style dialogues.
you've already uncovered a lot of the main strats yourself (well done!). i believe the most up to date guide is Leo's video guide, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVmJ-fxqrJQ67P8L1EF8cOgUh_qXwJXzL
i also have a quick rundown of zergu's newest swordfighting strats here: there's also a tips video frozenspade made here which has a few helpful bits for movement optimizations: https://www.speedrun.com/tsomi/guides/xtrn5
as i'm sure you've already watched a lot of the top runs, you can always just ask if you see something you don't get here or in the Speedy Adventures discord and i'm sure the community will do it's best to explain/answer. we're always happy to see another runner on the MI boards!
Hey- thanks for all these guides/thoughts! Might be worth collating all of these and adding it to the 'guides' section as these could certainly be helpful for folks, I worry it may get lost in the forums. Same with you (many) helpful notes on MI1SE!
Hey there, interesting! Runners of the 'classic' version of the game use the LucasFilm twinkle as the visual cue for the trick, rather than the audio cues. As there's no LucasFilm logo on SE, it was never thought to have been a thing- or at least that was my understanding. Other runners can keep me honest, but the trick works because the game changes it's speed to make those twinkles look the way they do.
I did a very hasty test and it does look like you're right, that's very cool! I did some quick timings from archway to archway in Melee Town:
- 7.1 (DOS w/speed glitch, ScummVM 2.9)
- 7.8 (SE w/speed glitch as described by saruya, but in classic gfx)
- 7.6 (SE, w/speed glitch as described by saruya, but in new gfx)
- 9.3 (SE, as is, with new gfx)
- 9.1 (SE, as is, with old gfx)
I only did a couple tests of each so it's not totally rock solid, but it's clear that there will be lots of accumulated timesave there for the taking should you take advantage of the glitch for a full run. Amazing find!
For other runners clarity- I managed to get this after the flurry of 4 notes following the bass tone at the beginning, which makes sense as that's when the logo would 'twinkle'.
hey there. there haven't been any new major discoveries, however, the newest run of the bunch is experimenting with using a set seed. the activity surge is mainly from aWay0fLife coming back and doing some runs out of the blue, so when one of us fires up the game it can sometimes get the band back together. there's been a lot of discussion, theorizing, and testing as a result.
if you're interested in following along on the set seed testing, or any future discoveries, i'd recommend joining the discord (linked by the game title above) and following the #lucasarts channel. it's been quite busy lately with folks trying to solve for good seeds in both MI2 and trying to crack the nut that is the Catacombs in Monkey Island 1. all are welcome!
Welcome! I just had a look at my setup and it looks like my Terrible Toybox folder was in AppData\Roaming. From there (hopefully) you'll see the folder and then can go to Return to Monkey Island -> prefs.json.
Have got ahead and added Sega CD and a few others (Atari ST/FM Towns) to the list too.
ah of course, the version Dominic first played iirc! would be cool for someone to submit a run on that platform for sure.
I haven't given the EGA version a try yet, but that's a very cool trick for sure! I'm not sure if EGA will keep up with the DOS version most runners are using now due to the speedglitch right at the beginning, but probably worth a deeper look (plus the EGA palette is the best).
hey folks, i do believe 2x categories (much like Monkey Island 2 + 3 have) is the plan. this game currently has a 2 week hold on submissions it since it's new, but I suspect the boards will be set up soon.
it doesn't look like it's been added to the board yet, but much of the chatter for this has been in the Speedy Adventures discord, you are welcome to join: https://discord.gg/w9uWcQeRPp
looking forward to running this with you folks! i haven't yet finished yet (ch2) but have been having a blast with it so far.
hey there! you're in luck, as i have been working on a 'state of grim' guide that is close to being finished which can probably answer a lot of questions for you. that said...
in terms of skipping the prerendered animations: use ESC to skip these cutscenes. it won't work for all of them, but will for most. as for conversations, hyperformance and myself use what we call a '4 key method' for text skipping. by hitting the '.' (period/dot/stop) key it will clear out one line of text. you can remap this in game to a second key (i use C, for example) however it doesn't actually cancel out using . as a skipping key. this gets paired with left and right click on mouse and by mashing all 4 of those together you can rip through text quite quickly.
on the note of ticket warping, this is still kind of in an early stage though hyperformance put together a pretty nice outline of what was done on their run in another thread. i'm sure this will change as more eyes are on it.
if you want any other info, feel free to drop by one of my streams as i have been doing attempts 2x a week and can answer questions live.
anyways, congrats on your first run and glad to have another active runner here! i would encourage you to join the Speedy Adventures discord (https://discordapp.com/invite/kWCfAPu) where i and a few others have been pooling some of our findings in the #lucasarts-legacy channel. it's also a great place for any sort of adventure game speedrunning if you are interested in others. (Mods- please consider adding this server as the official discord for this! also feel free to remove the link if this isn't allowed!)
hey there! GFR is my current speedgame project so i have been submitting runs here and there recently, glad to see some active runners :)
100% sounds interesting, the Speedy Adventures community discussed doing something similar with the Special Edition Monkey Island 2 release but never came to light.
Hi all, I have been learning this speedrun using the current version of ScummVM (2.5.1) which supports AGS titles. I only just noticed when trying to submit my latest runs that emulators may be banned. Just wanted to check that this is the case as it's not listed in the rules. The reason I have been running on ScummVM is for crash prevention and the fact it has room load times that seem to be equal to the ones already on the board.
Totally happy to abide with whatever the community answer is here, but wanted to check before submitting.
hi folks- this has now been added as an official category, so looking forward to seeing more runs of this!
just for full clarity for any new runners- timing starts on 'new game' and ends on Guybrush saying "it's aliiiiiive!" after releasing the Abomination.
here's the result of a few tries last night:
it seems that if we don't check the manhole cover, the options with Dave remain static. this ends up making the dialogue tree at the end of this much easier.
anyways, this is a really fun category and definitely vote to have it added. the shortness makes it a lot easier to approach, you get good practice on dialogues/movement/early routing and would be ideal for a beginner or a vet looking to take a break from the RNG.
edit- here are the dialogues i use for Dave once in the 'free tree', 1 is first answer, 2 is second, etc: 111 liver 132 heart 211 head 222 guts 311 stomach 322 foot 333 butt
i will give this a shot on one of my streams this week as well, i really like this as an alternative to the full run. since the any% run has a lot of RNG, abomination% would probably be a good entry run for anyone looking to pick it up as a beginner as you say. would kind of be like how 'lite%' works for Monkey Island 2.
