Hi! I've spent the last year routing this game as an occasional hobby and having finally reached my goal per level last week I decided I would begin recording it. Now, that time is around the 50min mark, but it is using the Dolphin emulator (I have a physical copy and a Gamecube, but since I test each route/glitch in-hardware and since no one had claimed the game I thought that emulated runs would be acceptable while building a community). If you would be willing to allow emulators for even the short term you and I could collaborate on building a really strong set of runs and guides for this game. I have carefully documented the routes and exploits for each stage, and though the game isn't the best game ever, the movement tech, routing potential, and perfection of exploits could be really fun.

As you are the mod, I understand that your decision is final; however, I have put a lot of time and strategy into this game and I honestly believe that with a little flexibility the game could become pretty popular for speedrunning.

Thank you for your time :)

Yeah for sure! I was just kind of fooling around with this game because I didn't think anyone else ran it or even looked into it. I haven't put too much time into this game. I can mod you if you want since you definitely know more about the game than I do from what you said and we can figure out rules and stuff. Im interested to see what you've found in this game!

Oh that's so very cool! I'm almost done with the recording on my run, but I thought I'd go ahead and link you and the community to a strat for the first chapter, as well as introduce you all to a few of the glitches that I use.

SETTINGS: I change the GAME SETTINGS under the main title options to the following: Bullet Cam = no Then, when you start a new game, I change CONTROLLER SETTINGS to Turn Speed = Max, Motion Center = no

Here's the tech that I use in this chapter:

BODY JUMPS: McClane tends to jump at the edge of a surface; we use this to our advantage often (though in some chapters I negate the auto jump by holstering and walking backwards). However, it turns out that McClane will also auto-jump off of someone's head, too, which makes using bodies for boosting purposes quite easy to do.

URKEL SKIP: In this first chapter I use body jumps for a skip that I lovingly call URKEL SKIP. This skip involves forgoing the long forced dialogue with Al (the actor being from the TV show Family Matters, hence my use of the name Urkel) in order to open the door into the museum. Instead, I body jump off of the cop to the left of the door, which allows McClane to land on top of the man working on the door. Then I position McClane so that he is partially inside the door. It's at this point that I can use a variation of McClane's crouch-jump (to be discussed at a later date) to complete the skip. For this skip, you simply: A. get McClane partially inside the door as I have done here; B. hold jump, and if you've positioned McClane correctly, you'll see and hear him vibrate in the door; C. once you've started vibrating, you then hold crouch and push forward. With a little practice, you'll be through the door in no time, saving about a minute.

SOFT LANDING and DASHMAN SKIP When most people playing DH:V's first chapter cross the atrium (the large, open-ceiling, two-storied room with a statue and pool in the middle), they head downstairs and then get annoyed by the enemy who is scripted to run between the pillars at the bottom (I call him Dashman). We can negate this script by not using the stairs and instead jumping from the top floor to the bottom. However, in an effort to reduce fall damage, I have McClane jump down firmly onto the base of the statue. There are some irregular objects in the game that do not cause fall damage, and this statue's base is the first of several I use in my full run. Of note: McClane does not auto-jump off of this base, so you have to force the jump (what other games simply call "jump") in order to not waste time falling into the water. A potential optimization here would be to jump backwards once you've landed on the statue base. Regardless, you'll find Dashman in his corner awaiting a script that will never come.

The rest of this chapter is simply movement and reload optimization and enemy patterns. Now, this run is not as perfect as I'd like it to be -- for example, I would like to be able to one-cycle (one ammo clip) the final set of enemies just prior to rescuing the daughter (the eight standard enemies as you round the corner into the helicopter area just before the hostage battle). As is, I try to line up the first three enemies to conserve ammo, and I want to line up the two enemies on the raised platform, but they're a little trickier. If we came up with a reliable strat for shooting the hostage taker w/o wasting ammo on the flower pot to stun him, that would help immensely.

However, I think this will help the community begin practicing while I finish recording my run (it should be submitted to Beef by this weekend).

Thanks for reading!

Wow that was awesome! It would probably be good to post that in the "Guides" section too. You're modded now too btw.

Also the loading for the first stage on that video was about 3.2 seconds faster than I had on my gamecube so maybe we could have separate leaderboards for console and emulator? Just something to think about, I don't want to discourage anyone from running the game because they don't have a physical copy.

You know, I had not timed the difference in loading, but that makes absolute sense. I agree that there should be separate leaderboards and that non-emulation would discourage new runners. It's also helpful because right now several of the exploits in a couple of the chapters are frame-perfect or seemingly RNG based, and being able to test quickly and repeatedly assists the runners of physical copies.

Thank you for modding me, friend :)

I added emulator categories to the leaderboard. I was thinking of adding an individual level leaderboard too but I wanted to hear your thoughts on that before I do it.

I mean, that sounds like fun to me! I think we can all agree that physical game + marathon/full game is the most legitimate run/WR, but having people experiment and compete in other categories simply increases DH:V's visibility. If you're down, I'm down :)

I think individual levels should go by the in game time too. Games like this usually do that for individual levels. That would also mean that theres no deaths allowed for an individual level run because I noticed that if you die and restart at a checkpoint the in game timer resets back to the time from when you got the checkpoint. I spent like 45 minutes on one level once because I died a ton but the in game time ended up being closer to 10.

Very good point on the individual levels, Beef, and it brings up an interesting issue involving chapter 7 -- as you can see in my guide, I actually use checkpoint restart in the chapter's opening moments to skip a 58 second forced dialogue. EDIT: So does that mean that such an exploit should be disallowed?

And yes, I am going to submit my run, I just wanted to get the guide out there at the same time :)

Hmmmmm, thats interesting. I'm guessing it resets the timer to 0 so maybe it should be allowed, considering there's no real gameplay? It starts the level over just without the forced dialogue. For a full run that would definitely be allowed. Thats tricky for an IL though. I guess we could maybe make an exception for this stage for an IL? Hmmm something to think about.

I know, I know... it's been, like, a hundred weeks since my last guide, and we're still lacking my run. I took a trip to Colorado, and Chapter 8 is a real, real pain to get right. But the good news is you aspiring faster-than-me's will have lots of tricks to perfect! See you soon :)