Hi. Don’t know if im the first but ive discovered how to beat the mechanic in the game that fails you in big game races when you “cheat” by taking huge shortcuts. I will recap the discoveries i talked about in my last post “questions about shortcuts” while filtering out what is no longer relevant. Here is everything ive learned:

The “Cheat Fail” as ive come to calling it can be circumvented allowing for giant time saves on certain levels. Normally if you try to take a big shortcut, the second you emerge back onto the road (thats actually a part of the course or is some cases directly adjacent) the game brings your bike halting to a stop and chastises you for cheating with a message that says “cheaters never prosper” before taking you to the “Wrecked” screen and asking you to cough up 1-3 thousand dollars. This mechanic can be beaten allowing you to trigger the end of the race without being labeled a cheater. I’ll explain what you need to know to accomplish this but first let me define a few terms:

Cheat Fail - When the game decides you’ve cheated and ends your race and demands your money

Course Road - a section of road that is a part of the designated path for that race. These roads will trigger the Cheat Fail if re-entered wrong after going off road for a lengthy shortcut.

Non-Course Road - roads not on the race’s designated pathway, can drive freely on these without the risk of triggering the Cheat Fail

Progressive - The direction you would need to travel on a Course Road to be making progress towards the finish line.

Regressive - The direction you would need to travel on a Course Road to be losing progress towards the finish line.

Flashy Crash - The name i gave to a maneuver where you purposely crash into one of the big yellow or orange flashing arrow signs in order to respawn yourself on the Course Road with a huge lead and the ability to once again drive freely on the Course Roads without triggering the Cheat Fail.

Forced Respawn - Basically any other version of crashing yourself into a specific spot on purpose with the goal of respawning back on the Course Road with the lead you acquired from a shortcut.

Win Zone - The area inside and outside of the finish line that when driven across in the Progressive direction triggers the end of the race. The Win Zone extends quite a ways outside of the poles of the finish line, I haven’t measured it but feels like maybe 80-100 feet in the game

Danger Zone - The area on either side of a Course Road that if driven inside of in the Progressive direction, the Cheat Fail will be activated. This feels like about 50 feet in the game. The fact that the Win Zone is about double the width of the Danger Zone is one of the keys to defeating the games anti cheat programming.

Ok, here’s how to defeat the anti cheat programming:

The “Cheat Fail” only gets triggered when you renter a Course Road traveling in the Progressive direction. So if you renter that same Course Road facing the Regressive direction, the Cheat Fail will not be tripped. At first glance this doesn’t seem very useful since we need to drive in the Progressive direction to finish the race but we can use this mechanic when crossing course roads or to temporarily drive on a course road in the Regressive direction to get to a Forced Respawn point.

Let’s talk about Forced Respawns. If you can crash your bike close enough to the Course Road you want to respawn on WITHOUT accidentally triggering the Cheat Fail in the process by pointing the bike in a progressive direction, then you will respawn just meters from where you crashed keeping the huge lead you gained from your shortcut and you be able to drive freely on the course road again without risking the cheat fail. But there’s a catch, the game still tracks your bike when its flying around during the crash. (i think the cheat fail is activated by tracking the bikes direction but im not 100% sure, the riders position during the crash could factor in too, ive only been at this a day and just using trial and error.) so if in the chaos of you ramming your bike head on into a tree, fence or flashy sign it happens to point in a direction the game doesn’t like, it will label you a cheater and end your race. This is the hardest part of defeating the anti cheat programming.

Its also possible to fail a forced respawn by not being close enough to the course road (or some other unknown factor) when you crash, if this happens, you wont necessarily trigger a cheat fail, you’ll just be teleported back to where you deviated from the path to start your shortcut; this usually makes the race unwinable. I want to find a way to have the game update your position to first place before performing a respawn so this problem is averted but I haven’t found out how to do that yet.

Not all shortcuts require Forced Respawns but the ones that do are currently the bane of my existence. There are four shortcuts ive worked out so far that require Forced Respawns, i got to hitting them about 75% percent of the time in practice but during my Speedrun attempt today with these new strategies under the pressure and fatigue of having fought lunatics on motorcycles for an hour just to get to my first attempt, i failed both of my first two Forced Respawns and ran out of money and got a game over ending my run. Unlike losing a race where you just lose time, activating the Cheat Fail will cost you the money you need to by your next bike or end your run completely so there is risk. However, i really think performing these shortcuts is easier than surviving or staying in front of the onslaught of the other riders constantly trying to beat you to death right before the finish line. If you successfully complete a shortcut, you get away from not just the other bikers, but most time you get away from spawning cars. So you can haul ass because there is no one in your way but the game also runs faster because its loading much less content and has no reason to lag.

Ok. I better get to the point. Basically, successfully using a shortcut as a time save in this game means triggering the end of the race without triggering the Cheat Fail (despite deserving it). Since the Win Zone that triggers the end of the Race is roughly twice the size of the Danger Zone that will end your race with a cheat fail, if you drive in the progressive direction through the the part of the Win Zone that does not overlap with the Danger Zone, you will win the race without being called a cheater.

There are three ways of doing that ive found.

1. The Off Road Method - On maps where the course is layed out so you can drive off road to the finish line faster than the other riders can finish the race, you can drive straight there as long as you dont enter the danger zone. I use this on 3:2 and it save about 15 seconds. Its also pretty easy since there is no forced respawn, you just cant drive too close to the course road or you’ll enter the danger zone and trigger the cheat fail.

2. Forced Respawn Method - this describes shortcuts that wouldn’t be viable if you couldn’t get back onto the course road traveling progressively to finish the race. I use this on 5:7 “Crash and Burn” and others. Sometimes the shortcut involves going off road, other times it involves using Non-Course Roads but either way you need to do a forced respawn to be able to finish the race with a time save. Once a forced respawn is successfully completed you can just play the game like normal exempt you wont have people trying to beat you to death every 5 seconds. You dont need to do anything fancy at the finish line, you just cross it like normal.

3. The Roundabout Method - Some races you can use Non Course Roads to drive to the finish line from THE OTHER SIDE. This takes a bit of maneuvering when you reach the finish line since just driving through it wont trigger then end of the race. You have to drive off to the side far enough away to be able to turn around without crossing into the danger zone and then drive through the win zone just like you would in the Off Road Method. These are the easiest and my favorite. The hardest part is remembering the right combination of non course roads to take to arrive at the finish line. MARATHON falls into this catagory and you can beat it in around 1m21s easy this way. Thats the single best time save i have to offer here and hilariously its the easiest. I use to kinda dread marathon but now i laugh my ass off it.

So thats it. To make a shortcut work you have to trigger the end of the race by driving through the Win Zone in the Progressive direction and you have to do that without triggering the Cheat Fail by driving through the Danger Zone or by entering a Course Road in the Progressive direction. If you cant drive straight to the finish line from the other side or take a off road route, then you can find a shortcut route that cuts off some time and then figure out where you can do a Forced Respawn that is consistent enough to be worth it. At first i always crashed into the flashy signs since they are at all the intersections i would be coming back onto the course road from and they are close enough to the road to usually work but lately they’ve been super inconsistent and ive opted for driving regressively to a fence or corner of where two buildings meet instead. If we figure out a consistent way to do them the game will be ours. For best results ive been limiting my speed to 100km per hour but too slow and you might not crash. Angle matters too. Im trying to design setups where i can hit it the same every time but its hard.

Good luck everyone. Id love to take first place but this game is mentally demanding and i dont usually do well on second attempts in a day and Im running out of time before the real world keeps me from attempting these speedruns for a while. I feel good with the idea that i helped push the boundaries of what’s possible in one of my favorite games.

Today I had a break through with the Forced Respawns while practicing for today’s speedrun. They are totally usable now. 100% reliable.

I mentioned in the above post that I thought there would be a way to get the game to update your position recognizing you in first place and moving your respawn point to your current location. That ended up being true. During one of my practice runs I was driving along side the Course Road when I noticed my position in the race updated to first place. The lightbulb went off in my head, so I went into the woods and crashed to test my theory, and it respawned me in first place with the lead I gained from the shortcut. It worked. You just have to get close enough to the course Road without getting close enough that it activates the cheat fail. Once it updates you into first place, turn away from the road and go crash somewhere. Ironically that ended up being the hardest part, because I use the crotch rocket bikes with really good handling and they never seem to want to tip over without actually smacking into something, sometimes I was able to do was sort of E-break turn and lay the bike down, but usually I ended up having to drive a number of seconds away to run into a tree. you want to do it away from the road because if you’re too close you run the risk of triggering the cheat fail. If you follow those parameters, the forced respawn works 100% of the time. After I made sure it worked on all of the maps I have Shortcuts for, I began a speed run. The shortcuts worked flawlessly except for one where I lost focus and did something stupid, but I need to work on my level four and five races that don’t have Shortcuts. I took 30 minutes off my best time and brought it down to 2h9m ish but first place is still half an hour away. I had to repeat far too many races to be a first place contender, but I’ll work on that. I’m sure one of you guys has what it takes to apply these techniques and destroy the world record. Good luck.

Hi everyone, the plot continues to thicken. It’s now become apparent that Getting the game to update your position into first place and thus moving your respawn point to your current location has more to do with The angle of your bike than it does with your distance from the road. So I described how I had a breakthrough yesterday, how I got the game to update your location to first place when I would creep up to the road, but eventually I would start turning and end up more parallel to the road so that I didn’t get too close and trigger the cheat fail. It finally occurred to me that the game would update my location when I was changing angles to be more parallel with the road. So you don’t have to get as close to the road as I thought, you have to travel in the progressive direction sort of parallel to the road for a second or two within it seems like around 80 feet from the road, and then it will update you. This has made it much easier, because you don’t have to get that close to the danger zone meaning you can go much faster, in fact in certain situations, you can even get the game to update your position to first while on a trajectory into a wall or some thing else to perform a forced respawn. This makes it possible to perform forced respawns at high speed under the right conditions. ✌️

In the future I think I’ll refer to the act of getting the game to update your position to first place while also updating your respawn point as just “Performing an Update”. So I’d just say, “follow that road left until you see the flashy sign, perform an update, then a respawn.”

There are so many shortcuts in this game now. Wanted to share a new piece of info about forced respawns. Actually crashing your bike has been surprisingly the least consistent part of these shortcut techniques. I use the crotch rockets in levels 3 through 5 to make it easier to dodge other players and weave through traffic, unfortunately though they have so much handling it can be hard to try to get them to crash when doing a respawn. A wall usually works but even then sometimes you can just do a big flip and end back on your tires unscathed. Here is a pretty consistent solution when the terrain allows for it. If there is any decent incline near by, you can hold a wheelie at slow speed when entering the incline and continue holding that wheelie. Speed up once on the incline and time it so you’re about 3-4 seconds into the wheelie when on the incline with a little bit of speed and it will buck you off the bike backwards. I know everybody already knows about this Mechanic, but on the street bikes in the later levels it’s often not enough to cause you to crash, the bike will find a way to correct itself, but doing it on an incline makes it consistently buck you off. This is mostly handy when you’re performing a reset away from the city since there aren’t any walls to crash into, trees work but you can glance off to the side or not be fast enough or even hit too fast and potentially end up too close to the road at the wrong angle and trigger the cheat fail, using the wheelie reset you can pretty consistently get the same results. I’ve only had one time where it’s failed so far, and I think that’s because I was too close to the top of the slope when The bike trued to buck me off. So if I had timed it better it likely would’ve worked. Good luck guys, I’ve been streaming every day and I’m trying to make YouTube videos with isolated tutorials on these concepts, just last night I found five new shortcuts in levels that were previously hard for me to beat consistently. I’ve only got a few more levels to find consistent ways of winning in Before I feel like a first place contender, I’m getting pretty close and I’m excited. I’m happy to share anything about what I’ve learned in this game, check me out on Twitch if you want to see some more real time discoveries. Thanks everyone.

Wow this is awesome. I just got 1:13 on Marathon after reading through and understanding your posts. I can't believe it's as about simple as the 'Win Zone' being a larger 'hitbox' than the 'Danger Zone'. Great discovery you've made. I'd love to look into this deeper too like you have, not sure what time I'd have for runs but it'd be great to try to fully figure things out either way.

For real, life’s in the way for me too. I’m like 20 seconds from bronze and I think my route would be 1h36m if I can grind it out long enough to get a no lose run.

You were not messin around when you titled this thread Open Season for Time Saves :O With your current PB I was able to practice a lot of the tracks and figure out stuff. You really figured almost everything out already. I have videos of Levels 3 and 5 so far, hopefully I'll get to Level 4 today, but I was able to find a few different routes that were (sometimes a lot) faster. I think Levels 3 and 5 combine for well over 10 minutes of timesave alone, I'll list all of the videos here (and edit-in Level 4 when I get to recording them).

3-1 Twistyland - Align the camera with the cloud to the right and stay on that path. Drive next to the huge green hill.

3-2 Smack and Run - Hold sharp-left at the beginning, align camera at the center of the clouds and follow that path. Squeeze inbetween the right-side of the long horizontal building, start holding A at the end of the grey patch to respawn correctly.

3-4 The Edge - Hop over the railing and keep the camera adjusted to the abnormal part of the cloud. The finish line is where the building is at.

3-5 Lethal Ascent - Turn off-road at the sign, constantly wiggle left on the control stick afterward. Stay right of the satellite, sharp-turn left after the tree to finish. *Note that this barely saves time compared to any other skip - only around 4 seconds.

3-8 Smooth Ride - Turn around to the end of the hill then accelerate. Ride the flatground then keep the camera aligned between the clouds. The finish line is a little bit after the tree.

4-1 Ricochet Run - Sharp-turn right at the beginning, center the camera with the abnormal part of the cloud and stay on that path. U-turn around the tree to finish.

4-2 Widow Maker - Turn sharp-left after the wooden pole, then wiggle left until you see the tree. Start holding A slightly before the downslope on the ground.

4-3 Beatdown - Turn slight-right at the beginning, tap A when going up the first green hill. Drive along the trees and buildings, then keep the camera aligned between (or slightly right of) the clouds, crash at/close to the 4th building.

4-4 Weekend Getaway - Sharp-left at the beginning, turn upleft at the hill. This isn't faster than the normal route, but the normal route can make you wait an extremely long time for the other racers to finish, so this route might be better.

4-5 Roadkill - Go off-road at the silver railing, align the camera in the center/right-side of the clouds, stay right at the big brown hill. 4-6 - Currently slower than normal route, should be able to figure out something to make it faster though.

4-7 Whine Country - Sharp-turn down-right at the beginning, hop over the railing inbetween the trees and keep the camera aligned with the right-center side of the cloud, then drive to the left-most tree and go downhill to finish.

4-8 Long Walk Home - Go straight instead of left, go off-road when the sign changes to pointing left. Go off-road again at the tree after the sign and jump-off in-between the satellite and the tree. Before jumping off, hold R+B when you pass the tree.

5-1 Cliffs of Insanity

5-2 Wrecking Machine

5-3 Carnage

5-4 Free Fall

5-5 Bike Mangler (To-Do)

5-7 Crash and Burn

5-8 Marathon (To-Do)

It’s nice to meet someone who gets it, figuring this shit out is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done but so niche nobody gets it.

It didn’t occur to me to use clouds as reference points, I usually used the high spots of little hills just when they load in, the make a sort of gun sight before the terrain behind them loads in.

I’ve never really tried insanity tracks, have you tested these techniques there?

The insanity tracks don't kick you out of the race for any reason so I don't think any discoveries made here are useful for other categories. There was one thing you figured out that I realized would save a little bit of time but I totally forget what it was lol (will edit this post if I ever remember). And yea I always use the clouds as reference points when possible, it's too hard for me to memorize where to go without it.

Don't have to deal with this problem on thrash mode, but legendary find for big game! Makes the thread about adding a no major shortcuts category to big game from 5 years ago pretty relevant now lol. Hope to see a few others try their hand at big game now the category is this much quicker.

Hello. I casually fired up RR64 this morning and made another discovery relevant to the strategies laid out in this thread. It’s pretty simple. JoeDamillio, you made a break through with these shortcut strategies when you started using the clouds in the game as reference points while traversing the difficult grass sections of shortcuts. It blew my mind when i first read your post in this thread about the clouds cuz i had never noticed the clouds before and that seems like such an obvious reference point. Turns out i never noticed them because on my game they weren’t there. By the time you had posted the information about the clouds i had stopped making runs as my life got busy and i haven’t really been back since. I did try to utilize your cloud strategy once and was bewildered by the missing clouds in my game, i even wondered for a moment if you were using an emulator or something but this morning i figured out the discrepancy.

The clouds in RR64 only show up when playing the game with the 4MB Ram extension pak installed to your N64. I didn’t instal the expansion pak or even know about it until a few months ago when i needed to get it to use the USAMUNE practice rom for super Mario 64 Speedrun practice. It kind of blew my mind, none of my speedruns for SM64, RR64 or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater utilized the expanded RAM and all of those games perform much better with it. And in addition to the increased frame rate performance, occasionally certain features are added to the game with the expansion pak installed; in this case the clouds.

So if anyone reads through this thread and wants to utilize JoeDamillion’s cloud reference shortcut strats, know that you need to buy and instal the N64 4MB RAM expansion pak, you’ll be happy you did though as it makes all of your n64 games more enjoyable. I will have to start brushing off my RR64 skills and try runs again soon now that i have access to the clouds. If this game had a bigger Speedrun community id argue we need separate catagories for with and without expansion paks as its definitely a different playing field but im not sure that’s necessary yet. Should probably look into whether the increased frame rate alone provides enough advantage to warrant the separate category; with a Speedrun of multiple hours the difference could be several minutes just because of your hardware.

That is all. ✌️