Hi SM64 community,

I recently watched the new records in 70 and 120 (congratulations to suigi btw) I began wondering, since carpetless is now consistently possible RTA when it was previously thought to be TAS only, have there been any leads towards pulling off a 1 Key playthrough in RTA? I'm aware that there's a 0 star category but not many people run it because of how unforgiving it is.

Also, when watching these runs, I noticed that suigi used the Japanese version in 120 stars, and in the 70 stars run he used the American version. What are the benefits of each version and how do they yield better times in the respective categories?

VC early is humanly possible but is still a bit away from being fully RTA viable but it's the PU navigation that makes 1 key impossible to be RTA viable

120 is faster in Japanese because of a few things, faster intro (no voice over), no box to break in JRB for pillar star, Eyerok (boss fight in SSL) talks forever in the US version; and I'm sure there's a couple of other things I'm missing.

US is faster for 70 star because text scroll is slightly quicker, and over 70 stars (none of which include the two mentioned in why 120 is faster on Japanese) it adds up.

The difference isn't much, just down to a second or so IIRC. I've talked to many runners who don't care enough about the difference to get the other version, but you'll find all top tier runners will always run on the faster version for their particular category.

With regards to 1 key, it's not the same. Carpetless is a precise trick with a short string of frame perfect inputs required, but doable with pause buffering and enough practice. For 1-key we're talking about countless (not really - the TASers counted I'm sure, I'm just not sure myself how many) consecutive frame perfect inputs, and navigating strings of PUs

Jake Paul may be able to beat an aged Mike Tyson, but he wouldn't stand a chance against Goku at his peak. To use a somewhat silly analogy.

Thank you LucineSR and WombatMan, that all makes sense. I figured JP had a faster intro (that's so often the case with speedruns it's not even funny). I really love how much of a science Mario 64 and other critically acclaimed games have each been refined down to independent branches of science!

I remember the good old days when speedrunning was people who were just really good players showing off on Speed Demos Archive, compared to where we are now those runs were nothing but casual playthroughs lol. I even feel like that with my own journey doing glitchless Four Swords Adventures speedruns, my first time was 3:15:31 with no notable tricks/optimizations and only one real skip. Now this year as of this reply my record is down to 2:44:20, a 31 minute difference!

Proud to be a part of the speedrunning scene with a unique entry!

Fun fact - in Parsee's 47:11 (right before he got WR in 70 star) he ran on JP instead of US (and in fact did not own a US cart iirc).

Also yeah right now there are no ideas for how to make 1 Key viable, and whenever I've asked the TASers they usually just say bluntly "it'll never happen", which at least goes to show their opinion of its difficulty. Carpetless was thought to maybe be possible for a long time, but it still took a decade for an idea to be turned into a working setup.