Transcendent Movement

These things go beyond how the game was intended to be played, and beyond what we probably originally imagined the limits of the game to be.

Another especially good example is rocket jumping in the first Quake.

The examples from Metroid Fusion and Last Impact’s Rainbow Road are kind of exceptions to the pattern. In Metroid Fusion, the developers discovered the shinespark trick and acknowledged it with a secret message, even though they hadn't purposely included it. That example from Last Impact is intended to be in the game, but it makes use of a subtle property of the golden jumps that you never needed to use in Super Mario 64.

The Halo 2 sword-fly clips are staged, not legitimate gameplay. If I could go back to era of prepatched Halo 2 live multiplayer (if there even was such an era), I would definitely make a combo video of just sword-fly kills.

I’ve always thought there was something poetic about using the seemingly unbounded speed of backwards long jumping to climb the endless staircase. It’s like countering one infinity with another.

The uncredited clips are me playing.

You should watch Wreck It Ralph if you haven’t!




Here’s a relevant story that I put in a description on a video I deleted a long time ago.

Once I was playing Mario Kart DS online, where a match consists of four four-person races. During the first race, it became clear that two of the other three players in the group were kind of bad, but one of them was really good. Definitely better than I was. But that didn’t matter, because I used the broken tactic where you stay in second place and save a blue shell for right before the end. So I won the first race.

At the start of the second race, that really good player did something I’d never seen before. He started going backwards, toward the item blocks. When I approached him as I was about to finish my first lap, he immediately used a star. He then literally COMBOED me – he would drive into me and hit me, follow my tumble trajectory, and then hit me again, over and over until the star ran out. Every hit seemed to be on the first frame I was out of the invulnerable hitstun, so there was nothing I could do. He did this EVERY lap of EVERY race for the rest of the match, except once where I successfully snuck past him. I ended up getting third in each of the last three races, which caused me to get third overall, behind the two bad people. He got fourth, but I’m sure he didn’t care, and that all that mattered to him was that I did badly.

To this day, it blows my mind that someone mastered Mario Kart DS to such a degree. It was probably the most humbling gaming experience I’ve ever had.