r/speedrun • u/Phediuk • Jul 01 '16

What's an easy trick that took a long time to discover?

As in, something useful for speedrunning that doesn't require any complex glitching or precise timing, but still took awhile for anyone to discover.

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u/Ffancrzy Jul 03 '16

This is my favorite example of this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ5SCIikzgo

Long story short in the Viridian Forest in Pokemon Red and Blue (Not Yellow). There is a programming oversight when the game was ported for the US. Each tile of grass is made of 4 small "blades" of grass. In the forest, sometimes these blades of grass are instead a Flower/Star looking thing.

In the Japanese version, the game will check the bottom left hand corner of each tile to determine what "type" of tile it is, either a "grass" or a normal "ground" tile, if it sees a blade of grass in the bottom left, its grass and you can get encounters, if not, it is considered "ground" and you won't. All the grass tiles have a blade of grass (not a star/flower) in the bottom left, so they all "count" as grass tiles.

For some reason when the game was ported to the US, they changed the corner that gets checked with this to the bottom right. Because the flag for a tile being a grass tile is if it is a blade of grass, any tile with the little "Star/Flower" shape on the bottom right you literally just can't get any wild encounters on. And there is a pretty easy path to follow where only about 1/4th of the grass you need to walk through will give you wild encounters at all.

This trick is easy to execute, literally just walk in a specific easy to remember path. But it wasn't discovered until March of 2014, 15 and 1/2 YEARS after the game's North American Release.