SpongeBob players discover dirty game discs make speedrunning tricks easier

SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom may be one of the most unlikely video games of all time, a licensed project that has proven to be both a great game and an interesting challenge for the speedrunning community. But the absurdity doesn’t stop there: Spongebob Speedrunners recently discovered that smearing their Xbox drives can lead to much better times, although the tactic may become obsolete in the near future.

A new video from YouTuber and Spongebob speedrunner SHiFT details the discoveries of the community. Essentially, mark the Bikini Bottom Battle the disc in a specific way interferes with the Xbox’s ability to play it, resulting in issues between the game and the menu screen that make it much easier to perform a “shift clip”, an important tip which allows players to squeeze through normally inaccessible barriers by overloading the game with excessive pause.

The speedrunning community has long been trying to optimize Battle for the bikini bottom runs on the hardware side, cataloging the different versions of the Xbox disc drive to see which one offers faster load times. The downside is that the faster the console accesses the data on the game disc, the harder it becomes to delay the clip. But by combining stained discs with the fastest hardware, serious gamers could theoretically have the best of both worlds.

Speedrunners are known to do crazy things to beat the games faster. Besides just playing for hours, we saw them crawl on the ground in virtual reality, inject their own code into Super mario world, and even play with the Famicom by putting it on a hot plate. I’m not sure where to classify squirting ketchup on a Battle for the bikini bottom hard looking for the best, but it is definitely up there.

Upon further testing, however, this smudging method proved to be quite unreliable on its own, not to mention its poor form of ruining copies of an 18-year-old game. Some speedrunners have also come to the conclusion that shift clips are too dependent on material inconsistencies to be considered a viable or useful tactic for moving forward.

“That’s too much,” SHiFT explained during a Twitch stream last night. “You need something as thin as a scratch on the record for these things to work, and we’re not going to damage our records. It just won’t happen. It’s ridiculous. And like I said before, it’s unethical to do this because the whole point of speedrunning is to preserve a game.

SHiFT went on to explain that new developments Bikini Bottom Battle speedrunning can make lag clips, and therefore the need to screw with discs, obsolete anyway. By making it legal to run the game from hard drives through software modulated Xboxes, the community would be able to level the playing field by standardizing load times across the board and making lag clips impossible. , taking the frustration out of searching for the perfect console with the perfect disc drive to make the tricky technique a little less easy.

There isn’t a single, unifying body at the center of speedrunning, but rather a disparate collection of detached scenes that do their own thing for the most part. Battle for the bikini bottom players will need to come together and figure out what’s best for them while balancing the frustrating mechanics and accessibility to newcomers. At least we now know that coating their discs with ketchup is (probably) irrelevant.