SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom it may be one of the most unlikely video games of all time, a licensed project that turned out to be a great game and a worthwhile challenge for the speedrunning community. But the absurdity doesn’t stop there: Sponge Bob Speedrunners recently discovered that blurring their Xbox discs could result in much better times, although the tactic may become obsolete in the near future.
A new video from YouTuber and Sponge Bob speedrunner SHiFT details the findings of the community. Essentially, marking the Battle for the bikini bottom disc in a specific way interferes with the Xbox’s ability to read it, resulting in obstacles between gameplay and the menu screen that make it much easier to play a “lag clip”, an important trick that allows players to squeeze through of normally inaccessible barriers, overloading the game with excessive pause.
The speedrunning community has long tried to optimize Battle for the bikini bottom runs on the hardware side, cataloging the different versions of the Xbox hard drive to find out which one provides faster load times. The downside is that the faster the console accesses the game disc data, the more difficult the clip’s delay becomes. But by combining stained discs with the fastest hardware, serious players could theoretically have the best of both worlds.
Speedrunners are known for doing crazy things to win games faster. In addition to simply playing for hours on end, we saw them crawl on the floor while in virtual reality, inject your own code into Super Mario World, and even mess with Famicom placing it on a heating plate. I’m not sure where to rank squirt ketchup on a Battle for the bikini bottom disco in search of the best, but it is certainly there.
After further testing, however, this method of smudging was found to be very unreliable, not to mention it’s a bad way to go around spoiling copies of an 18-year-old game. Some speedrunners have also come to the conclusion that lag clips are too dependent on hardware inconsistencies to be considered a viable tactic or worth pursuing.
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“It’s awesome,” explained SHiFT during a Twitch stream last night. “You need something as fine as a scratch on the disc to make these things work, and we’re not going to disfigure our discs. This is simply not going to happen. This is ridiculous. And as I said before, it is unethical to do this because the goal of speedrunning is to preserve a game. “
SHiFT went on to explain that new developments in Battle for the bikini bottom speedrunning can make lag clips and, therefore, the need to mess with discs, obsolete anyway. By making it legal to run the game on hard drives via modified Xboxes, the community would be able to level the playing field by normalizing loading times across the board and making lag clips impossible, eliminating the frustration of looking for the perfect console. with the perfect disk drive to make the technique a little less difficult.
There is not a single unifying body at the center of speedrunning, but rather a disparate collection of isolated scenes that mostly do their own thing. Battle for the bikini bottom players will need to get together and find out what’s best for them, while balancing frustrating mechanics and accessibility for newcomers. At least now we know that staining your discs with ketchup is (probably) out of the question.