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The Super Mario Maker community faces its final boss
- makin 3y agoThat final boss, Trimming the Herbs, has definitely turned out to be a hacked (TAS) level, so The Last Dance was the last, already beaten level. This article is fairly outdated for a developing story.
- BryantD 3y agoBeat me to it! See https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2024/03/random-its-done-every-super-mario-maker-level-has-been-cleared-before-wii-us-online-shutdown https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2024/03/random-its-done-ev... for more.
- permo-w 3y agointeresting nonetheless
- TillE 3y agoThat was always by far the most likely explanation, it was the general opinion of top-level SMM players. Something like 10 frame-perfect inputs with a lot of precise movement, it's just not plausible. He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs. A lot of people were saying "there was no TAS in 2017", meaning I suppose there were no specific tools for emulator at the time, but that's just irrelevant when you can take a day or two to trial-and-error it.
- bakugo 3y agoI'm fairly sure the Wii U was already hacked by 2017, so he could've just played the inputs back on the console itself. Either that or just hack the game into thinking he cleared it when he didn't.
- pjerem 3y agoNo need to hack anything, you just have to make a Bluetooth controller with the same characteristics than Nintendo’s controllers. They are pretty standard.
- kevinventullo 3y agoI mean tasvideos.org goes back to 2003: https://tasvideos.org/SiteHistory#2003 https://tasvideos.org/SiteHistory#2003
- LukeShu 3y agoI don't think anyone is saying that there was no TAS in general in 2017, but that there was no TAS for the Wii U in 2017.
- Retr0id 3y agoEven with a microcontroller, doing frame-perfect inputs is tricky because you don't have anything to sync off of - even tapping into the vsync signal from the video output is an imperfect reference because there's no guarantee that the game engine is actually synced with it (although I have no knowledge of SMM, maybe it does work better than I expect)
- a_t48 3y agoYou can start off with a start input to unpause the game, for instance.
- Retr0id 3y agoThat doesn't solve the problem, in the general case (it might work acceptably well in practice, though)
- ikiris 3y agoif your controller has such loose timing that you can't match a 10ms window reliably, you're doing something very wrong. '
- lmm 3y agoMatch a 10ms window how far away from your last sync point? Every clock has a drift rate.
- themoonisachees 3y agoI get where you're going, but also consider the level is 17 seconds long. It's not unreasonable to think he just ran it a few times until the clocks decided to cooperate.
- braiamp 3y agoExcept that many top players said it was very unlikely due the time it was uploaded and the availability of TAS methods at the time. The creator took a day to beat it, because not only couldn't sync inputs with the game engine current state, but also there's real rng in the trick.
- ufferop 3y agoThe funny thing is if you watch the clear vid it actually looks really straightforward. The original purpose of the video was to coyly announce the TAS tool the maker created, but the video was mostly ignored because it looks like a regular clear vid. That’s how it so effectively accidentally flew under the radar. The level lacked a TAS label, and TASs are usually obvious and flashy. But then you play it and realize those jumps are insanely precise. Yes, frame perfect, but also mostly pixel perfect x,y precision. There is even RNG manipulation necessary to ensure a bomb is spawned from a note block in a specific direction. Streamers had already beaten it in chunks so it was theoretically possible for a human to do, but once people started offering monetary bounties the uploader felt it was time to let everyone in on the 7 year old joke.
- ufferop 3y ago> He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs. The streamer featured in TFA, ThaBeast721, said that he and some other high profile streamers playing the level were contacted by the maker, whom many in the community knew prior and so there was chat history to authenticate the claim, and shown a video of the device breaking the level. Thab described the device as a “raspberry pi or arduino type device hooked up to an actual controller somehow” When the clear video failed to go viral the maker dropped the gag, and forgot about it until recently, because the device was a pain to use anyway. The maker said it took 3 months to upload the level. Something about the device causing the console to crash when programming the inputs. https://m.twitch.tv/thabeast721 https://m.twitch.tv/thabeast721
- tech234a 3y agoI’ve heard that people are still trying to attempt it before the deadline.
- tialaramex 3y agoRight, it's clearly not hard enough to be impossible for a human to do it which is one reason there was doubt prior to the confession. Thabeast was pretty close to mid-way I think, and he wasn't the person who'd spent most time attempting this.
- jmcgough 3y agoYep, you can still people working on it here https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/super-mario-maker https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/super-mario-maker
- PokemonNoGo 3y agoI see nothing there?
- TJSomething 3y agoSeems like it might still be worth trying to recording tool-assisted run for.
- Zedseayou 3y agoIt was published on the 19th, this submission is just late
- labster 3y agoThe Last Dance with Mario Jane, one more time to kill the pain
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> That final boss, Trimming the Herbs, has definitely turned out to be a hacked (TAS) level Has it? There's a confession, but this was an issue of major public significance (within a limited sphere). Do people never confess to things they didn't do?
- bspammer 3y agoAccording to a few high-profile members of the community (including people who previously insisted the level wasn't cheated), the level creator sent them a video of the TAS being used in practice.
- anthomtb 3y agoTAS: Tool Assisted Speedrun Took more googling than expected to figure that one out, probably should have gone with a GPT.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI assume they look at the levels but don’t edit them, so that a statistically unbeatable door maze can be defeated by knowing the answer?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brokensegue 3y agoYeah there are tools to view the layout of unbeaten levels. They also reconstruct bits of levels for practice
- extraduder_ire 3y agoIn mario maker 1 you can just open the level in the editor after downloading it. Very useful for practising.
- crtasm 3y agoHere's a Mario Maker 2 level viewer as an example: https://smm2.wizul.us/smm2/level/XL3-SS0-HNG https://smm2.wizul.us/smm2/level/XL3-SS0-HNG
- Jerrrry 3y agoThey are Turing* complete*.
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- duskwuff 3y agoThere was already one of those - "Lucky Draw". It was cleared a few years ago, after a bunch of players left the game running continuously. https://kaizomariomaker.fandom.com/wiki/SMM:Lucky_Draw https://kaizomariomaker.fandom.com/wiki/SMM:Lucky_Draw
- bspammer 3y ago
- pierat 3y agoThe real "Boss" is Nintendo, being against emulation and archival.. and intentionally throwing away all of these user created levels. And that boss, in Mario fashion, needs to be butt-stomped.
- stevage 3y agoI love a well written story like this. Fascinating communities.
- pimeys 3y agoI recommend checking the Mario Twitch community too. I'd say watching the SMM stuff is interesting, but the real meat is with the smwcentral mods, especially the ones done for Super Mario World. Lots of great games in there.
- andybak 3y agoHere's a fucking idea. Cultural artifacts of any significance shouldn't be this easy to destroy. And corporate entities that do so should become pariahs.
- sevagh 3y agoIf you don't like it, you shouldn't buy or play Nintendo games.
- hiddencost 3y agoWe have this thing called a "society" which is empowered to make rules collectively. One way it is empowered to make rules.is through "laws" and "regulations". Amazingly, these things can and do work, often much better than free market capitalism.
- illusive4080 3y agoEvery action has costs. Laws and regulations will exhibit costs, sometimes hidden costs until the law is actually in place.
- Zuiii 3y agoAnd? I'm sure Right-to-repair has far more costs and that got passed. When you buy something, you own it. If nintendo doesn't want to pay for hosting anymore, the ethical thing would be to dump the server code and the levels so that players can host the servers themselves. Given how nintendo, activision, and other publishers have been acting the past decade, I really think its time for a Right-to-play law.
- CaptainFever 3y agoConcretely, I think this sounds like a combination between AGPL-like "server must have source code" and the data portability law in the GDPR.
- 3y ago
- episteme 3y agoWhy does the tracker say yes, 100% cleared after The Last Dance, if this level still remains? https://www.issmmbeatenyet.com/#stats https://www.issmmbeatenyet.com/#stats
- tech234a 3y agoArticle is from a few days ago
- episteme 3y agoSo this map (Trimming the Herbs) wasn't the last to be cleared, and they have all been cleared now?
- duskwuff 3y ago"Trimming the Herbs" was disqualified after it became clear that the original author of the level hadn't cleared it honestly (i.e. they abused glitches to upload the level without clearing it, or hacked the console to cheat through the level). Other levels had been disqualified for similar reasons; this one just took longer to confirm.
- bskap 3y agoOne of the rules of Mario Maker is that in order to post a level, the creator has to clear it, to make sure that all posted levels are possible. But the creator of this level admitted recently that their clear of the level was tool-assisted. The team that was working on beating all the levels don't consider such "hacked" levels in scope.
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- wetpaws 3y agoThe final boss always will be Nintendo
- StevenXC 3y agoLiterally Doug Bowser.
- Aeolun 3y agoIt can’t be that expensive to keep these servers up for the remaining 1000 people that use them right?
- mathgradthrow 3y agomintendo just doesn't want smm to compete with smm2
- Zuiii 3y agoNintendo, the drm-crazy company that keeps giving its customers more reasons to break their drm to preserve and play what they bought.
- jjordan 3y agoIt's why we need self hosted servers. If not at launch then at some point during its life cycle so that buying a game means it's playable indefinitely.
- crtasm 3y agoSome amazing people have made this happen for Mario Maker 2: https://opencourse.world/ https://opencourse.world/ If you have levels uploaded on the official servers it's a straightforward process to get them copied over (and that step can be done with an unmodified game+console).
- Shawnj2 3y agoHonestly I think they just don’t want to deal with it especially since those endpoints are a massive security flaw in their network. In practice this is another “abandonment off to the community” moment like when Rebble spun off of Pebble the last week of the Pebble online services existing as Pretendo already has working replacement online services for the Wii U. After April 8th the only remaining Nintendo service for the Wii U will be redownloading already purchased games so if you own a Wii U it will pretty much make sense to set it up to handle all online through Pretendo, especially since a bunch of the existing Wii U online services have been broken for a long time like Miiverse and WaraWara plaza. Similarly if you jump through a bunch of hoops you can still play Mario Kart Wii online even though the game has been offline for a decade.
- throwawayk7h 3y agoSmash Bros. Ultimate custom stages are deleted after a month or so. You can find hundreds of beautiful screenshots of custom stages you can never play.
- tacocataco 3y agoSad that the art was destroyed all to save Nintendo their pennies.
- jaimex2 3y agoIs this something you could throw Gymnasium at and see if it can clear it? https://gymnasium.farama.org/index.html https://gymnasium.farama.org/index.html
- Shawnj2 3y agoI mean yes that would work but that kind of goes against the spirit of the whole thing The point is that a real human has actually gone through the level and beat it. If a run an AI against a gameboy game and it wins I wouldn’t consider it me beating the game
- jaimex2 3y agoI guess that would prove if it is human doable assuming it has the same input constraints. It might find an alternative way to pass the level?
- tacocataco 3y agoIt's my opinion that games as a service need to be forced to allow the community to resume hosting once the window of profitability has passed for a product. We should definitely not rely on for profit businesses to preserve gaming history. They have repeatedly declined to do so in the past.
- hedora 3y agoI agree; I think it should apply even more strictly for user-provided content. Assuming there's no third-party backup of these levels somewhere, they're destroying countless people's creative work. I don't care what the terms of service say. Companies shouldn't have the legal authority to delete the only copy of third parties' copyrightable work. The current situation is mass censorship.
- phailhaus 3y agoI never understood this line of reasoning. You are not "entitled" to Super Mario Maker. Nintendo made it, they hosted the servers, they let you build stuff within their platform, and you were fully aware of all of it. You weren't forced to contribute, you weren't forced to play. How can you then turn around and cry about censorship? If Nintendo decides tomorrow to shut it down, tough luck! These servers cost money, and it's even more work to responsibly open it up to the community.
- scarmig 3y agoKey point: Nintendo is also not inherently entitled to copyright protections. We grant it the ability to exercise violence on people who copy Super Mario Maker. It's a perfectly reasonable compromise to require that people who want the protections of copyright also make that protected asset accessible.
- CivBase 3y agoAnd I've never understood this line of reasoning. Nintendo made it and sold it to people. They didn't rent it. There was no lease with a defined expiration. None of that was ever presented to the user when they bought the game. It's tucked away in some TOS users are asked to click through post-sale where they essentially say "yeah you gave us money to access this but we can permanently revoke your access at any time for any reason git wrekt". I don't care if the servers cost money. Boo hoo. Nintendo sold access to people. They should be held responsible for upholding their end of the deal. At the very least they should stop being able to use misleading terms like "buy", the terms of the deal should be much more strictly defined instead of this "we can do whatever" nonsense, and the relevant parts of that deal should be made clear and apparent to consumers prior to any exchange of money. I don't think it's "censorship", but I do think the way it currently works is unethical and should be illegal.
- packjack 3y agoWasn't this revealed to be verified via TAS?
- junon 3y agoThey've apparently cleared the last level.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- katejmurchison 3y ago[dead]