Released in June 2000, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards is a 2.5 dimensional, side-scrolling adventure game featuring Kirby, our little pink hero. This time around, it's up to Kirby to collect the seventy-four crystal shards and save the fairies' home, Ripple Star.

Game Objectives

  • Emulator used: Mupen64 0.5 rerecording v8
  • Takes damage to save time
  • Manipulates luck
  • Collects all Crystal Shards
  • Genre: Platform
See this page for most of the tricks used in this run.

Comments

Yet another new N64 title from yours truly! The soundtrack and atmosphere of this game captivated me as a kid so I decided that it deserved a nice TAS. I decided to go for 100%, otherwise I would have just ended up using the fire ability all the way through. This game isn’t really fast-paced, but I still suggest you watch it all because each stage has a nice little touch to it. Alright, now sit back and enjoy!

Stage by Stage Comments

1-1

Unlike the SDA run, I just use the single fire ability instead of the double fire ability. sonicpacker and me tested it and it turned out to be way faster to blow air after each use of the single fire. Boss battle is optimized.

1-2

Pretty short stage, there. I try to entertain as much as I can during the boss battle.

1-3

Jumping before the stairs and use the single fire afterwards is faster. Jumping on the side of the platforms instead of climbing through them is also faster. I easily one-cycle the boss.

1-4

Here, I’m forced to take a hit to save time. I think I could also have manipulated the boss to avoid the falling apples animation at least once, I’m not sure.

2-1

Sadly, there’s no way to make the sand go up faster. Also, rolling down the hill being in the rock form is slower.

2-2

It’s possible to get a fire enemy hit boost in the King DeDeDe maze part, but it’s slower.

2-3

I’m not really satisfied with this stage. There are some tiny mistakes that should be fixed in v2. It’s faster to avoid the last big underwater bone from the left.

2-4

There’s a little trick here that I call float-reset; when you take a hit, your floating counter resets, thus giving you the ability to fly again. You’ll also notice that I keep my single fire power-up instead of getting the light bulb ability. There’s a limited amount of possible 3-items combinations (about 5, that I know of) so I just tested them until I found the good one.

2-5

Now, this boss battle was a pain in the ***. Manipulating the different phases was insanely hard and I’m glad I could one-cycle them all by still keeping my best friend, the fire ability.

3-1

Not much to say here.

3-2

The major timesaver here is to run in the water as much as possible because the current gives you more speed.

3-3

Two things to point out; first, turning into rock form will give you much more falling speed than being in Kirby form (thanks physics??). Second, I had to wait a little bit before turning into the hamster, otherwise I would have gotten in the owl form (you can’t reach the shard by just flying up there).

3-4

Like you, I hate water stages, but at least they are easy to optimize ;)! Pulling a fish up your head saves time in this case.

3-5

Loved this battle as a kid! Everything is optimized here, to my knowledge.

4-1

By getting hit by the spider while swallowing, I can clip trough the ground and collect the first shard a bit faster.

4-2

Constantly jumping with the mine cart saves a lot of time. The room with the pillars going up and down can’t be done faster, afaik.

4-3

I chose to manipulate the sculpting part and get the umbrella instead of the hat or the pizza because it turned out easier to do with the curling ability.

4-4

Optimizing the curling was the most annoying thing in this whole TAS. I think some frames could still be saved with better optimization (same thing goes for 4-3).

4-5

I take damage both to save time and entertain. All the boss phases are manipulated.

5-1

Same as in 4-2, constantly jumping with the sleigh saves a lot of time.

5-2

I love this stage’s theme song!

5-3

With some testing, I figured it was still faster to re-visit 5-1 and get the fire ability. Also, like in 2-4, I just tested the different regular possible combinations until I got the good one.

5-4

Ah, the factory! I did some silly stuff at the “ceiling-crushing” part because it can’t be manipulated and thus can’t be done faster. I also had a big decision to make and whether or not I was keeping the fire ability or switching it for the electricity ability. Why?

5-5

Because this boss is a troll inside a huge robot costume! He is a pain to manipulate, but there’s worse... when trying to hit him with the fire ability, in his second form, you have to hit a very specific spot to hurt him, otherwise it won’t work. Anyway, off to the last planet!

6-1

This stage looks a lot like 1-1. Same music, same shard locations, same tomato before the room transition, mini-boss battle, same ground design, same enemy position... (déjà vu?) Everything went well, what can I say?

6-2

Ohhh, that scary feeling I got when playing this stage as a kid is still haunting me... hence I beat the stage as quick as I can! You know, looking back at this, I still see some tiny improvements, but nothing major.

6-3

The light saber is mandatory for this stage... what a deadly weapon! Fun fact: enemies don’t “die” until you fully swallow them. That’s why I couldn’t just put the fire dude up Kirby’s head and wait for the cactus enemy to appear.

6-4

Here comes the final boss (or is it?). I was easily able to one-cycle him on every phases, unlike the SDA run.

Last stage

I tried to find a good pattern to end up the input early, but didn’t get anything. I hope you enjoyed the run, thanks for watching!

Special Thanks

  • sonicpacker: He encouraged me and gave me feedback throughout the run.
  • Survive: His 1-1 TAS run motivated me to pick this game up again and finish the run.
  • peril1337: His SDA run gave me a nice goal to beat.
  • Comicalflop and CoolKirby: For watching my WIPs and giving me advices.

Baxter: Not the fastest paced game, but a well executed TAS. The 100% goal lead to significantly more variety and planning. An any% category for this game seems almost pointless given this movie, so collecting all shards was a great choice. This TAS got a good response from the viewers; accepting.
Aktan: Processing...


Editor, Player (44)
Joined: 7/11/2010
Posts: 1029
Hmm, for me, this run was missing something, due to the game choice. Kirby moves pretty slowly even with the fire powerup, and spamming fire horizontally lets him/her/it skip large portions of levels. The run seems to get a bit repetitive no matter what Kirby's doing, and there doesn't seem to be any huge demonstration of TAS-level reflexes; it looked more like an unassisted speedrun that happened to have no mistakes, than a TAS. Is there something I'm missing here?
Player (210)
Joined: 7/7/2006
Posts: 798
Location: US
It seems silly to call this an all shards run if it can be classified as a 100% run. Is there any reason it wouldn't technically be a 100% run?
ais523 wrote:
The run seems to get a bit repetitive no matter what Kirby's doing, and there doesn't seem to be any huge demonstration of TAS-level reflexes
The game is a bit slow paced, but there is a lot of small optimizations, especially in the general movement around terrain. It probably only amounts to a couple seconds saved on average per room There is also a lot of planning done in switching abilities. It's not the greatest game for display of tool assisted precision, but it's there. I enjoyed the run though. =)
Joined: 6/6/2004
Posts: 223
Kirkq wrote:
Is there any reason it wouldn't technically be a 100% run?
Enemy card collection? (Granted, the only way to max that out requires going through a level 59 extra times, so any run that undertook that goal would easily be rejected.)
Joined: 1/9/2012
Posts: 25
CoolKirby wrote:
ah2190 wrote:
And, I would give this a YES vote if I was able to. (Then again, I've hadn't needed to post on here until now...)
If you make three more posts, you will rise to Newbie rank and be able to vote on any submission.
Well, by going through some of the recent submissions and saying what I would vote has managed to allow me to apply those votes. Still, once I gain enough experience, I might try some TASing of my own.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Mr. Pwnage wrote:
Kirkq wrote:
Is there any reason it wouldn't technically be a 100% run?
Enemy card collection? (Granted, the only way to max that out requires going through a level 59 extra times, so any run that undertook that goal would easily be rejected.)
I think you also have to unlock all the difficulty levels/arenas of the multiplayer games by playing through the previous ones. Or you could set world records! Whee!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Editor, Experienced player (569)
Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4034
Bag of Magic Food wrote:
Mr. Pwnage wrote:
Kirkq wrote:
Is there any reason it wouldn't technically be a 100% run?
Enemy card collection? (Granted, the only way to max that out requires going through a level 59 extra times, so any run that undertook that goal would easily be rejected.)
I think you also have to unlock all the difficulty levels/arenas of the multiplayer games by playing through the previous ones. Or you could set world records! Whee!
So "all shards" is pretty much the only category entertaining enough to be published?
Joined: 6/26/2011
Posts: 167
More-or-less. I don't think this game could exactly benefit from having a run that does either less or more; either one would be far more boring.
First a movie gets submitted, and ends up accepted despite breaking rules other runs have been rejected for. And when I vote less than spectacularly on this movie, I become the victim of harassment and threats. Yay, favoritism.
Joined: 5/1/2007
Posts: 294
Location: MD
If memory serves, aren't all the shards necessary to fight the actual final boss of this game?
I like Doraemon
Joined: 2/25/2006
Posts: 407
I vote No, waaay too much spamming of the Fireball attack to quickly move to the right.
Ryzen 3700X, ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard, 32GB 3600MHz RAM, MSI Geforce 1070Ti 8GB, Windows 10 Pro x64 http://tasvideos.org/Nach/FranpaAlert.html
Editor, Experienced player (569)
Joined: 11/8/2010
Posts: 4034
Lorenzo_The_Comic wrote:
If memory serves, aren't all the shards necessary to fight the actual final boss of this game?
Yes. You must collect every shard to fight 02.
Player (206)
Joined: 5/29/2004
Posts: 5712
Just spamming the Fireball attack might have annoyed me, but I find the Fireball+puff combo to be really funny, so I don't hold that against the run. I'm also starting to really like the boss battles in these Kirby games where Kirby runs around searching for the most objects to inhale at once. Miracle Matter is one boss I like for how broadly its weakness is defined: You can only hit it with the power it's using, but that power could take the form of the copy ability attack, or the attack of that copy ability combined with any other power (which would affect two forms of Miracle Matter if it's two different powers), or the regurgitated copy power itself, or even the raw object Miracle Matter emitted which would have given you that power.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 5/30/2011
Posts: 29
I don't find spamming the fireball movie that annoying, really. Great run overall. Excellent work, Nahoc!
Experienced player (583)
Joined: 2/23/2008
Posts: 266
Location: CA, USA
Agreed with Ashra. Great route planning for all the different move combos, entertaining run.
Publisher
Joined: 4/23/2009
Posts: 1283
Here is the 320x240 encodes: http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc.mp4 http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc.mkv 320x240 10-bit 4:4:4: http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_10bit444.mp4 http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_10bit444.mkv 320x240 Stream: http://aktan.site90.com/?vid=NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_512kb 640x480 encodes: http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_480.mp4 http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_480.mkv 640x480 10-bit 4:4:4: http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_480_10bit444.mp4 http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_480_10bit444.mkv 640x480 Stream: http://aktan.site90.com/?vid=NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_480_512kb 1920x1440 encodes: http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_1440.mp4 http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_1440.mkv 1920x1440 10-bit 4:4:4: http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_1440_10bit444.mp4 http://www.archive.org/download/NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_1440_10bit444.mkv 1920x1440 Stream: http://aktan.site90.com/?vid=NahocsN64Kirby64TheCrystalShardsallShardsIn10615.62/kirby64-tas-allshards-nahoc_1440_512kb Other resolutions, streaming encode, and publishing coming soon. Edit: Added 320x240 stream, 640x480 encodes and 10-bit 4:4:4 Edit 2: Added 320x240 10-bit 4:4:4 and 640x480 Stream Edit 3: Added 1920x1440 encodes Edit 4: Finally added 1920x1440 10-bit 4:4:4 encodes Edit 5: Finally added 1920x1440 Stream
Active player (426)
Joined: 3/21/2011
Posts: 127
Location: Virginia (United States)
CoolKirby wrote:
Yeah, and in some newer Kirby games, like Return to Dream Land, he can float an infinite number of times like he used to. I don't see why Kirby 64 needed a floating limit though, since some shards are near a pit or very high, and they can be difficult to reach.
It allowed for some puzzles in the game (such as level 3 of world 3), and prevented breaking certain levels. I really liked this run, though I feel like it could be improved... I haven't tried TASing it, though, so I figure there must be some reason certain things couldn't be used.
YouTube Channel - Twitter Current projects: Sutte Hakkun, Hyper VI, RTDL, own hacking projects
N._Harmonik
She/Her
Joined: 8/27/2006
Posts: 502
Location: Canada
What's taking so long, dudes? I could have sworn it was faster to publish the very first LoZ:OoT TAS and that was twice the length of this Kirby run.
Why, oh, why do I even <i>try</i> to understand my own species?
Post subject: Movie published
TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 15527
Location: 127.0.0.1
This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [1970] N64 Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards "all shards" by Nahoc in 1:06:15.62
Editor, Experienced player (859)
Joined: 8/12/2008
Posts: 845
Location: Québec, Canada
kaizoman666 wrote:
CoolKirby wrote:
Yeah, and in some newer Kirby games, like Return to Dream Land, he can float an infinite number of times like he used to. I don't see why Kirby 64 needed a floating limit though, since some shards are near a pit or very high, and they can be difficult to reach.
It allowed for some puzzles in the game (such as level 3 of world 3), and prevented breaking certain levels. I really liked this run, though I feel like it could be improved... I haven't tried TASing it, though, so I figure there must be some reason certain things couldn't be used.
I know it's been a very long time, but what do you feel could be improved? I may work on a v2 of this game if you know about any big timesavers.