Pause Storage (Zelda: Wind Waker HD)

In the beginning, there was pause-buffering, much like in the original Wind Waker. A lot of Zelda games allow you to consistently input or time things by pausing the game to frame-advance while looking for visuals, or to buffer inputs. But then people wised up. The GameCube just has a piddly controller with some buttons + sticks + sliders, and a bare-metal OS. The Wii U is an unholy conglomeration of multiple controllers, screens and OS + internet features. First there was home-buffering – suspending the entire game by pressing the home button. Then there was, uh, this

And then, this 🧐

This is a variation on the old die-and-enter-cutscene-simultaneously idea for the modern delinquent – die, enter cutscene, and switch from TV to gamepad mode at the same time LUL. *multiple beeping noises*. Then if we pause after the load (3-frame window), we retain the menu during a death animation, letting us save+quit instead of die+continue, saving a lil bit. Well, this new big glitch is another, similar fuckry.

If you’re on the pro controller (and you still have that tablet-shaped gamepad by your side to quickly equip items), you can hit “Options” on the gamepad and time it to hit the exact same frame of entering a loading zone. Then the menu stays up after the load, while you can still keep playing. Then when you enter a cutscene, you can switch to gamepad mode, transferring the menu over to the gamepad, and save+quit from there, skipping the cutscene.

The disconnect from the load where you get pause storage and the cutscene you use it on looks set to turn solid bits of gameplay into blind navigation with the options menu up on screen. Other problems have been foreseen, like the fact that this is a frame-perfect coincidence of inputs, one of which comes out slowly… but this idea of home-buffering a charged spin-attack release (which moves Link forward a bit) with an options button release has removed all timing from a lot of setups, like the one in the video, now just a case of working out where to stand to get moved into the loading zone. One challenging cutscene to skip, triggered by slashing the last chu in a fight, was looking a bit dicey for a while, cos, how do you press b to slash w/o exiting the menu? Well… one way was by disconnecting the gamepad, which was kinda hard to do w/o, uh, leaving the building, or, um…..

But fortunately,

This looks set to drop ~6 mins from Any% alone (current WR 51m34), with bigger savings in longer categories, maybe 20–30 in All Dungeons (WR 2h18) and 100% (WR 5h16). Wind Waker has hella cutscenes, and most skip setups are fast coming together. So there’ll be a lot to watch these next few weeks, even tho we will unfort never again find out that Tetra is Zelda 😠. But the biggest problem remains unaddressed :c

Here’s a really good detailed demo/explanation of the glitch. It has since been applied to break events – save+quit after getting an item but before the flag marking the event as complete is set – which enables obtaining some items multiple times and… getting auction items before paying for them :3. Auction in 100% could well become faster or less random from now on.