SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom arguably one of the most unlikely video games of all time, a licensed project that proved to be both a great game and a worthwhile challenge to the speedrunning community. But the absurdity doesn’t stop there: SpongeBob Speedrunners recently discovered that wiping their Xbox discs could result in much better times, although the tactic may be outdated in the near future.
A new video from YouTuber and SpongeBob speedrunner SHiFT describes the community’s findings. Essentially it marks Battle for Bikini Bottom disc in a specific way interferes with the Xbox’s ability to read it, resulting in stuttering between gameplay and menu screen, making it much easier to perform a ‘lag clip’, a major trick that allows players to squeeze through normally inaccessible barriers by overloading the game with excessive pausing.
The speedrunning community has long tried to optimize Battle for Bikini Bottom runs on the hardware side and catalogs the different versions of the Xbox disc drive to find out which ones offer faster loading times. The downside is that the faster the console can access data from the game disc, the harder it becomes to slow down. But by combining dirty drives with the fastest hardware, serious players could theoretically have the best of both worlds.
Speedrunners are known to do some wild things to beat games faster. In addition to playing for hours, we saw them crawl around on the floor while in virtual reality, inject their own code Super Mario World, even mess with the Famicom by putting it on a hob. I don’t know exactly where to rank squirting ketchup on a Battle for Bikini Bottom drive looking for the best, but it’s definitely up there.
However, after further testing, this smudging method itself turned out to be quite unreliable, not to mention that ruining copies of an 18 year old game is bad form. Some speedrunners have also concluded that lag clips rely too much on hardware inconsistencies to be considered a viable or worthwhile tactic.
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“It’s too much,” explained SHiFT during a Twitch stream last night. “You need something as nice as a scratch on the disc for these things to work, and we’re not going to damage our discs. That’s just not going to happen. That is ridiculous. And as I’ve said before, it’s unethical to do that because the whole point of speedrunning is to keep a game. “
SHiFT then explained that new developments are taking place Battle for Bikini Bottom speedrunning can create lag clips, eliminating the need to screw around with discs anyway. By making it legal to play the game from hard drives over soft-modified Xboxes, the community could level the playing field by normalizing load times across the board and making lag clips impossible, eliminating the frustration of looking for the perfect console with the perfect disc drive to make the difficult technique a little less.
There’s not one unified body at the center of speedrunning, but rather a disparate collection of distant scenes that, for the most part, do their own thing. Battle for Bikini Bottom players will have to get together and figure out what’s best for them, while balancing frustrating mechanics and accessibility for newcomers. At least we now know that smearing their discs with ketchup is (probably) off the table.