Great video! I just have one correction to make. Meta doesn’t mean “Most Effective Tactic Available”; that is a backronym. “Meta” actually comes from a prefix taken from Greek which means “after” or “beyond”. This is where “metamorphosis” and “metalanguage” come from. Similarly, it is called “metagaming” because you are playing the game “beyond” the actual game, like using advanced strategies and glitches and different hardware.

When a video starts with “Dragged his balls across the disc” you know you’re in for a treat

"If you show'd me this disc without flipping it over, I'd be able to tell it was a copy of Battle for Bikini Bottom" Lord have mercy on us all.

war. war sometimes changes. the grease strat must be abandoned

Well, guess I'll have to start showering again.

"Licking your game disc is illegal on other planets" liked and dubbed for that line alone

Happy about the soft modding. Game preservation is something people need to talk about more. This community is absolutely amazing.

Some day we'll look back and wonder how people ever speedran games from discs rather than digital copies. Most speedgames are probably still good for the next couple decades, but discs and disc readers will all degrade eventually.

“Surgically applied fingerprints” might just be the most brilliantly stupid thing I’ve heard today.

So gross, yet so incredibly engrossing. Thanks for part 2 Shift

would anyone be interested in a follow-up video sometime from now regarding the new benefits we're seeing through HDD? already a bunch of cool things like practice mods and input readers are being developed.

The whole "natural wear and tear" on the disc reminds me of Super Mario Kart Speedrunning. The SNES controller's D-pad has a plastic nub in the center, and by shaving it down or rapid use, it will shrink, allowing for more strategies.

“So I got Swag to clean his disc with dish detergent”

Bfbb is such an insane game. It seems like every month there’s some new discovery that causes chaos. I love it

I feel sorry for that one guy's kids. He's gonna treat them so badly if they dare watch a cartoon or play a Nintendo game past the age of 12.

Imagine if this gets to the point where they find the best possible fingerprints for lag clips, and this one guy just has the right fingertips for it and everyone wants to send him their disks so he can smudge them

disk smudging is like reading with dirty glasses, while cartridge tilting is like tearing out certain pages. If the glasses get too dirty its just unreadable. but you can remove 97% of the pages and still have something readable, albeit completely different.

SHiFT: “who can find the fastest stick to stuff in his WiiWii” Me: fuck it I’ll sub for that

Nice title reference.

its over, its finally fucking over

I really have no idea how I was intrigued enough to watch this entire video with very limited interest going in, but god damn this was interesting

Guys I licked my Switch copy of Rehydrated and can do all the tricks perfectly now go ahead and try it yourselves

I like how you had to stop yourself from laughing when you said the Wiis native disk space

Are we going to be seeing another sequel to this? Such as “To Pimp A Gunky Gamer”?

A good ending.

Now I’ve gotta clean my phone screen because I’ve been shamed for MY gamer gunk

Such a clean solution to dirty conundrum.

This is probably the dumbest way I've ever seen speedrunners save time in a speedrun, but I'm all for it!

It's really nice to hear that the community decided to move away from disc destruction!

this is a good ending. i was super worried about the sustainability of straight up scratching the disk

After explaining how disk smudging/scratching and cartridge tilting are different, this video then makes disk smudging/scratching feel closer to cartridge tilting than it did in the last video, what with the random instability and hardware manipulation factors.

That one frame of Dan Schneider around 1:14 had me deceased

I literally just watched the first video and then right after I'm done this came out.

I dont usually sit through videos this long but I enjoy how you don't just take a surface level approach to the questions Keep on keepin on mate

This video was great Shift, your editing gets better and better!

I was under the impression that "meta" was short for "metagame", or the game about the game. This is a really common term in D&D for players who use information from the real world to inform game world decisions, as opposed to using only the information available to their characters. In addition to the absurd info from the rest of this saga, you learn something new every day!

i'm not even a speedrunner but this is a very interesting saga, and a nice silver lining about game preservation. i'm an amateur archivist, so i appreciate when communities come together to save the stuff they cherish for future generations :)

Great video dawg ‼️ Gotta put out more bangers like this

I’m not really into speedrunning or gaming but I really like how much the speedrunning community prioritizes accessibility. I know gamers have kind of a reputation for gatekeeping so it’s really nice to see that this community is so welcoming :)

“You can’t tell what’s satire anymore” Yeah, that sums this whole thing up.

I guess you could say that the optical meta was on a... downward spiral

That's a great title. Love Emplemon.

These two vids have been insanely well done, thank you for the entertainment and gl setting new records brother (=

Amazing video and incredible research. This is the reason why I love speedrunning, you guys managed to circumvent a hardware limitation, avoid and endless combo possibility (making getting the correct disk an irl rng event) and the preservation of the game in a solid form. I also like the fact that you were able to quit using lag clips for "the greater good" (maybe I'm exaggerating a bit there, but you get the point). Will definitely be subscribing.

Hey man I haven't seen your videos before (except the precursor to this) and I just want to say that this is an excellent video. Well edited, paced, and explained. Keep up the great work :)

I knew I was right about strategically scratching the disc to help make lag clips more consistent

I've never speedrun this game because I've never played this game because I've never played any of the games on any version of any of the consoles it's available on...and yet, I've still sat through two lengthy videos on the subject. Congrats on making such captivating videos!

Damn I just watched the last video and you've already got a new one from an hour ago. Good work!!

“The stinky gamer ketchup disc extravaganza had opened up a can of gamer worms” is one phrase I never thought my ears would be blessed with

Speedrunning is such an in-depth and interesting thing to learn about. I love learning about all the different strategies and controversies. I know loads about speedrunning without ever having to dedicate the time to playing

This video title is absolutely phenomenal thank you for the laugh and both informative videos

“dragged his ballsack across his disc in an attempt to make his lagclips better” is the best shit i’ve heard all month

I always thought meta was talking about how you have strategies, and metastrategies, strategies about strategies. Things like doing something sub-optimally to throw a opponent off guard or similar.

Thanks for the awesome videos man! Very well done!

2021 is going to be a very long and entertaining segment on the BFBB speedrun history.

One thing is clear. This guy hates the Thomson drive.

Squeaky Clean Gaming™

10:07 damn, hitting hard on the remake/remaster or whatever it's called, i do enjoy rehydrated, it was something that let me revisit something from my childhood, but i understand if people don't entirely care for it

This is amazing. Hacking on an extremely abstract level, i'm impressed. I'm not interested in speedrunning per se, but i immensly appreciate the level of technical manipulation of software and hardware i get to see because of this community / hobby.

Anyone else surprised that "META" was an acronym? I always thought it was short for metagame/metathinking, where strategy is focused on thought around tactics and not just performance. But the acronym also makes sense

Great video and more importantly great decisions for the community and for game preservation!

This is fascinating, thank you

never been into speedrunning. dont know why im here. i find putting this much effort into a game i remember playing on Saturday mornings after spending the night at my friends house makes it all worth watching lmao

You keep this up, Spongebob’s gonna get the suds

I love the "Good Kid, m.A.A.d City" reference

This is a nice discussion and one that could easilly happen again in the future for other games. This will be mentioned as an example of what could be done, whenever another game is discovered to have different performances if the disc is scratched or not. :P

If a DVD is scratched in just the right spot, then the data will remain intact, but the tracking laser will detect the scratch and overcompensate, causing the video to skip during normal playback. However, you could rewatch the skipped bits of video by rewinding. Again, the data was still there, the laser was just skipping over it because it shifted to dodge what it thought was a dust particle.

You wanna talk about meta? I used to assembly line mod my friends XBOXs circa.. I dunno... 2003? So much so that if you live in Columbus, Ohio and have one I have often found that it traced back to me or at the very least, one of my friends. If you could speed run console modding, I would like to see someone who was faster than me at it. I didn't use any stinkin' memory cards! All I used was my PC, like a REAL turbo ner..MAN DOES! Also, it meant that I didn't have to buy shit. No more hard modding with my rear window heater repair kit. This is as barebones as you can get ... and it was technically also dangerous so naturally my girlfriend got pregnant.. for a week or two thank god. So anyway, you can do it with NOTHING but a screwdriver and PC that still has support for IDE hard drives. The xbox unlocks the hard drives when it starts up so.. you start your PC, hit the physical pause button on your keyboard on the screen that says "Detecting drives...." during start up. Then, you turn on the xbox and have it boot to the stock menu. I always then go to the file select screen and back to the front a few times to make sure it's unlocked the drive. Then you unplug the IDE cable and replace it with one in your PC while keeping the power on. That is, you hot swap it after the XBOX has done the work to allow it to be read. ... Then it's as simple as booting the PC and accessing the drive and copying over the few files needed to do the exploit. This sounds possibly more complex, but trust me.. I literally got to the point that I could line up 5 consoles, unscrew them all, and then per each one get it done within like 1.5 minutes with my own super slimmed down Linux distro that JUST booted to a file manager where I selected the drive and hit copy... Could be done ever faster. Boot xbox and pc.. hit pause on pc. Access drive on xbox clickity clickity.. swap cables... hit enter to continue drive detection... Done, booting linux.. done, copy and..... complete. I am so cool. 😎 But yeah, somewhere I have this disc for fast soft modding, although I guarantee it looks like the gross discs used in this video as I'm pretty sure I spilled a can of coke on spindle of discs containing it but was literally going to be late for work so I just said fuck it and left. ... I know this spindle.. Removing discs from it is terrifying. You can't just soak it in water, I've tried. ... Every time you remove a disc it either comes off clean or ... parts of it stick to the next disc. .. All my coding and computing history is on this spindle. SHHHHHhhh DONT TOUCH. As it stands it's all there and I don't wanna lose it. ... Without it, am I cool? ='(

be happy that the game you are running has an active community and is accessible

great story with a happy ending. you love to see it

i was so happy when you mentioned soft modding the xbox, i was thinking this in your first video. i have tons of experience modding all of the versions of xbox's and the cd/hard drives all seem to kill themselves.

“In the last video I lacerated my perineum with a spongebob disc.” *AND NOW THE CONCLUSION*

Not a speedrunner but super entertaining nonetheless. You have a real talent for storytelling. I love the amount of rigor that you and the community use -- both to find the best strat and also to govern which strats should be considered viable. Great work!

"The fastest stick to shove in their WiiWii" God that caught me so offguard.

I'm happy to see greasy gaming is getting a voice on KZfaq

"He's the best, he had the best ballsack" Rich Evans referring to bfbb speedrunner

they had us in the first 7 seconds

Finally I actually have the right hardware to seriously attempt the run. Thank you kind sir

Came for the gamer gunk. Stayed for the bar exam on speedrun laws

Great video. I don't speedrun, play SpongeBob, or have a high level of computer skills, but I learned a lot and was entertained the whole time. Also, bonus points for calling out Nickelodeon's problems with toe-loving pedos.

When the HDDs start dying, will the next switch be to SSDs? Or has this not even been given proper consideration yet? The firmware/mobo available on the original Xbox will probably have limited read/write speeds relative to SSDs, so it's very likely that pretty much any off-the-shelf SSD would be able to max out that connection. This means it should be an accessible mod, of course barring any special adapters necessary to actually connect the SSD.

the hard drive load should have entered meta much sooner, modifications are a must to keep this aging hardware functioning in a competent fashion, when i heard about the dirty disk trick i knew it would be impossible to enforce anything about it but now its damaging the disks and probably harming the drives by placing greater stress on the laser, i guess thats a self moderating tactic

I've never understood how it was even a question whether it was hardware manipulation. It had intent, physical manipulation and exploitation of unintended hardware and software interaction.

Are you currently working on the BFBB documentary Part 3? I'm just asking because I recently rewatched Part 1 & Part 2 and I still really enjoyed it. I just can't wait for more video from you :)

I love how the thumbnail alone brings attention 😂

"load times are consistent" yeah I totally got that impression from the last video lmao..

I absolutely love how far I fell down this random rabbit hole lmao

everytime you upload my day is improved!!!!!!! I wish I could watch your livestreams more often!!!!!!!

that beginning clip had me in tears

I loved this arc

after watching this video, my xbox's drive isn't the only thing that's hard.

What if you try putting window tint on the discs? I don't know what percentage opecity/tint you could get away with before making the disc too darkened to read, but it would be more consistent than fingerprints or scratches by far, and possibly it will make the discs last longer in the Samsung A drives as well.

it quickly SHiFTed from having a gunky disc to a whole bunch of information on hard drives

shift : I love lag clip also shift during stream when one fail : I fucking hate this game it made me laught to think about that xD

Oh shit didn’t think there would be a part 2

this is the equivelant of cartridge tilting for discs weird stuff happens sometimes good if your precise but it damages it

dammit! Here goes my clever plan to sell precisely scratched discs to speedrunners at unreasonably inflated prices :(

The speed running community never fails to amaze me

Huh, I assumed "meta" was just a shorthand for "metagame".

Holy shit thank you for the Paul Blart example you used for your analogy. I was fucking rolling lmao... I miss that era of memes.