Lọoo͘niᵰg?ale's' A⠝y% - 2::58.I - Director's Commentary

IMPORTANT: This is an analysis and explanation of the glitchy Looningdale's Any% - 2:58.1 video, not of the run itself. To briefly analyze the run: mediocre execution, but got all the HVEs, so it's decent enough. You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE4XyP5iQks

I guess I should start at the beginning, which would be around the 24th of July, when the LUVORATORRRRY! song randomly appeared in my YouTube recommended section (for once that section proves itself useful). I instantly loved it, and soon after started considering using it on a speedrun video. It didn't also take long for me to choose a run for this song: sub-3 Looningdale's.

Unfortunately, Looningdale's is pretty hard to speedrun, as it includes three HVEs, two PHVEs and quite a few more hard tricks. The two RNG bounces also don't help. Luckily, I got a good enough run after only an hour of attempts, so I was pretty happy.

By this point, I still had no clue what to do with the video, so I was just playing around with different ideas. One of them was giving the video a purple/pinkish filter, but due to my crappy GCN capture card and/or my equally disappointing video editor, the rendered video came out all glitchy (you can see those glitches on the way to the battery, for example). However, I was actually surprised with how cool that looked and how the music kinda fit, so I decided to go with the glitchy aesthetic.

I didn't want the video to be just those video glitches though, since it kinda got annoying after a minute or so, and parts of the original run weren't exactly beautifully executed, so I recorded some clips on emulator to splice into the video to create some funny or bizzarre scenes and add to the glitchy aesthetic I was trying to create.



I guess that's all I have to say about the creation of the video, so let's move on to the individual glitches (not the gameplay ones) present in this video - try to guess how many there are!

(0) (Title) - The title of the video contains three "o"s (two of them having diacritics), the second "n" has a middle tilde, the "d" is replaced with a question mark, there's an extra apostrophe after the "s", the third "n" is replaced by its spelling in braille, there's an extra colon and the "1" at the end is replaced with an upper-case "I".

(1) - The level opens with a Star transition, not with a circular one. This was done by simply timing a clip transition in the video editor.

(2) - The level has a purple/pinkish tinge at the start. Again, a simple color filter.

(3) - Taz teleports from one side of the plugs to the other one as the camera changes position. Done by splicing an emulator run into the actual run.

(4) - The camera stays on the plugs for much longer than it usually does. It's just a still image between the video of the run.

(5) - The entire video has some glitchy flickering. Like I said above, some effects like the color filter don't work perfectly with my capture card/video editor.

(6) - The battery is actually responsible for the color filter. I wanted to have the glitchy flickering, but not for the whole video, but I wanted to use the color filter. Solution: use it at the start, then remove it somewhere appropriate.

(7) - Taz in the first battery cutscene. I simply teleported Taz up there before the cutscene started. Taz fell off the thing during the recording, which gave me an amazing idea.

(8) - Taz falls from the sky in the second battery cutscene. Yeah, this idea. Fun fact: if you assume the two clips are the start and end of a single fall, then Taz fell for 4.6s. Assuming there is no air resistance or friction and that Looningdale's's gravitational pull is the same as Earth's (9.8 m/s^2), then Taz fell for ~103.75m (~340 feet), achieving a speed of ~45 m/s or ~162.3 km/h (~100.9 mph). Needless to say, that is enough to kill any normal human, especially if you fall on your face like Taz did.

(9) - Taz switches shopping cart. He also switches back at the end. It should be obvious by now that this was just a splice.

(10) - A box of ice creams gets destroyed twice. I particularly liked how that box flew when I destroyed it, so I played that part twice both to increase glitchiness and runtime (since I needed to fit the music to the run).

(11) - The world gets mirrored when Taz touches the treadmill. It kinda creates the effect that the room is symmetrical. Also, Taz usually spins clockwise, so it's kinda weird seeing him spin counter-clockwise during this part. The mirrorring goes at the water fountain.

(12) - Taz has his costume after the water fountain. Had to include this one. I also used a cheat to disable whack-in-the-boxes.

(13) - Taz turns into  Snazzy Suit Sam after the Clock Sign(???) This was done by [REDACTED].

(14) - The first PHVE has graphical glitches. Glitches on glitches.

(15) - Taz's smoke trail disappears after hitting the second dart shooter. I just edited out a failed HVE and looking at hint videos advances certain animations, including the smoke trail.

(16) - Taz dabs. A freeze frame in time with the music to reveal that during one of Taz's Spin's start-up frames, Taz looks like he's dabbing.

(17) - Third dart shooter PHVE. The map is replaced with Zooney Tunes's, and the PHVE is replaced with the Cork Sign HVE.

(18) - The hole room is upside-down. Again, I had to use this one.

(19) - The final HVE is replaced with Ultra Despair Girls. For those who don't know, I ran Ultra Despair Girls for about a month. I didn't upload any videos publically, but everything I made is on a playlist on my channel. The scene I used is of a pretty infamous part where you have to not break a controller eight times in a row. Not only is this part pretty long (about two minutes) but it's also extremely boring and you need to choose the second option every time, or else you'll waste even more time.

(20) - A fourth explosion during the level end cutscene. I did this one for three reasons: increase the runtime a bit more to fit the music with the run, make the end of the run more glitchy than the start and mid, and give a nod to the fact that the three explosions at the end of Looningdale's actually destroy three objects, making it the only level that destroys objects in its level end cutscene.

(21) - Dynamite and color bars. I'm a huge fan of those color bars =P. On a previous attempt, I got to the end on a decent-ish run and spun straight into that dynamite, even getting the longer animation to rub salt on the wound. I correctly dodge that dynamite on the real run, so it ends up looking like an included outtake - an intake?

(22) - Reverse-spinning up the ramp. The start of the run, but backwards.



That's pretty much it! Let me know if you liked this video and if you enjoyed reading this.