December Days 27: Post-Game Replay Value
Dec. 27th, 2019 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. There's only a couple spots left before we're done, although I hear from many of you that I am perhaps more knowledgeable about these things than y'all. I don't want this to stop you from making suggestions.]
There's still a lot more to do with a game once you've cleared it for the first time. Assuming, that is, that your game isn't one of those endless loops that eventually hit a maximum speed/difficulty and then just plateau at that point. Or until they hit a kill screen because the game itself wasn't programmed for people to be so good at it that they cause a memory register to disturb its neighbor and then the whole thing goes keflooey. Pac-Man's kill screen is the most iconic one, but several other games also have them if a player can play well enough.
Some games have content that is only available after the main game is finished. A Bonus Dungeon might appear, with super-hard enemies and a Bonus Boss at the very bottom of that dungeon that will take everything that you have to defeat it. Nippon Ichi's strategy-RPGs, like Disgaea, have a supermassive amount of post-game content. The main storyline can be beaten by a party that's under or around level 50-100, usually, but the actual level cap for everything is level 9999. Some of the post-game content isn't even accessible until the player characters have reached levels in the 1000s, and others will require levels in the 2000s before they can be challenged. Finding the most efficient way to grind levels is essential to any NIS game, because beating the main storyline means you've experienced about 5% of the content that's actually available. More sedately, though, even Pokémon has a bonus dungeon at the end of the main game. The Cerulean Cave is only available to the League Champion, which is what the player character achieves at the end of the main story, and at the bottom of the Cave is Mewtwo, the strongest mon in the game.
Many games in the RPG genre now offer "New Game+" or a similar mode, where the game begins again, but with characters of the level, power, and equipment they obtained at the end of the previous run, barring any plot-important objects that have to return to their place in the story. The concept appeared first in The Legend of Zelda, for the NES, where winning the first game would allow the player to start again on the Second Quest, which changed the location of all the dungeons and items, and significantly increased the difficulty of the opponents. (Super Mario Brothers does this, slightly, as well. On the second time around, in addition to being able to choose which world you start on, all of the Goombas have been replaced with the fireproof and shell-leaving Buzzy Beetles.) As with many old games, there was a way of shortcutting to the Second Quest - inputing one's name as ZELDA at the entry screen would warp Link to the Second Quest immediately.
The most iconic (and trope namer) game for New Game+ is Chrono Trigger, an SNES RPG by Square (now Square-Enix) that usually ranks among the finest of RPGs available for that generation of consoles. The storyline follows a teenager that gets involved in a time-travel plot that spas several eras of the world that Chrono inhabits, as the characters attempt to avert a disaster called the Day of Lavos, where a parasite that buried itself in the world's core when human and reptilian life forms existed together erupts from its sleep and rains destruction upon everyone. After defeating Lavos the first time, the New Game+ option unlocks the ability to warp directly to the final battle at any point in the narrative that the player wishes. By doing so, the end of the game changes, such that it might turn out that all of the characters in the game are actually reptilian life forms in human suits, or that instead of being the heroes of the narrative, Chrono and his friends take over a villainous role normally filled by a different trio of characters and have to be defeated by a different fated hero. The most difficult of those endings is the one where the player character skips immediately to the end as soon as they have the opportunity to do so. If successful, the player is treated to messages from the developers, programmers, and staff of the game talking about the game or about the player's accomplishment, before the credits are rolled as if they were played on fast forward. After all, since the character was in such a hurry to finish the game, why waste more of their time by making them watch the credits at regular speed?
Chroo Trigger's PlayStation sequel, Chrono Chross, took and expanded the New Game+ idea, expecting the player to play the game through multiple times to take advantage of the branching path possibilities available for most major decisions, where certain characters will either join the party or not based on the actions of the main character. To collect all of the possible playable characters on the roster required at least three playthroughs of the game, including a playthrough where the player has to take advantage of the ability to warp immediately to the final boss and do so in the middle of the narrative, so that the allies currently available to the player on that playthrough will be saved for the next playthrough to bring forward. And, of course, there's still the "as soon as it is available, warp to the final boss and beat them" that produces the developer's room again. (Although, for all of these endings, the player has to know how to achieve the good ending of the game, which involves having either a musical ear or a good color memory and having collected a piece of equipment that will achieve this good end. Thankfully, that piece of equipment only has to be found and used for a good ending once, and then in New Game+, the player character immediately starts with that equipment so they can activate the ending whenever in the plot they wish.)
Some games actually use the mechanic of persistence through playthroughs as one of their core items. While the most famous of roguelikes (games based on Rogue, whose major mechanic relied on procedural generation and randomization elements (and placement of those elements) to build a unique game from a particular radomization seed), NetHack, doesn't mechanically reward players with having a better time of it on any subsequent playthrough, presumably, the player learns more about how the game works from everything that kills them or causes them effects that can then be applied to subsequent runs, letting them go further into the game and to encounter new things that will kill them or cause them bad status effects. NetHack is also a game that has been constantly added to for as long as it has existed, which makes an already punishingly unforgiving game worse every time it releases a new version, as many of its seemingly-odd effects are explainable if you have the correct cultural knowledge to understand, for example, why you should first ring a bell, then read from a book, and then light a candle on a particular space to open the way to the underworld. To ascend (win) in NetHack is often the work of a lifetime, with many runs (once you have died enough to develop a strategy on how to succeed) dashed by unfavorable rolls of the RNG or the appearance of exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time that makes the current strategy application cause death instead of making the character stronger.
More forgiving roguelikes will often reward the player with progress toward unlocking new elements, starting the player with better statistics and equipment, or otherwise making subsequent runs through the game easier to make substantive progress with, or at least to get back to the space where the character bit it before and possibly succeed from the virtue of having had an easier time getting there. And some of those games have things to do and unlock even after a successful run of the game, like Slay The Spire. Succesffully winning the base game there unlocks "Ascension mode", where the game's rules change with each subsequent victory, adding more conditions and hindrances to the player to power through as they continue to try and gather victory.
Even games that do not offer their own post-game rewards and modes, but are simply the game as presented, which can then be started again for the joy of playing the game through another time can provide rewards to the player. Having discovered the correct path through, or having beaten the game, if it is the kind of game that offers branching paths and decisions, like a visual novel, there's an incentive to choose differently. (Assuming that one did not already choose all the wrong answers on the pathway to the right one.) New scenarios, new endings, or new things that happen on the way to the end are possible through different decisions made during the course of the game. Or, having seen the end of the game, players might attempt to set their games in motion so as to invoke specific scenarios that might reward achievements for ramping the difficulty up beyond reason and then defeating a powerful boss. Or, in the case of many danmaku (bullet hell) games, especially the Touhou series, attempting to run through a stage without firing a shot or using a screen-clearing bomb. This usually involves having to memorize the bullet patterns and their appearances to the point where a whole bunch of things might whiz by extremely close (and sometimes, there are score bonuses to be had by getting that up close and personal with the bullets ("grazing")). Pacifist runs like this often have a special surprise waiting for them in the form of changed and much more difficult bullet patterns on the last phases of the run. By specifically trying to play the game in certain ways, whether as developer-sanctioned challenges (like the Custom Night settings in the Five Nights at Freddy's series of horror games) or as self-imposed challenges, there's some replay value in a game that might otherwise simply sit on the shelf after having been defeated.
One of the most common challenges for any given game is to try and complete it as quickly as possible. This usually involves finding shortcuts in the game that allow for rapid progress. In just about every Super Mario Brothers game, there are specific places where the player encounters a Warp Zone that allows them to jump several worlds forward without having to play through of each world's stages. In the original game, Warp Zones were scattered throughout the game, but for the purposes of getting through the game as quickly as possible, the only Warp Zones that are important are the one in World 1-2 that allows a warp to 4-1, and the one in 4-2 that allows a warp to 8-1. Later games would turn the Warp Zone into a thing reached through the use of items (Two Warp Whistles will get you to World 8 in Super Mario Brothers 3) or through finding the secret exits to particular stages that lead to a either a stage or a device that allows for rapid transit between worlds. Knowing where the level warps are makes speedrunning a game much easier.
The second, and arguably more important part of speedrunning is figuring out how to do things that are technically possible within the game but are clearly not intended behaviors (the first time they're discovered. Sometimes subsequent games incorporate what were bugs in a previous game into tactics in the next.) The kind of things where a person can glitch between the end pipe and the wall behind it in World 1-2 and get to the Warp Zone faster or generate a situation where a character moves in a straight line at top speed until they contact something in the way, which would allow them to jump to obscene heights, destroy blocks, or evade hazards that might otherwise require a long trip around instead of being able to go directly through them. For the first person shooter genre, the fundamental technique for moving and leaping much farther and faster than the character would otherwise be able to do is the rocket jump, where a character points their explosive weapon (usually a rocket launcher) at their feet, uses the character's jump ability to propel them a little into the air, and then fires the rocket weapon so that the momentum generated by the explosion is imparted to the player character. This usually causes the player character to suffer a significant amount of loss of health or armor or both. In id software's Quake, however, rocket jumping was a core part of several movement schemes useful in competitive versus play, as well as for propelling a player quickly through any given space to various places that might have otherwise been considered out of bounds or inaccessible without the use of the rocket jump.
Excellent timing and use of these techniques can sometimes result in reaching new areas or being able to skip entire parts of the game that would otherwise have to be fought through or navigated. Such sequence-breaking is a core part of a speedrun, even in speedruns where the rules are set such that the player has to collect all of the possible collectibles in the game and/or fiish the game with at least 100% completion of finding weapons, items, secrets, and sometimes even defeating enemies. If a technique allows a player to continue effectively playing the game without having to make a long diversion for an item that will let them defeat or bypass a barrier normally, that technique will feature prominently in a speedrun. (As games progress and speedrunning becomes more popular, there are some games that lean into this idea and provide either alternate cutscenes or specific pathways that a player on a speedrun can take to shave a significant amount of time off of their run.) Speedrunners also often try to skip long action sequences or rip right beyond boss rooms if they can avoid them, but often times what a speedrun will also show is a significant amount of skill in defeating boss battles while underpowered and without the equipment that the game expects a player to have to make the boss battle doable. Other types of speedrunning, especially for RPGs, sometimes involves manipulating the Random Number Generator in such a way as to make the dice rolls (or the number lists) always come up with favorable or critical hits for the player so as to spend the least amount of time fighting other units or to ensure one-turn victories for the player.
Sometimes, speedrunning technique can be done by humans with the controls that are available, and other times, speedrunners use emulation tools and other methods that allow them to perform frame-perfect maneuvers and sometimes record those inputs in such a way that a computer will perform that technique flawlessly every time. Or the speedrunner will use a tool that exposes the numbers list or the RNG in such a way that they can know what the next roll is going to be, instead of having to hope, and can thus use apecific tactics developed to take advantage of this oracular knowledge to help gain speed on the game. Tool-assisted speedruns have different records and times to beat than ones that are just humans and others that are just humans on the original hardware of the game, because, well, computers can sometimes impart a huge advantage to someone because of their abilities.
Anyway, if the idea of playing a game to figure out where all the soft spots in its reality are, so that you can warp and spark and do all sorts of things that the game developer may not have intended (or intended as techniques for players that have mastered everything else and are deliberately trying to speedrun), there are plenty of videos around on the Internet for speedruns of your favorite game, as well as festivals and events dedicated to the art of the speedrun. One of the most famous are the two events under the Games Done Quick banner, which do human and tool-assisted runs, races of speedruns against each other, and sometimes, entirely memorable events that have not only to do with finishing the game quickly, but also doing things like highlighting the absolutely stellar sound and gameplay decisions that went into The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time by besting the first three dungeons of the game while wearing a blindfold. The same runner would eventually complete the entire game 100% (or something close to it) while wearing a blindfold, spending slightly more than one hundred hours of playtime doing it.
But if you don't have time for the Ocarina of Time video, you can watch the world record speedrun for Super Mario Brothers happen in slightly less than five minutes, which demonstrates all of the things mentioned in this post - techniques to get Mario to full speed as soon as possible, techniques to do things not actually intended in the game (such as being able to bound over a pipe with the Piranha plant fully extended and being able to wall jump on the pipe in 8-4), some repeatable glitches that allow Mario to pass through solid objects that would otherwise require more time to get through, allowing Mario to take the most direct path possible through the stage, and a couple of times where the Nintendo gets fooled into making what should be a non-warp pipe into a warp specifically to a warp zone or other place that allows for a significant amount of time to be cut down by not having to go through the normal process of getting to that warp zone or playing the complete segment associated with it. It goes by in a flash, but there's a lot that's been done for practice put into it. And, as it goes to show, even a game that's thirty-four still has appeal for more than a few people.
There's still a lot more to do with a game once you've cleared it for the first time. Assuming, that is, that your game isn't one of those endless loops that eventually hit a maximum speed/difficulty and then just plateau at that point. Or until they hit a kill screen because the game itself wasn't programmed for people to be so good at it that they cause a memory register to disturb its neighbor and then the whole thing goes keflooey. Pac-Man's kill screen is the most iconic one, but several other games also have them if a player can play well enough.
Some games have content that is only available after the main game is finished. A Bonus Dungeon might appear, with super-hard enemies and a Bonus Boss at the very bottom of that dungeon that will take everything that you have to defeat it. Nippon Ichi's strategy-RPGs, like Disgaea, have a supermassive amount of post-game content. The main storyline can be beaten by a party that's under or around level 50-100, usually, but the actual level cap for everything is level 9999. Some of the post-game content isn't even accessible until the player characters have reached levels in the 1000s, and others will require levels in the 2000s before they can be challenged. Finding the most efficient way to grind levels is essential to any NIS game, because beating the main storyline means you've experienced about 5% of the content that's actually available. More sedately, though, even Pokémon has a bonus dungeon at the end of the main game. The Cerulean Cave is only available to the League Champion, which is what the player character achieves at the end of the main story, and at the bottom of the Cave is Mewtwo, the strongest mon in the game.
Many games in the RPG genre now offer "New Game+" or a similar mode, where the game begins again, but with characters of the level, power, and equipment they obtained at the end of the previous run, barring any plot-important objects that have to return to their place in the story. The concept appeared first in The Legend of Zelda, for the NES, where winning the first game would allow the player to start again on the Second Quest, which changed the location of all the dungeons and items, and significantly increased the difficulty of the opponents. (Super Mario Brothers does this, slightly, as well. On the second time around, in addition to being able to choose which world you start on, all of the Goombas have been replaced with the fireproof and shell-leaving Buzzy Beetles.) As with many old games, there was a way of shortcutting to the Second Quest - inputing one's name as ZELDA at the entry screen would warp Link to the Second Quest immediately.
The most iconic (and trope namer) game for New Game+ is Chrono Trigger, an SNES RPG by Square (now Square-Enix) that usually ranks among the finest of RPGs available for that generation of consoles. The storyline follows a teenager that gets involved in a time-travel plot that spas several eras of the world that Chrono inhabits, as the characters attempt to avert a disaster called the Day of Lavos, where a parasite that buried itself in the world's core when human and reptilian life forms existed together erupts from its sleep and rains destruction upon everyone. After defeating Lavos the first time, the New Game+ option unlocks the ability to warp directly to the final battle at any point in the narrative that the player wishes. By doing so, the end of the game changes, such that it might turn out that all of the characters in the game are actually reptilian life forms in human suits, or that instead of being the heroes of the narrative, Chrono and his friends take over a villainous role normally filled by a different trio of characters and have to be defeated by a different fated hero. The most difficult of those endings is the one where the player character skips immediately to the end as soon as they have the opportunity to do so. If successful, the player is treated to messages from the developers, programmers, and staff of the game talking about the game or about the player's accomplishment, before the credits are rolled as if they were played on fast forward. After all, since the character was in such a hurry to finish the game, why waste more of their time by making them watch the credits at regular speed?
Chroo Trigger's PlayStation sequel, Chrono Chross, took and expanded the New Game+ idea, expecting the player to play the game through multiple times to take advantage of the branching path possibilities available for most major decisions, where certain characters will either join the party or not based on the actions of the main character. To collect all of the possible playable characters on the roster required at least three playthroughs of the game, including a playthrough where the player has to take advantage of the ability to warp immediately to the final boss and do so in the middle of the narrative, so that the allies currently available to the player on that playthrough will be saved for the next playthrough to bring forward. And, of course, there's still the "as soon as it is available, warp to the final boss and beat them" that produces the developer's room again. (Although, for all of these endings, the player has to know how to achieve the good ending of the game, which involves having either a musical ear or a good color memory and having collected a piece of equipment that will achieve this good end. Thankfully, that piece of equipment only has to be found and used for a good ending once, and then in New Game+, the player character immediately starts with that equipment so they can activate the ending whenever in the plot they wish.)
Some games actually use the mechanic of persistence through playthroughs as one of their core items. While the most famous of roguelikes (games based on Rogue, whose major mechanic relied on procedural generation and randomization elements (and placement of those elements) to build a unique game from a particular radomization seed), NetHack, doesn't mechanically reward players with having a better time of it on any subsequent playthrough, presumably, the player learns more about how the game works from everything that kills them or causes them effects that can then be applied to subsequent runs, letting them go further into the game and to encounter new things that will kill them or cause them bad status effects. NetHack is also a game that has been constantly added to for as long as it has existed, which makes an already punishingly unforgiving game worse every time it releases a new version, as many of its seemingly-odd effects are explainable if you have the correct cultural knowledge to understand, for example, why you should first ring a bell, then read from a book, and then light a candle on a particular space to open the way to the underworld. To ascend (win) in NetHack is often the work of a lifetime, with many runs (once you have died enough to develop a strategy on how to succeed) dashed by unfavorable rolls of the RNG or the appearance of exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time that makes the current strategy application cause death instead of making the character stronger.
More forgiving roguelikes will often reward the player with progress toward unlocking new elements, starting the player with better statistics and equipment, or otherwise making subsequent runs through the game easier to make substantive progress with, or at least to get back to the space where the character bit it before and possibly succeed from the virtue of having had an easier time getting there. And some of those games have things to do and unlock even after a successful run of the game, like Slay The Spire. Succesffully winning the base game there unlocks "Ascension mode", where the game's rules change with each subsequent victory, adding more conditions and hindrances to the player to power through as they continue to try and gather victory.
Even games that do not offer their own post-game rewards and modes, but are simply the game as presented, which can then be started again for the joy of playing the game through another time can provide rewards to the player. Having discovered the correct path through, or having beaten the game, if it is the kind of game that offers branching paths and decisions, like a visual novel, there's an incentive to choose differently. (Assuming that one did not already choose all the wrong answers on the pathway to the right one.) New scenarios, new endings, or new things that happen on the way to the end are possible through different decisions made during the course of the game. Or, having seen the end of the game, players might attempt to set their games in motion so as to invoke specific scenarios that might reward achievements for ramping the difficulty up beyond reason and then defeating a powerful boss. Or, in the case of many danmaku (bullet hell) games, especially the Touhou series, attempting to run through a stage without firing a shot or using a screen-clearing bomb. This usually involves having to memorize the bullet patterns and their appearances to the point where a whole bunch of things might whiz by extremely close (and sometimes, there are score bonuses to be had by getting that up close and personal with the bullets ("grazing")). Pacifist runs like this often have a special surprise waiting for them in the form of changed and much more difficult bullet patterns on the last phases of the run. By specifically trying to play the game in certain ways, whether as developer-sanctioned challenges (like the Custom Night settings in the Five Nights at Freddy's series of horror games) or as self-imposed challenges, there's some replay value in a game that might otherwise simply sit on the shelf after having been defeated.
One of the most common challenges for any given game is to try and complete it as quickly as possible. This usually involves finding shortcuts in the game that allow for rapid progress. In just about every Super Mario Brothers game, there are specific places where the player encounters a Warp Zone that allows them to jump several worlds forward without having to play through of each world's stages. In the original game, Warp Zones were scattered throughout the game, but for the purposes of getting through the game as quickly as possible, the only Warp Zones that are important are the one in World 1-2 that allows a warp to 4-1, and the one in 4-2 that allows a warp to 8-1. Later games would turn the Warp Zone into a thing reached through the use of items (Two Warp Whistles will get you to World 8 in Super Mario Brothers 3) or through finding the secret exits to particular stages that lead to a either a stage or a device that allows for rapid transit between worlds. Knowing where the level warps are makes speedrunning a game much easier.
The second, and arguably more important part of speedrunning is figuring out how to do things that are technically possible within the game but are clearly not intended behaviors (the first time they're discovered. Sometimes subsequent games incorporate what were bugs in a previous game into tactics in the next.) The kind of things where a person can glitch between the end pipe and the wall behind it in World 1-2 and get to the Warp Zone faster or generate a situation where a character moves in a straight line at top speed until they contact something in the way, which would allow them to jump to obscene heights, destroy blocks, or evade hazards that might otherwise require a long trip around instead of being able to go directly through them. For the first person shooter genre, the fundamental technique for moving and leaping much farther and faster than the character would otherwise be able to do is the rocket jump, where a character points their explosive weapon (usually a rocket launcher) at their feet, uses the character's jump ability to propel them a little into the air, and then fires the rocket weapon so that the momentum generated by the explosion is imparted to the player character. This usually causes the player character to suffer a significant amount of loss of health or armor or both. In id software's Quake, however, rocket jumping was a core part of several movement schemes useful in competitive versus play, as well as for propelling a player quickly through any given space to various places that might have otherwise been considered out of bounds or inaccessible without the use of the rocket jump.
Excellent timing and use of these techniques can sometimes result in reaching new areas or being able to skip entire parts of the game that would otherwise have to be fought through or navigated. Such sequence-breaking is a core part of a speedrun, even in speedruns where the rules are set such that the player has to collect all of the possible collectibles in the game and/or fiish the game with at least 100% completion of finding weapons, items, secrets, and sometimes even defeating enemies. If a technique allows a player to continue effectively playing the game without having to make a long diversion for an item that will let them defeat or bypass a barrier normally, that technique will feature prominently in a speedrun. (As games progress and speedrunning becomes more popular, there are some games that lean into this idea and provide either alternate cutscenes or specific pathways that a player on a speedrun can take to shave a significant amount of time off of their run.) Speedrunners also often try to skip long action sequences or rip right beyond boss rooms if they can avoid them, but often times what a speedrun will also show is a significant amount of skill in defeating boss battles while underpowered and without the equipment that the game expects a player to have to make the boss battle doable. Other types of speedrunning, especially for RPGs, sometimes involves manipulating the Random Number Generator in such a way as to make the dice rolls (or the number lists) always come up with favorable or critical hits for the player so as to spend the least amount of time fighting other units or to ensure one-turn victories for the player.
Sometimes, speedrunning technique can be done by humans with the controls that are available, and other times, speedrunners use emulation tools and other methods that allow them to perform frame-perfect maneuvers and sometimes record those inputs in such a way that a computer will perform that technique flawlessly every time. Or the speedrunner will use a tool that exposes the numbers list or the RNG in such a way that they can know what the next roll is going to be, instead of having to hope, and can thus use apecific tactics developed to take advantage of this oracular knowledge to help gain speed on the game. Tool-assisted speedruns have different records and times to beat than ones that are just humans and others that are just humans on the original hardware of the game, because, well, computers can sometimes impart a huge advantage to someone because of their abilities.
Anyway, if the idea of playing a game to figure out where all the soft spots in its reality are, so that you can warp and spark and do all sorts of things that the game developer may not have intended (or intended as techniques for players that have mastered everything else and are deliberately trying to speedrun), there are plenty of videos around on the Internet for speedruns of your favorite game, as well as festivals and events dedicated to the art of the speedrun. One of the most famous are the two events under the Games Done Quick banner, which do human and tool-assisted runs, races of speedruns against each other, and sometimes, entirely memorable events that have not only to do with finishing the game quickly, but also doing things like highlighting the absolutely stellar sound and gameplay decisions that went into The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time by besting the first three dungeons of the game while wearing a blindfold. The same runner would eventually complete the entire game 100% (or something close to it) while wearing a blindfold, spending slightly more than one hundred hours of playtime doing it.
But if you don't have time for the Ocarina of Time video, you can watch the world record speedrun for Super Mario Brothers happen in slightly less than five minutes, which demonstrates all of the things mentioned in this post - techniques to get Mario to full speed as soon as possible, techniques to do things not actually intended in the game (such as being able to bound over a pipe with the Piranha plant fully extended and being able to wall jump on the pipe in 8-4), some repeatable glitches that allow Mario to pass through solid objects that would otherwise require more time to get through, allowing Mario to take the most direct path possible through the stage, and a couple of times where the Nintendo gets fooled into making what should be a non-warp pipe into a warp specifically to a warp zone or other place that allows for a significant amount of time to be cut down by not having to go through the normal process of getting to that warp zone or playing the complete segment associated with it. It goes by in a flash, but there's a lot that's been done for practice put into it. And, as it goes to show, even a game that's thirty-four still has appeal for more than a few people.
