The Ghost of Kraken Bay: Gamer Theatre and a bit of Hacking
	2025 October 02
	Current Mood:	surviving on hot sandwiches
	Now Playing:	La Favi - Knife Story (prod. by lagrima & Modulaw)

My partner got a pre-order version of Sonic Racing CrossWorlds as a birthday gift, so we've been playing the game since its pre-release.

One thing we always do when trying to get A's on Time Trial courses is watching the replays of top leaderboard players for each course. We did the same thing for Kraken Bay as we struggled to figure out how to cut our current best time, and without much thinking chose the current best result in the leaderboard — 4 seconds faster than the next one behind it

Just look at this first place line. The player has not just Sage, but robot Sage as their main — you have to grind quite hard to unlock this special skin. Then there is their badge: "Everything is a Calculation" — the highest reward you can get for pumping donpa tickets into the friendship menu with Sage. Not to mention that Sage herself is an AI hacking program that Eggman created to hack into the Starfall Islands mainframe.

Now look at their car customisation:

Using the disabled in Time Trials gadget to give you a boost item at the start of the race instead of optimising this slot for something better is such a "fuck you" to everyone else trying to beat their time, in my opinion. Something else I haven't noticed at first is how the third lap is 20+ seconds faster than the previous ones?? Totally nothing suspicious.

Now here's their replay video, compressed by me to fit into my website (:

They are going so slow, hitting walls, and bumpers, and stuff, barely doing any tricks or drifting — how could they get such fast result time? Then, right at the 2:20 mark in race time they hit the kraken tentacle and stop. And the race time also stops! Even funnier — I realised that now it was suddenly my turn to control the car?? During someone else's replay??

We watched this replay three times and all three times the same thing happened and I needed to finish the race myself to end the replay.

Highly orchestrated game glitches that are (seemingly, at least) made for the public to find are, honestly, what online games exist for. It's so funny seeing someone doing something weird with the game and unlocking new broken ways of experiencing it for other players.

As I'm writing this, I'm realising that when someone did such things in niceRO I still had to decide if a funny glitch should be fixed or not, so I guess I have double-sided feelings about it, lol... It's fun when it happens the first time anyway!

P.S.: We've just checked and this replay has been removed from the leaderboards... T__T