Zelda: Ocarina of Time's fastest speedrun just got its first new route in 3 years, but nobody's sure if wrapping a Wii U gamepad in a rubber band is cheating

gamesradar.com:

For the first time in three years, there's a new route in the fastest The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speedrunning category, and it comes down to an unlikely savior: the Wii U.

Any% runs of Ocarina of Time are under four minutes these days, thanks to a particular way to exploit the game's code that runners call Stale Reference Manipulation, or SRM. The technique used in any% OoT speedruns is called the Lightnode SRM, which allows players to alter the game's memory based on the characters of the save game filenames.

Back in 2021, a method was found that let you use Lightnode SRM to instantly warp to the game's credits from the starting area of Kokiri Forest. Boom - four-minute speedrun. But this particular technique was only possible with the Wii Virtual Console version of Ocarina of Time, thanks to a bug in how the system's N64 emulation works. As a result, Wii became the platform of choice for most of the game's any% speedrunners, since it was the only place you could use this particular Lightnode SRM technique.

But as MrCheeze - a member of the Zelda speedrunning community who's been instrumental in devising strategies like this - explains on Reddit, the Wii isn't actually the best place to speedrun Ocarina of Time. Rather, the ideal platform is the Wii U. That's because the Wii U N64 emulator achieves much better frame rates than the Wii, and over the course of the four-minute OoT speedrun, the reduced lag on Wii U could theoretically save you as much as two seconds over the Wii version. 

Again, the particular SRM technique used on the Wii VC is only possible thanks to a bug in the emulator. But now, after three straight years of runners using this same technique, MrCheeze has managed to find an SRM filename that works on Wii U. If you want to see the technique in action, you can check out the video above from runner Malicia - the first to set a new personal best with the new discovery. MrCheeze also has a more detailed technical breakdown of the new