That final boss, Trimming the Herbs, has definitely turned out to be a hacked (TAS) level, so The Last Dance was the last, already beaten level. This article is fairly outdated for a developing story.
That was always by far the most likely explanation, it was the general opinion of top-level SMM players. Something like 10 frame-perfect inputs with a lot of precise movement, it's just not plausible.
He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs. A lot of people were saying "there was no TAS in 2017", meaning I suppose there were no specific tools for emulator at the time, but that's just irrelevant when you can take a day or two to trial-and-error it.
The funny thing is if you watch the clear vid it actually looks really straightforward.
The original purpose of the video was to coyly announce the TAS tool the maker created, but the video was mostly ignored because it looks like a regular clear vid.
That’s how it so effectively accidentally flew under the radar. The level lacked a TAS label, and TASs are usually obvious and flashy.
But then you play it and realize those jumps are insanely precise.
Yes, frame perfect, but also mostly pixel perfect x,y precision.
There is even RNG manipulation necessary to ensure a bomb is spawned from a note block in a specific direction.
Streamers had already beaten it in chunks so it was theoretically possible for a human to do, but once people started offering monetary bounties the uploader felt it was time to let everyone in on the 7 year old joke.
> He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs.
The streamer featured in TFA, ThaBeast721, said that he and some other high profile streamers playing the level were contacted by the maker, whom many in the community knew prior and so there was chat history to authenticate the claim, and shown a video of the device breaking the level.
Thab described the device as a “raspberry pi or arduino type device hooked up to an actual controller somehow”
When the clear video failed to go viral the maker dropped the gag, and forgot about it until recently, because the device was a pain to use anyway.
The maker said it took 3 months to upload the level. Something about the device causing the console to crash when programming the inputs.
Even with a microcontroller, doing frame-perfect inputs is tricky because you don't have anything to sync off of - even tapping into the vsync signal from the video output is an imperfect reference because there's no guarantee that the game engine is actually synced with it (although I have no knowledge of SMM, maybe it does work better than I expect)
Except that many top players said it was very unlikely due the time it was uploaded and the availability of TAS methods at the time. The creator took a day to beat it, because not only couldn't sync inputs with the game engine current state, but also there's real rng in the trick.
I'm fairly sure the Wii U was already hacked by 2017, so he could've just played the inputs back on the console itself. Either that or just hack the game into thinking he cleared it when he didn't.
No need to hack anything, you just have to make a Bluetooth controller with the same characteristics than Nintendo’s controllers. They are pretty standard.
> That final boss, Trimming the Herbs, has definitely turned out to be a hacked (TAS) level
Has it? There's a confession, but this was an issue of major public significance (within a limited sphere). Do people never confess to things they didn't do?
According to a few high-profile members of the community (including people who previously insisted the level wasn't cheated), the level creator sent them a video of the TAS being used in practice.
He's not really clear about how exactly he did it, but it's pretty easy to just take a controller cable, wire it into a microcontroller, and program inputs. A lot of people were saying "there was no TAS in 2017", meaning I suppose there were no specific tools for emulator at the time, but that's just irrelevant when you can take a day or two to trial-and-error it.