17 years after the launch of Wii Play, the Nintendo minigame collection that's mostly remembered by fans as 'the one that's not as good as Wii Sports,' nobody had managed to get a perfect shot in the 9-ball billiards game. Speedrunners have finally changed that, but only after decompiling the game's code to build a tool that could finally sort through millions of possibilities to find the one magic angle. Wii Play has a robust speedrunning community that's been around for years, and getting through the billiards game as fast as possible means trying to sink as many balls as you can in a single shot.
If you're speedrunning a game of 9-ball, it'd be ideal to sink every single ball in a break shot, but as of earlier this year, the best anybody had ever managed was seven balls sunk in the break - something that had only happened four times in the history of the game's speedrunning scene. A broke down the problem in detail back in February. No two break shots ever played out the same way, and despite years of effort in the Wii Play speedrun community, nobody could ever figure out why.
Nobody, that is, until cyndifusic worked with a developer named kiwi to disassemble the game's code and figure out why the hell it's so hard to get a perfect break. Together, they discovered that the code that places the balls on the table very subtly randomizes their positions. The change is so subtle that it's impossible to see from the game's default camera angle, but it's just enough to ensure th.