How to Basicly HWBT-DS
By PlainOldPants
This is about how to basicly, which is different from basically. In all seriousness, I didn’t want to have to post a separate guide for every single freaking thing, so I’m just combining all of it in this one document to save everyone’s time. I’m sorry about the video quality, but I didn’t want it to take forever to upload all of these videos.
Hate reading? Click here for videos
(*The video playlist only covers the Bedroom. The rest are only in this text guide)
This entire document only covers the DS version!!! Click here for the Wii version.
To get the best car in the game which has max stats, on the vehicle selection screen, hold L and press Y, X, Down, X, Y, Up. Most places online have an unnecessary “Up” at the beginning. When you do the code, it’ll automatically bring you to the car, but after that point, you have to keep manually selecting over to that car each time you do a race. The car doesn’t get saved, so if you restart your game, you’ll be able to enter the code again.
If you have two DS systems, you can do this trick to skip waiting for the game to get through all the startup videos: Play the game on one DS while waiting for the other DS to get through all the startup videos, and when you need to reset, you can restart the game on the DS you’re using and switch to the other DS. You can see me do this in these speedrun attempts: https://youtu.be/HwqyGu9pgKE
All of these shortcuts should work on both Quickrace and Eliminator unless it’s specified that it only works on Rampage. There are no shortcuts that only work on Quickrace or only work on Eliminator, and there are no Quickrace/Eliminator shortcuts that don’t work on Rampage. If a shortcut works on one level, that doesn’t guarantee it’ll work in the same place in a different level.
For Quickrace and Eliminator there are both an easy shortcut and a hard shortcut. You should be able to get the easy one consistently. The hard one takes some effort to get the muscle memory for and might still be too inconsistent after a lot of practice. The few seconds the harder one saves isn’t really worth it for longer runs.
Video: https://youtu.be/NdGN374ixIg
This is the harder skip. Since this one was discovered by me, I get to name it. Yay.
To get your car to get launched forward, the trick is to get your car aligned so that the only tire touching the wall is the back-left tire. Once you’re in that position, you have to accelerate while turning left to get a bunch of speed.
This works because driving while your car is tilted upside-down (meaning at least 90 degrees back or forward) makes the game think you’re going around a loop, and when you’re going around a loop, the game gives you a bunch of speed to keep your car stuck to it, which in this case just makes your car sort of get yeeted into the air.
Also, make sure you go past the spot where the white lines suddenly get closer. If you don’t go there, the lap won’t count. More about why that works in this post I made on SRC.
Video: https://youtu.be/efvUkmLQrUA
I’m not sure if I or someone else discovered this one first, but I’m naming it anyway. Yay.
This one’s really simple. For this one, you just have to turn into the wall and drive up it. If you drive through the wall or fall to your death, you were probably too close or too far when you turned into the wall.
Also, make sure you go past the spot where the white lines suddenly get closer. If you don’t go there, the lap won’t count. This is the same spot you have to go to when doing the harder shortcut.
I recommend waiting until the second lap to start doing this shortcut during an eliminator race because it might take too long for your place to get updated to first if you do the shortcut during the first lap.
NOTICE: I don’t know if this is faster or not. It’s probably slower.
Video: https://youtu.be/tn54R7EzPKw
Doing this in anything except Rampage will not work because it skips the first turn, which then causes the game to think you’re driving back to the finish line.
To do this skip, you just have to drive back into the side of this ramp in a certain spot that clips you on top of it. Once you do that, you can get to the item hoops earlier and backtrack to the first two cars which are coming towards you. At that point, a glitch will cause your shots to shoot higher up, so you can snipe the other 2 cars from far away. Make sure you attack while you’re right next to them instead of from a distance because doing this shortcut causes your missiles to shoot upwards to where the game thinks you are. After you get those two cars, do the “Wall Climb” shortcut described above to get to the top floor where you can shoot a third car. I am an idiot. For your third hit, you can just re-hit whichever car you had hit first.
The main problems with this route are that I’m not sure if it even saves time, and even if it does save time, it relies on the first two cars making it over the first jump on their first try, which has a random chance of happening.
Video: https://youtu.be/X8MS0SMyYRE
This level has a relatively easy shortcut right at the beginning. To do it, you have to turn left while driving up the first ramp so that you fall down into the lower floor. When I do this cut, I like to space myself away from the wall a certain amount, but I’ve seen other runners do the clip with their car almost touching the left wall.
For unknown reasons, the lap doesn’t always count when doing this shortcut, but, thank god, there’s a way to make the lap count more often. Once you drive some distance past that glass support thing next to the table, turn around to the left, drive against the glass thing, and turn around again. There is an invisible trigger area here that makes the lap count, and what you’re trying to do is re-enter the trigger area again going backwards, since going through it forwards doesn’t always work. You can see me do this in this video: https://youtu.be/HwqyGu9pgKE?t=1959
Also note that in Eliminator races, it’s best not to try to do this shortcut on the first lap because if you fail it on your first try and quickly get it on your second try, it might take too long for the game to update your place back to 1st, and if you’re still in 6th at that time, you’ll lose the race right there.
This one’s hard. To get a really fast rampage time on this level, you can do the standard shortcut at the beginning, pick up the missiles, shoot the car that’s above you (a glitch causes your shots to go upward), shoot the car that goes towards you (it’s only possible to shoot this one from right in front, so you have to be quick) and then re-shoot the car that’s above you. Video footage is coming “soon”, aka whenever I feel like picking up this game again.
This track doesn’t have any major shortcuts, so to optimize this one, you have to keep getting Hot Wheels points by “drifting, drafting, and jumping” (I’m not even joking) and use them to turn one boost into three boosts whenever possible. This is pretty terrible because what items you get in this game are completely random, and you might not get boosts when you need them.
That being said, there are some very small shortcuts you can do to save a little bit of time, but depending on how many points you have and what item you’re holding onto, it’s sometimes better to forgo doing these so that you can get another random item or more supercharge points.
Video: https://youtu.be/ZhSvJTgsyxA
I’ll admit this one is really dumb and only saves maybe a fraction of a second, but for some reason you can drive inside this wall to cut this corner slightly closer than normal. Most similar spots in the Bedroom area have collision detection to stop you from doing this, but it works in this spot in this specific level for some reason. It does not work in the same spot in Bathroom Break.
Video: https://youtu.be/QbVERKjpYu8
There’s a spot here where you can cut the corner to save some time, but be careful! Cutting out too much of this corner will make the lap not count. This video is showing a rough minimum for how close you should cut the corner, so it’s better to be a little further to the left. Doing this skips a set of item hoops, so if you need the items, you should get those instead of doing this cut.
Video: https://youtu.be/UeXKYIXULMQ
This one is pretty hard and takes a bit of practice.There’s a spot near the end of the track where you can turn in for a small shortcut, but there’s an invisible wall that you have to go around. The reason why this is so hard is because you also have to quickly avoid bumping into another wall. It’s easy to accidentally get stuck on the ledge or drive all the way up the wall while doing this, both of which lose some time.
The most consistent way I found to get squarely on the ground early enough while also not bumping into the other wall is by lining up against the wall, turning right 80 degrees, left 80 degrees, right again, and left again in a certain rhythm.
Also, after you do the glitch, you have to drive around what seems to be a checkpoint. Otherwise the lap won’t count. Don’t just do the trick and go straight for the finish line.
If you thought some of the previous glitches were nearly impossible, you should probably just quit right now before you get scarred.
This level is the absolute worst to speedrun in the game, and I think it’s even worse than most stages in the console versions of this game. Like Floorboard, there are three shortcuts you can pick from–an easy shortcut, a medium shortcut, and a hard shortcut–but unlike Floorboard, I highly recommend against doing any shortcuts in this stage during an eliminator race at all because it takes especially long for your place in the race to update on this track after doing a shortcut.
There’s also a fourth shortcut you can do if you happen to get a boost. Its difficulty and time saved are just between the medium and hard shortcuts. If you’ve learned and practiced it, it might randomly save you a few seconds
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2gyxvppaaw
If you’re struggling with the Two-Piece shortcut, you can do this shortcut. Just drive parallel against this wall and slowly turn 180 degrees in this spot to clip through and fall down. If you’re having trouble landing correctly, try holding no direction while falling, and start turning left while holding A when you’re about to land.
Then, you have to go into that shortcut area, otherwise the lap won’t count. You can enter the shortcut from either side (this video shows me entering the far side), but you must exit from the side that’s closer to the finish line, otherwise the game will glitch and reset your progress for the entire race.
This is a two-piece shortcut, like a two-piece swimsuit. [Insert inappropriate joke here]
Method 1: https://youtu.be/RnQ1jfagmmM
Method 2: https://youtu.be/Go0CnHvfG10
The first piece is to get over this ledge and onto the ramp just behind it. One way to do this is to drive into a part of the wall that just clips you up over it. The other way is to do it similarly to how I prefer to do the shortcut in Bedroom Brawl, where you drive on the left and do a sharp right turn to go over the right wall.
Once you’ve made it over, DON’T press Y to respawn yourself. Doing that puts back on the first part where you have to do the shortcut again.
Video: https://youtu.be/_Qif7cT65Xw
The second piece is to clip inside the ramp that leads back to the main part of the level. I’m pretty sure you’re only able to clip into the right side of it. You can clip through either the left side or the right side. The right side is easier to get because you get more time and more room to line yourself up.
If you’re having trouble getting the clip into the right side, turn 90 degrees to the right and turn back to the left before doing the clip. For some unknown reason, doing that seems to make this glitch happen more consistently.
You are about to witness one of the hardest glitches in this game.
Video: https://youtu.be/CWDx1nOvdW8
Lower quality: https://youtu.be/UmQB5QdMO7A
Old videos: https://youtu.be/zNv9I8ub6G8 https://youtu.be/DCTQmW-z-ug https://youtu.be/ud9kB6--JkY
This glitch starts out in a similar way to the first method for “Piece 1”, but instead of jumping forward onto the ramp, you have to fall to the right and onto the ground, which is right at the end of the race.
There’s one part of this wall where if you’re driving directly into it, your car will always get clipped up onto the wall. What you want to do is slide into that spot from the left while facing directly into the wall so that you get clipped onto it at the same time that your car switches from turning left to turning right. Having a lot of rightwards momentum from the start helps to avoid accidentally going onto the ramp. For me, this method of doing the shortcut works about 2 times out of 3.
Also, after doing the wallclip, you have to backtrack into that shortcut area, otherwise the lap won’t count.
There are some ways I’ve tried to make this glitch more consistent, but it might just be the placebo effect. The way that’s worked best for me is going into the middle item in a certain way to line up into the right position before trying to clip the wall. I usually aim for the middle item, but in this recording I hit the left item instead. I’ve gotten this version of the wallclip three times in a row at least twice, but I don’t have any times written down anywhere unfortunately. I’m pretty sure it was under 50 seconds though!
Another way is to go all the way around and try to clip through that way. I can’t verify that this way is better, but it just feels easier to me for some reason. When recording this, I got it on my second try without using any TAS tools, and I *am* bragging right now.
Video: https://youtu.be/NIR5Zs-aRoU
There’s one more glitch in this level, but for it to be doable in real time, you need to have a boost item. (It theoretically can be done without a boost, but that’s pretty much TAS-only.) To do it, you simply have to boost off this specific ledge and try to go as far as possible to get past the death plane. Once you’ve landed, don’t go too far up the track before turning around because that’ll reset your progress back to that area of the track.
This isn’t a shortcut, but in my absolute insanity while trying to find a better shortcut or route on this track, I found out that turning into the blue marker walls in the main room can very rarely make you drive up and over them to get out of bounds. It would be like a miracle if someone could find some way to make this useful. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a video of this glitch.
There are no known useful glitches in this level currently, so you should follow the tips from Desktop Dash.
There’s one part of the track where you might think you can fall over the wall to the right and cut the corner very sharp to save time, but make sure you don’t over-do that. If you cut out too much of the corner, the lap will not count.
You can’t try to glitch around the vertical loop either. You should go around the whole loop. If you manage to glitch around and skip having to go all the way around, the game won’t count your lap.
There are no known useful glitches in this level currently, so you should follow the tips from Desktop Dash.
You can drive on the water, but it will make turning slower. There is one part where you can save a little time by driving over the water, but this skips getting a weapon. It might be better sometimes to go over the water. Other times, you might want one of those weapons.
In the part where the track splits, make sure you take the left path. The right path has a vertical loop that takes more time to go around. At the end of that road, there’s a part where you have to drop down. This fall is more important to practice than you think, since hitting the ground with just your front tires might cause your car to hesitate or even start rotating around the wrong way, wasting several seconds.
(Video: https://youtu.be/I7Dg5j5WoZc?t=785 ) This track has a really obvious shortcut right at the beginning that you can do, but if you do it, make sure you also do the non-glitch shortcut that’s right after it because that corrects your position and makes your lap count at the end. (Not that you aren’t probably doing that already.)
(Video: https://youtu.be/I7Dg5j5WoZc?t=816 ) There’s also one part where you can go around a certain rock to the left instead of going the long way around on the right like the white tracklines tell you to. This works and is not a glitch.
(Video https://youtu.be/TzF0LdjPQCI by JowenGrande/Jeremy ) At the start, you can immediately backtrack using the Y button and go to a certain spot to skip almost all of the first lap. This only works on the first lap of the race.
(Video https://youtu.be/I7Dg5j5WoZc?t=985 ) There is a small skip you can do here, but it makes you miss a few items.
(Video https://youtu.be/TzF0LdjPQCI?t=67 by JowenGrande/Jeremy ) There’s also this skip here which cuts out part of the track.
There are no known useful glitches in this level currently, so you should follow the tips from Desktop Dash.
There’s that vertical loop right at the beginning of the track, but it’s faster to go to the left and skip around it.
Video (low quality): https://youtu.be/I7Dg5j5WoZc?t=1295
Right at the beginning of the level, the track has a bit of an incline. You can use that incline to jump over the left wall and land really close to the end of the level. The spot you fall into is conveniently the same place you need to be in to make the lap count.
There are no known useful glitches in this level currently, so you should follow the tips from Desktop Dash.
There is a pretty easy skip you can do on only the first lap. In this video https://youtu.be/I7Dg5j5WoZc?t=1494 I decided to play it safe by going all the way around like this. Later, I did this individual level run https://youtu.be/iDIdkUfCWOI where I did a more risky version that doesn’t always seem to work.
This skip here https://youtu.be/I7Dg5j5WoZc?t=1513 skips most of the track and is recommended for most runs.
This much more difficult skip https://youtu.be/iDIdkUfCWOI?t=23 skips more of the track, but it is extremely difficult. What you do is you try to slow down near the top, get a “launch” while holding right like the gap jump in Floorboard, and immediately switch from right to left. Depending on which frame you switch to holding left, there are 2 different ways you might get launched, and only one of those launches will work. The trick to getting the landing cleanly is to always commit to holding left, meaning you should hold left the entire time without readjusting and have faith that your fall was good. This video https://youtu.be/drm-TvV8gMo is a straight 45 minutes of failed attempts by me, showing how hard this route is. You should just use the easier glitch instead unless you’re doing an individual level run.