I explain how to escape from chuckya’s grasp. This is a feature that the programmers deliberately put into the game, but they didn’t actually explain anywhere. Consequently, this feature isn’t very well known, and so I figured I’d make a video explaining it in detail.
Here’s a summary: Chuckya has a counter that starts at 0 when he grabs Mario. Once chuckya starts rotating, we can increase this counter using certain controller inputs. If we manage to increase this counter to 11 before chuckya starts the throw, then we break free. There are two controller inputs that increment the counter, which are (1) pressing A, and (2) moving the control stick from the center (magnitude less than 30) to the outside (magnitude greater than 40). Also, this same feature is available when being grabbed by King Bob-omb.
Thanks to Peter Fedak for looking into the code and explaining to me exactly how this escape feature works.
Additional Notes
(1) I said that chuckya can rotate anywhere from 12 to 41 frames. This is how long chuckya will *naturally* rotate, but in practice he can rotate slightly more than this. Specifically, if chuckya's next to a wall or out of bounds and his natural rotation would have ended with him facing it, then he’ll deliberately keep rotating until he’s no longer facing it.
(2) I said that using solely the A button takes 21 frames to break free from chuckya’s grasp. However, we can actually use pause buffering in combination with the A button to escape in 11 in-game frames, which would be 41 total frames. Therefore, it actually would always be possible to escape from chuckya’s grasp using the A button with pause buffering. Note that we can’t use pause buffering to do this with the control stick method, since the corresponding boolean variable doesn’t update during pauses.
