Submission #1125: Twisted_Eye's NES Mad Max in 13:08.53

Loosely based on the movie by the same name, Mad Max stars a man named Max trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, where major warfare has destroyed society and survivors fight in a neverending quest for gasoline. The gameplay's almost like a GTA1/2 mixed with Blaster Master. ....Almost. Alllmost.

Your mission is to keep enough fuel in your tank to drive your car until you reach the arena, your freedom from wherever you are in each stage. However, to open the arena, you need an arena pass, bought at any store. However, to trade, you need to find enough food and water as payment (you start with two, so five must be found). To find food and water, you have to explore underground bunkers laid out across the land and strip the rather generic gangster types of their stash. You're free to shoot anyone (...which has a very weird result to their bodies...maybe they're reeeally thirsty? you'll see)

Once in the arena, your mission then is to be the last car driving. You're stripped of the dynamite used in the previous stage type, but given a full tank of gas, with which you have to either smash your opponents or push them off the ledges or into the pits that open in the road as you drive. When all else are gone, the exit opens, and you can drive through to...well, the next stage, where you have to again buy an arena pass etc. etc.

Three rounds of road war->arena and you reach the final battle. Shoot your opponent while walking on a thin platform until he is down, and then, the rivetting victory sequence! ...Rivetting! Really!

This is considered a pretty hard game. Death comes easily, and, while you're given infinite lives, every continue needed takes you all the way back to the start of the road war of the stage you're on. Run out of gas? Death. Come anywhere near one of the open pits in an enemy hideout? Death. It does have some fun to it, even though there are only two pieces of music IN the game: Title/Cave music, and Death/Next Area music.

I've redone and redone the movie as a find more strategies and even a pretty powerful/unusual/dangerous glitch. Right now I'm pretty darn satisfied with the end result

During the Road War stages, I frequently cut corners without slowing down--something about how the engine revs keeps my momentum beyond what it should at certain times. Sometimes I'm able to drive right through the bushes without slowing down at ALL, like just after buying the arena pass in Road War 1--this, well, that's just bad programming, hehe. Otherwise, the only other trick I use that isn't obvious is throwing dynamite at apparently nothing; if there's one stick already on the screen, the tire towers and enemy cars won't throw any. By throwing a dummy shot, I'm keeping them from getting in my way. Otherwise, any funky movements made are done to get around/manipulate enemy cars/dynamite. And when those rock barricades explode, the explosions act as a wall, so I have to slow down for roughly 12 frames before I charge through them. Ah, and if you hear a DEOWww, DEOWww noise, that's my gas tank about to go asplode; I was cutting it pretty darn close when trying to get to those arenas!

Inside the caves, it's merely a matter of dodging the thugs and grabbing the closest food and water, and sometimes keys to open doors. This is where my big glitch rears its crazy head:

The way that the game handles gunfire is poorly programmed with the assumption that players can never press up+down or left+right. Now, most combinations where up+down are pressed cause the game to actually crash, but up+down+right instead starts doing very weird things. One time, the cave I was in got so screwed up that I could walk anywhere/everywhere but never leave. Once, two other Maxes appeared beside mine and mirrored his movements (a VERY fun result). The only useful part of the glitch, however, is when this glitch is used near doors. If you can do the glitch right and enough, any locked door you are just north of will open, as if you shot the lock right off! You keep any keys, but your health is set to 4, no matter what it was before. I use this glitch a couple different times to get where I need to go without need for most keys!

oh, and those gangsters require multiple bullets to kill annnd they die strangely hehe

--During the third Road War, I have to stop off in a second cave to pick up another Crossbow; the extra ammo is NECESSARY to kill the final boss. This detour put a huge dent into my very limited gas tank, and I ended up not being able to reach the end the first time through. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to cut corners and mess with the programming, and ended up redoing the whole movie again. ALL because the last boss is bullet-absorbent. Some exercise wouldn't hurt, dude--

Once I reach the arenas, however, I found things very hard to keep precise. I needed to be as near the exit as possible while still killing nearly every car I found--how the cars are programmed to appear is still not certain to me, they appear programmed at certain spots, and yet, leave one alone and another will appear later to replace it, so that when the number remaining is zero, there truly aren't any left. And yet, if you CHASE one that you let go, you can always catch up to it as it is running away! AND YET I can reasonably manipulate cars to appear two at a time in places that I can kill them quickly.

So in short, I did what I could to kill them as quickly as possible, but I put a lot of leeway into being entertaining while doing it. I have to kill a total of 120 cars in the movie; I wonder how many suicides, explosions, push-offs, pit-luring traps there were in all...

After the third arena, the final boss reveals his pixelated face. The crossbow ammo I picked up in the previous road war is necessary (wait, crossbow? Is my gun no GOOD HERE?!), and another programming error pops up here. Just like how throwing dynamite prevents the tire towers from throwing their own, if there are two crossbow shots on the screen already here, the boss won't be able to fire any back, so firing every available frame keeps him powerless to do anything but try to avoid my shots! Which...he chose not to do!

And then the rivetting ending sequence! Rivetting! When it's done, hitting A just takes you back to the title screen, so I didn't include that in the movie file. If I did, you'd miss the rivetting ending sequence!

I enjoyed this opportunity to finally beat this game that haunted my youth. As for further runs, I once dabbled with Jet Force Gemini for N64 controlling two players at once (the second player as Floyd for a free infinite-ammo double-pistol weapon), but that would take a long time, so who knows. (running slightly angled while strafing lets you run faster than otherwise possible, but otherwise that and a better planet sequence, I don't know how much better it would be than the well done SDA video, but it's definitely a game for someone to look into in the future!) I've also considered Robotrek for SNES, but after about 10 complete reworks of the movie and never even getting past the first boss, gggaaaahhhh. Then there's Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar for NES, by far the most open-ended 2D RPG I've ever played, where your mission is to become the Avatar of morality.

A good screenshot for this movie I say would be frame 17500 or so, being a very accurate capture of the movie on the whole and being ACTION PACKED! There's even an explosion in it, can't go wrong!

I'm done here for now, enjoy the movie, have a day

adelikat: Rejecting due to poor response and limited entertainment value of this game.

adelikat: Unrejecting in consideration for publication to the Vault

adelikat: While the viewer response was poor, there was no mention of anything problematic other than its entertainment value so I am accepting for publication to the Vault

Brandon: Publication underway.