--Cancelled because possible improvements brought to light in feedback have prompted me to run through it again.--
Here's a run of Conquest of the Crystal Palace, a fun and quite difficult NES game. In this game, Prince Farron and his dog Zap must take back the Crystal Palace from the usurper Zaras. Graphically it's pretty advanced for the system, and there are countless opportunities to be hit, so I thought a run of this game would be interesting. This movie was made with FCE Ultra 0.98.15 at double the normal window size (1x). All other settings are default.
Some might recall I submitted a bad attempt at TASing this game a couple of years ago. When I made that attempt, I didn't really understand the purpose of TAS and played at full speed. I tried much harder this time and improved by nearly four minutes.
My aim was to complete the game as quickly as possible. This movie frequently takes damage to save time. In this game, if the player lands on the upper right side of an enemy, they are launched forward slightly. I use this boost to walk through obstacles I could not otherwise avoid (I would be knocked backward by damage) and a few times to get onto a platform I could not otherwise have reached with the same jump. Technically, I could jump on nearly every enemy in the game to get this boost, with only health as the limit, but it would only save a few frames each time and make the movie look bad, so I don't do this.
The hero's dog can be used as a platform; I take advantage of this to avoid waiting for some moving platforms and to climb a couple of staircases more quickly. This would be close to impossbile to do on console as I do in the movie, because during Zap's initial jump the player can only land on the dog for one frame. Whenever I do wait for a moving platform in the movie, I had tried the dog trick and it either did not save time or took longer than just taking the platform.
Some notes(times are approximate, I got them from a FCEU-generated avi):
- 0:05 - I have to wait for the annoying text to scroll twice in order to select the jump crystal, which makes the game go much quicker for obvious reasons.
- 1:00 - It was really difficult even with frame advance to jump through this waterfall without taking damage. I could go just as fast by getting hit, but this is more impressive.
- 2:30 - I get hit and ignore lag here because the girl has to be avoided. If you touch her, you enter the shop, which takes an enormous emount of time.
- 3:15 - Keep in mind that these snowball-looking things (I think they're supposed to be spirits) damage you on contact and have to be avoided.
- 3:24 - I wait until here to recall the dog becuase it's the first point at which I can do so without wasting time, but perhaps I should have done it earlier anyway to conserve the dog's health.
- I don't use the dog trick while going up the stairs near the end of level 2 because the dog gets stuck in the walls if you attempt to summon him here.
- Level 4 - I collect several invincibility items here. I'm not just being lazy, being invincible is much faster than any other way.
- 10:30, 10:38 - This area is normally very laggy, so I take the time to kill some enemies to keep things running as well as possible.
- 12:00 - I allow myself to be hit because the spiked ceiling is normally an instant kill.
- I don't jump down quite as soon as I can after beating the penultimate boss because doing so gets the hero lodged in the bottom of the final boss arena, causing death.
- I call the dog at the end because it makes the ending look a little better. The fact that it delivers a hit to the boss is a nice bonus, though. This doesn't cost any time.