Metroid Zero Mission any% improvement by Dragonfangs, using the "Kraid First" route.
- Visual Boy Advance 1.7.2 re-recording v19.3
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes damage to save time
- Abuses programming errors in the game
- Manipulates luck
Metroid Zero Mission has several hidden paths and alternate routes for things which, if used correctly, shortens the game greatly. It also produces many possible routes through the game, but the fastest one is pretty much set. Apart from one detail, which of the main bosses to beat first?
Going for Kraid first has the advantage of an earlier speed booster, which quite obviously speeds things up. Having speed booster also allows for a slightly different, faster, order of picking up a few expansions.
Ridley first, however, gives you Super Missiles before Kraid, which allows for a really fast Kraid fight. Ridley first also gives you power grip and possibly hi-jump really early. And power grip really speeds up vertical shafts, way more than you'd think, actually. Ridley first also has a slightly shorter route through Brinstar.
So the big question is, which saves more time: Speed Booster in Norfair/Ridley, or Power Grip/Hi-jump in Kraid? I believe speed booster wins that race. Don't trust me completely on that though, both these routes are very close in terms of speed.
This run mainly aims for the ingame timer. This doesn't really make a difference in most cases, but some of the routes I take might be slower in real time due to doors. The final timer reads 21:39 with 22% of items collected. 1 minute and 50 seconds faster than the previous run.
Random Notes of DOOM
- Exiting a spin jump will still keep your vertical momentum unless you shoot.
- If exiting a spin jump without shooting and while rising, you'll still rise for a frame regardless if you hold jump or not, if you then press jump again you'll start spinning again and still rise. I can't actually remember ever using this for time saving purposes.
- Exiting a spin jump positioned the right way under a ledge, you'll get pushed down a bit, and since you don't lose any vertical momentum by exiting a spin jump you can save a bit of time.
- Doing the "corner boost" at a certain place in Chozodia made a part of the room load incorrectly. But it's just a visual glitch and can't be used for anything.
- The horizontal movement of all of Samus's projectiles are related to Samus's movement, so if you move in the same direction of a missile it will move faster to keep itself away from Samus, avoiding a doppler effect. This same technique can be used to "curve" shots by shooting diagonally and then moving sideways.
- If multiple projectiles hits an enemy, all of them will do damage. This is only really useful against the Brinstar Worm/Charge Beamst/Boss right after missiles that drop the charge beam.
- Shooting while turning around cancels the entire turnaround animation, speeding up a turn by quite a bit.
- Starting a spin and shooting at the same time makes the shot appear at the bottom of Samus's sprite instead of at the arm cannon.
- Morphing and shooting at the same time fires the projectile at the back of the Morph ball sprite.
- After the Chozo ghost battle it usually locks you in place before transforming you to your full suit. But if you turn around during a certain time frame of about 4 frames you can move freely again and the rest of that scene still plays out the same. If there happens to be any stun pistol shots left on the screen when the you've got the suit for real, they'll turn into garbled plasma sprites.
- The stupid slow walking robot in the Mothership has to get hit first and then go through an animation before you can start pumping him full of missiles. So it might seem like I "waste" a missile but I need to do that first, missiles have longer range.
- Power Grip is usually way faster than other forms of vertical movement(shinespark excluded) because there is only a single frame without upwards movement.
- There is a "sticky walls" effect when spin jumping. In other words, if you touch a wall while spinjumping and then try to move away from it, you accelerate way slower than you would if you haven't touched anything. Most likely there to make wall jumping easier.
- Space Jump removes the ability to Wall jump, which would've been faster if there's a wall nearby. But at the same time, Space Jump removes the sticky walls effect.
- Ingame time still runs during the "Item get!" popup.
- Mother Brain will usually only take 5 missiles or a super before closing its eye to charge a beam. But there is a short amount of time right after a beam is fired where she'll accept damage anyway.
- Bosses in this game die too fast :P
Thanks
I'd like to thank P.Jboy for providing me with a lot of useful information, Boltr for making the previous run and giving me something to compare to(it's kind of unfair to compare to that run because of all the lag, but it was still helpful).
I want to thank moozooh for commenting on my wips with constructive criticism, he really tried his best to make this run as good as possible, and he was a great help.
I'd like to thank a lot of people but mainly Angerfist and my IRL friends that go by the nicknames Meroigo, KConny and Demon for keeping the time spent on this worth it and enjoyable.
Truncated: Accepted as an improvement to the any% category.