#1718: Randil's NES Snow Bros in 13:56.85

Snow Bros warpless TAS by Randil

This run is 10 094 frames, 2min 48.23 seconds, faster than the current run of this game, which happens to be the oldest non-obsoleted movie on this site - it's around 3.5 years old! The improved time comes from playing the levels better and avoiding getting items from enemies. More details on what has been improved can be found under the "Improvements section below.

Aims for fastest possible time.
1 player controls 2 characters.
Manipulates luck.
Genre: Platform

About the game:

The goal in Snow Bros is simple, you have to kill all the enemies that are on screen. There are 50 levels in the game, and every 10:th level is a boss level. In order to beat a floor and proceed to the next one, you first have to kill all the enemies that are on screen, and then pick up any items that they leave behind. The next level won't start until there are no items on screen. It is because of this that I avoid getting items unless it's necessary or faster than avoiding it.

There are two ways of killing an enemy: The first way is to cover him in snow until he turns into a snowball, and then roll him away. The second way is to hit him with another snowball. If an enemy that is not totally covered in snow is hit by a snowball, he will drop an item. This is why I almost never hit an enemy with a snowball unless he is completely covered in snow.

There are power-ups in this game that will make your snow men stronger. In this run, I pick up two out of three power-ups: The first one I pick up is the red potion, which allows me to run and jump faster. The second potion, the blue one, makes my shots stronger, which is very useful. There is also a yellow potion that will allow you to fire longer, but it didn't help me anything in the run. I waste some time on level 1 and 2 to get the necessary power-ups for both characters.

You'll notice that I encounter a sumo enemy on floor 24,26 and 28. If you hit him with a freeze shot, he will disappear, but if you don't, and there are enemies on screen, he will fire some shost at you. If you don't shoot him, but you've killed all enemies on screen, he will disappear and money will fall down from above. :) This happens on floor 28, since it's faster than reaching the sumo and shooting him.

After every boss, I'll get to play the slot machines. I always get 3 X every time I play, since getting anything else would give me points, and this wastes time.

Boss fights:

As stated above, there are 5 bosses in this game. All bosses have both normal HP (health points) and sub-HP, where 1 HP = 256 sub-HP, just like with pixels and sub-pixels.

Hitting a boss with a snowball deals 1 HP damage to the boss. Hitting him with a freeze shot deals 1 sub-HP. So theoretically, I can kill a boss by just shooting at him, but as you'll realize, it's much faster to use snowballs.

For example, the first boss has 5 HP and 40 sub-HP. So the way to kill that boss is to fire 40 shots to drain all his sub-HP, and then hit him with 5 snowballs. It's possible to kill him using just snowballs, but in that case I would need 6 snowballs, which takes more time.

Improvements:

It would be too much work to write each and every improvement here, so I'll just give you the general strategies I used to save time:

Playing with frame precision, such as jumping on the first possible frame, etc.
Fire at the first possible frame.
Avoid getting items by killing every enemy on screen when they're completely covered in snow.
Kill bosses faster.
New and faster strategies on every level.
Better manipulation of the slots.

The making of this run:

This is my first completed 2-player movie. It was challenging to control 2 players at the same time - I assigned control of player 1 to my gamepad, and player 2 to my keyboard. I usually first played each level individually to get a hunch of what to do with each character before playing with both.

This game is pretty edit-friendly, I managed to edit in some improvements without having to redo the entire run, which was nice. :)