Returning from a two year absence, the Ferret comes back to kick some tail!
The Story So Far
The hero of the story, Hiro Miyamoto (no relation to Shigeru Miyamoto), haphazardly runs into various enemies in a vain attempt to make sense of the convoluted (and mostly filler) time travel plot he has been unwillingly caught up in. Don't worry about the text going by too fast to read: the story will make more sense if you just make it up as you go along. Trust me.
The Game
You can read up about the history of this infamous game here. The ROM for this version, which John Romero, the owner, has put on his web page for free, can be found here, as well as some additional first-hand comments.
The Movie
The movie is comprised of the game's four rather long levels; the last makes up about one third of the whole movie. Action and pacing are very good as long as it's not in a cut scene, which can become very long. I recommend fast forwarding through them as I ignore the text and are very slow and boring. Many tricks and glitches are employed, most common being damage boosting and a quirk in the engine that causes the player to move faster for a few frames when hugging a corner. Bosses go down insanely fast, so I consider them the highlight of the movie.
The Notes
- Eight of the bosses give you a 50+ bonus to your max health and fill your meter back up. The animation for giving this bonus has a fixed amount of time to go through, but I've determined that if your health is 25 points below the current max when you get the bonus, the animation time increases. Thus at the end of levels 3 and 4 I had to forgo damage boosting as there weren't enough pills to restore my health.
- This game is not random. Enemy AI has limited manipulation based on the spatial relationship with the character. Teleporting enemies and bosses have a set pattern that cannot be broken. Very irritating in almost all of those fights.
- The emulator reports the movie length inaccurately. This is due to VBA 19 holding frames during loading periods out longer than usual. A more accurate time could have been reported with VBA 20, but I tried that and ended up desynching about 5 times in 30 minutes of recording. Didn't want to put up with that.
- All that effort to beat the game in 36 minutes and it STILL gives me a rank D. :(
Enjoy!
- Aims for fastest time
- Takes damage to save time
- Abuses programming errors
- Recorded with VBA 19 (see above)
NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots
of this movie and placed them here.
Ferret_Warlord: Nice picture of a not-yet-loaded weapons menu, NesVideoAgent. I'm actually surprised you failed to get something from the space cut scenes.
Screen shots trimmed to some of the more interesting, non-scrolling ones.
NesVideoAgent: Thanks for the help, Ferret Warlord!
adelikat: Not my favorite game but you seem to have won over enough of the audience. I grant thee an acceptance.
ccfreak2k: Processing the itty bitty game into an itty bitty video.