Submission #4651: Hetfield90's SNES Mega Man X in 29:12.91

Goals

• Uses no passwords

• Aims for fastest time

• Abuses programming errors in the game

• Manipulates luck

• Takes damage to save time

• Dies to save time

• Uses speed/entertainment tradeoffs

Overview

Stage Info

Table of time saved per stage

Intro Stage(36 frames saved)

• The time save here was from lag reduction, slope jumps, destroying the final car from a jump off the 2nd to last car, and a better Vile pattern.

Chill Penguin(59 frames saved)

• Slope jumps, log zips, lag reduction, etc...

Boomer Kuwanger(130 frames saved)

• Clearing the first ladder gap with dash speed, an additional laser damage-boost, elevator skip, more gap jumps, lag reduction.

• Doing less charged shots on Kuwanger, but firing the uncharged shots that precede charged shots only when Kuwanger is up against the wall is a slightly faster fight.

Sting Chameleon (1 frame saved)

• Adjusting my movement after triggering the 2nd boulder guy, but before jumping over him, allowed me to dash under the 3rd without losing any frames from the inhibited movement required to set it up(since you have to wait to jump over the 2nd guy anyway).

Storm Eagle(411 frames saved)

• This platform is the same platform that is grabbed after the capsule in the 100% run, only from the left instead of the right side of the platform spawn area.

Mandrill(16 frames)

• Not using tornado on Thunder Slimer allowed me to save 1 frame over the published run (although I didn't check to see how much time I was losing through lag emulation disparities).

Mammoth(9 frames lost)

• No new strats to add here, so the frames lost were from lag emulation during the 2nd conveyor belt section as well as the two load times before the boss.

Armadillo(0 frames saved)

• There is a jump near a bat that requires some crazy sub-pixel nonsense as you are climbing the wall just before the second spike-cart that gave me hell in every TAS I've made of this game, and twice during the 100% runs because of revisits. Nrgzam came up with the idea to destroy one bat with C-sting and then kill the annoying bat with a boomerang that hits the bat behind X as the boomerang spawns. This not only eliminated the need to set up my sub pixels all the way back near the e-tank, but ended up being faster because of lag reduction with 2 bats beind dead.

Octopus(95 frames lost)

• The frames lost on this stage were because of emulator differences. Not only does Launch Octopus have the laggiest stage in the game by far, but I even had to change up my strategy on the Utuboros(snake miniboss) because of extra lag. On Snes9x 1.43, the Utuboros can be damaged with boomerangs while underground without causing any extra lag, but on BizHawk, putting even one boomerang on screen takes the game from 60fps to 30 for the entirety of the boomerang's duration. There was no other option than to wait for him to surface before dealing damage to him.

Sigma 1(755 frames saved)

• The beginning of this stage is probably my favorite part of the TAS; somehow I was able to manipulate an extra life drop for this phantom grab again, and the only damage I had to take to set up the Vile fight coincided with waiting for the boomerang to loop around during the grab.

• The Kuwanger skip is the same as in the 100% run, only this time it saves ~10s instead of ~1s due to not having hadouken.

• This Bospider fight was all the work of FractalFusion. This table shows which RNG values correspond to which web patterns(and starting positions), and show how many crossings it will take him to reach the ground from each of the 4 starting positions in that web. Using this information, he was able to find out how many dust sprites were needed to manipulation each starting position/web pattern based on where the TAS started the fight in the RNG sequence. He also discovered that breaking an ice sled advances the RNG sequence by 12 values, which made getting one of these 0 crossover patterns possible when there wasn't enough time to create 12 extra dust sprites.

Sigma 2(41 frames saved)

• Most of the time save here was from the phantom grab at the beginning of the stage.

• During the climb before eagle, I set up my jumps before the ladder gaps so that I wall jump inside of them before undergoing the animation change that freezes you mid-air for 1 frame after jumping away from the wall. I was able to save 5 frames over my 100% run in this climb.

• I managed to get enough of an off screen kill on Storm Eagle such that all lag was reduced during the explosion. I only had to delay killing him by 2 frames to do this, but these 2 frames were also necessary for manipulating Rangda Bangda.

Sigma 3(1264 frames saved)

• Armadillo skip saves a lot of time in Any%.

• I still suspect it is somehow possible to have 3 boomerangs in the air while charging on the Maverick Tank fight, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. 7 frames could be saved here with a theoretical perfect fight.

Sigma 4(12 frames lost)

• There are load times before each song in this stage(so pretty much before and after every boss) and lag during the first Sigma fight boss explosion, which explains the time loss on this stage.

• I was able to save a few frames on Velguarder by taking a damage boost.

Possible Improvements

• Sub-pixel min/maxing, lag reduction, RNG manipulation always has room for improvement; there are just infinite possibilities there.

• Manipulating 3 boomerangs mid-air while charging on the Maverick Tank fight could save 7 frames, but I'm not sure if it is possible.

• Some amount of time less than 1 second could maybe be saved in the phase 1 Sigma fight if it is possible to set up 2 charged E-sparks with uncharged shots from further away (and without using flame thrower). I am not sure if Sigma's patterns will allow this, since he likes to climb if you are in the top of the room for too long.

Closing

• FractalFusion: For manipulating Vile, dissasembling and manipulating Bospider's RNG, giving me ideas while I was making the run, his published Any% run, proving his Nicovideo encode, and teaching me how to properly TAS Mega Man X games in general.

• Nrgzam: For spitballing ideas with me during the making of this run and coming up with solutions for some areas where I could not figure out how to proceed, as well as providing the twitch encode(which wasn't really an encode but him streaming the .bk2 on my channel since my computer can't run BizHawk at 60fps while streaming).

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