Submission #6185: EZGames69's PCE Splatterhouse in 12:12.61

WARNING: The horrifying theme of this TAS may be inappropriate for young children... and cowards.

This is a 184 frame improvement to the published movie, due to better optimization and some slightly better boss fights.

This TAS will sync on both version of the game as the only real changes between them were the removal of religious references and Rick's mask being colored red. If this TAS get's accepted, I would like to do what the current publication does, and have the Japanese version be the main movie encode with the American version being the secondary one (even though I did this movie on the American version)

So before I talk about the stages, I want to mention that there is a Hard mode for this game, but all it does is increase the boss health. So it isnt really worth running on it. It might be best suited for a separate branch if it was entertaining enough.

So to start off, sliding is the object of the game. You move faster when you jump instead of walk. but sliding is faster than either walking or jumping. if you jump as soon as your slide is done, you can preserve speed. you can also preserve this speed if you jump again when you crouch and jump as you land. but after you land again your speed reduces. you also want to let go of the directional pad when you jump otherwise you lose the speed.

Sliding does 2 damage to enemies while normal attacks only do 1. you also have a huge hitbox when sliding, so you can pretty much mow down enemies this way, as it's very hard for them to hit you if you're in this state.

The ladder at the end of some rooms do not end the stage based on your position you climbed them on, as soon as you grab them the stage ends after a specific time.

The boar worms is basically an auto scroller, none of the worms have to be killed to finish the stage, except for the very last one that jumps out of the corpse at the end.

overall, 2 frames were saved in this stage.

for the first room, it's same concept as the last one. one frame was saved in this room.

the next room is another auto scroller. the only way you can waste time in any auto scroller in the game (besides not going for the exit) is if you are standing on the left side of the screen, this halts the screen scroll until you move away from it.

This boss is the reason why I wanted to pick up this game. as soon as an object dies, another one will come up, it's faster to slide into them as it can kill them instantly.

this room had the biggest time save, the current pubished tas did a method where they would kick the chair out of bounds. This ended up being slower as the game takes a bit to confirm that the chair died. a slide kick to the chair has a much faster death.

at this point we are 96 frames ahead.

This stage was a bit difficult to do because the positioning on the bridge to avoid the spotlights was tough to time. touching them is instant death so we dont want to touch them.

for the boss, we want to use the shotgun to get some hits on it, we can save the last bullet and finish the boss with a slide kick. this way we can avoid taking damage from the boss which would waste a bit of time, and be on the right side of the screen as the stage ends.

no additional frames were saved here.

this stage consists of 2 auto scrollers.

the first one I can juggle spears around until the end of the stage. other than that there's not much to say about this room.

this room contains 3 mirror ricks that if you dont kill them, the screen will stop scrolling until they die. I have some fun with them before murdering them.

this stage was censored in the US release, all religious references were removed but the stage plays the exact same way. the gold knife is used because it's does 2 damage, same as the slide.

So to explain a bit on how the quick kill works, we have to understand how it changes cycles. the boss starts out moving up and down on the screen, once you reach the end of the room, it will continue to bounce until it reaches a certain point on the screen, it needs to be on the bottom right while moving upward to start an arch movement above Rick. So how the quick kill is achieved is you notice that I dont move full speed to the boss, and instead pause then walk the rest of the way, this is so the boss wont immediately start it's arch cycle, as it still has a bit of time before it can move downward to position. now while the boss is still in the first phase, hitting it will cause it to freeze for a second until it teleports back into the position it should be at, this allows use to make it miss the arch position, and we can keep hitting it until it's dead.

another thing I found when doing this boss is if you're more to the right of the screen, the cutscene that plays afterwards is actually shorter. this saved quite a bit of time which I really never expected to find such a big improvement to this boss.

at this point, we are now 152 frames ahead.

the longest stage in the game.

The first room is basically just making sure you keep speed and not take any damage to any chairs.

The second room is the only time in this game where you speed can be doubled. walking on the downward slopes makes you go twice the speed you normally go when walking. you also will slow down if you walk on the upward slopes so it's best to slide on them to prevent you from slowing down. about 6 frames were saved in this stage.

in the other water room, getting to a certain point on the right side of the screen will cause Rick to automatically move right and start jumping, when this happens you can avoid taking damage from spikes, so I try to time it just right so Rick can fall into the hole as soon as possible.

in the next room, 3 zombies can be killed but can be resurrected by a witch. the game will prevent screen scrolling after a certain point if you don't kill the witch in time.

in the next room if you kill a zombie, dogs will come to eat the gore. there's also ghosts that will drop skulls on you but you can kill them with 1 or 2 hits.

Plot twist, your girlfriend is a zombie. for this boss, Jennifer will transform back to normal if her health is at some specific values, the transformations do not help save time so it's best to avoid them. due to the way we deal damage to her, we can skip these transitions and deal a quick kill.

we are now 169 frames ahead

probably my favorite music in the entire game. I had a blast dancing to this one.

the stage has enemies that can latch onto you, but if you move the directional pad back and forth, you can get them off of you.

for the boss, I try to attack it as soon as possible. I delay my 2nd slide attack to kill a bubble behind me as he can cause a bit of trouble when going for the quick kill. the way I'm able to do so many slide kicks is because any sort of momentum can allow Rick to do a slide kick, this way when I set up for another slide, I can still be near the boss and do an air kick to further reduce health on it.

we are now 176 frames ahead

this is damage boost the stage.

the flaming guys are the only enemies that you cannot hurt, so doing slides here is pointless. I try to keep as much momentum as I can when passing through the logs and flaming dudes. damage boosting is important so we can do as many slides as possible. I also do an air kick at the very to slightly preserve some speed before the automatic walking script is triggered.

for mozzarella face, the first cycle you have to deal 9 damage to him before he goes back into the ground. The next phases take 8 hits before returning to the ground, and 7 hits for the last cycle, which is nice because input can end as soon as the last slide kick happens.

Finally, we reach 184 frames saved in total.

I want to thank LattMackey for running this game during streams which got me interested in the game series in general. Zallard1 for his great knowledge on Splatterhouse and for telling me about the time save in the Stage 2 boss. And Samsara who was the author of the previous tas, I studied alot of her inputs to figure out what worked best and what worked the least.

Memory: Claiming for judging.

Memory: Updating with 1 frame improvement.

Memory: Updating with 2 frame improvement.

Memory: Optimization is very good, especially after saving some frames that were previously lost to the published run and one additional frame to boot. Definitely appears to be gameplay improvements over the published run.

Entertainment seems fairly solid, some fairly good playarounds and some quick boss fights. I do feel that the current publication did a slightly better job at doing playarounds but this is by no means bad. Audience reception was fairly positive as well.

The publication did a strategy on one of the bosses that could potentially be seen as more entertaining than the run here, however the author of that TAS made no indication that said strategy was an entertainment/speed tradeoff so I see no reason to count it as such. If a future submission wishes to revert to that strategy, they might be able to provided it is labeled as such.

Accepting to Moons as an improvement to [2987] PCE Splatterhouse by Samsara in 12:15.72.

As a note to the publisher, this movie syncs on both the U and J versions and encodes can be published for both as with the current publication.

feos: Pub.

feos: The author asked me to publish the encodes of the Japanese version as the main ones, which would mean the whole publication is supposed to represent the Japanese version, which means we need a movie made on that version instead of the USA version, so I asked the author to make a movie of that version so we could replace the currently submitted movie file with that. I got bored and decided not to wait and asked myself to make that movie file for the Japanese version, so I'm replacing the movie made for the USA version with the movie made for the Japanese version, so it's used in the final publication. I honestly only updated the header, that's all. Also note that I'm publishing encodes of this movie being played on both of these versions anyway. And while the previous publication uses 2 video streams, each representing its own game version, I decided to make 2 separate encode files each representing its own game version, and the version represented is represented in the hard subtitles represented in the encodes of the corresponding versions. But that's already plain and simple, and honestly I think this is stupidly obvious, like, as obvious as what I'm trying to say here is. Also keep in mind I'm not a native English speaker, so give me a break. If there's still something you failed to understand about versions and encodes, just ask away. Why do I suddenly feel as chatty as Samsara used to be in their notes? I guess it's because I'm obsoleting their movie, which alone makes me feel weird. I guess I must shut up already.