Submission #802: Randil's NES Circus Charlie in 03:24.37

I will often use the term "game B" in this submission text. "Game B" is "hard mode" on Circus Charlie. Just so you know what it is.

There is no english version of this game, only a japanese version.

And I know that some of you are thinking "Hey, he didn't beat the game, after stage 5 he's back at stage 1 again!". That's correct, but the thing is that after you beat stage 5 all stages start all over again. That's why the completion of stage 5 is accepted as the end of the game.

The goals of this movie:

I will not compare this movie to Phil and Genisto's run simply because that movie plays on another difficulty, which makes it hard to compare the two movies. The stages in this run looks somewhat different than in Phil and Genisto's run.

I tried to find out how to manipulate luck in this game, like making the obstacles appear on different places, but couldn't find out how to do that. Perhaps it's simply not possible to manipulate luck in this game, I don't know. If I could have manipulated luck in this run I could've shaved of at least 3 seconds I think.

I will now comment each individual stage briefly:

Stage 1: On this stage you ride a really cool lion with purlpe eyes. This is a very easy stage, even on game B. Some notes though:

Note #1: Around frame 1200 you will see that I miss a goldbag. Believe me, I tried to take it, but even with frame advance and savestates I found it impossible to do without hitting the burning pot behind it.

Note #2: Around frame 2500 you will notice that I suddenly stop for a few frames. This was done in order to avoid jumping into the firering that's coming towards me. I really tried to prevent this but wasn't able to.

Stage 2: On this stage some monkeys are trying to kill you by walking right into you. This stage is really easy, so I try to be entertaining by being really close to hitting the monkeys. This stage was probably completed as fast as theoretically possible, because the only thing I do in this stage is running forward and jump, and since jumping is exactly as fast as running in this game, I don't see how you can complete this stage any faster.

Stage 3: On this stage you are to jump on balls to the other side. This stage is really easy, and once again I try to do it as entertaining as possible by making very precise jumps and being close to fall off the balls and die. Whenever you jump over a ball, you get 500 points. I try to do this as often as possible.

Stage 4: I... hate... this... stage...This movie has 2027 rerecords, and I can surely say that at least 1000 of those were used on this stage. On game B, this stage is crazy hard. I don't have time to do tricks and get points and stuff, all I focus on in this stage is surviving, since it's extremely easy to fall off the horse.

Note #1: I slow down once on this stage, this was necessary to stay on the horse. I know, it bugs me too, I really tried to avoid it. Really, really.

Stage 5: This is the last stage. This is the stage that I improved the most. While Phil and Genisto falls down three times to catch the new rope, I only fall down once. This saved me quite some time. This stage was generally easy.

This run was done in just one day, to be exact it took me about 4-5 hours to complete it. This run was quite easy to do, except for stage 4 which was crazy hard. I used frame advance with frame counter on for most of the run. Between stages i ran the game on normal speed.

Here are the times for each stage. With "time" I mean from the first frame on the stage that Charlie appears on to the frame with the first "wave animation" (after you finished a stage, Charlie waves his hand) on each stage. The time is measured in frames.

Fun fact: Did you know that Circus Charlie (the character) doesn't have any eyes? If you look carefully, you'll see that Charlie's eyes are always the same colour as the background. Doing all those crazy tricks without having any eyes is really impressive!

I hope you enjoy this run.

/ Randil