Little Nemo has had several previous submissions. The current one follows Randil's run exactly up to level 8, where it uses a new found strat involving the morning star to boost through the level. This saves about 13 seconds over the published run.

Game objectives

  • Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.2
  • Completes the game as quickly as possible

Comments

Just another update run by me. : )

Stage by stage comments

Dreams 1-7

Exactly the same as Randil, feel free to skip to level 8 at about 17:55

Dream 8

Here you'll start seeing the morning star trick used. When the morning star fires it recoils you in the opposite direction. If you then jump on just the right frame without pressing any direction, you will fly a fairly long distance at high speed.
In the first area, it actually only has 2 uses since you need the reptile to get up the big tree, and the narrow tunnel and nemo's jumping mechanics make getting the first one quicker. It turns out the first boss in this area uses a slightly different pattern, which is a couple of frames faster then the older pattern.
In the second part of the stage, the boost makes getting to the lizard significantly quicker. Thereafter the area is completed essentially identical to Randil. The boss here has the same pattern and is beaten with Randil's original inputs.
The final part is where most of the time is saved. Nemo has a mechanic where after he lands from a jump he is stuck in a crouched animation for a few frames. This means jumping as little as possible, which is what the morning star boost allows for, adds up to saving significant time. For the final boss, he ended up having a pattern that was about a second slower then in Randil's run, the only way I could modify this I could find is by dying, which is far too slow. Overall however still time is saved in the final section from where I leave the bee to the last input.

Other comments

This is another run of simply catching up to strats already known from the RTA world. This trick, according to Jokaah, comes from a Japanese runner called visan. I get the sense that TAS is quite far behind the RTA world in a lot of ways, but this could simply be because there are fewer TASers.
A possible improvement to this run would be to find a way to implement another new trick involving zipping. I couldn't find a use for it, since it only moves Nemo to the left.

Truncated: Judging...

Truncated: Looking good! Accepting as improvement to previous movie.
fsvgm777: Processing.

TASVideoAgent
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Oh, this is exciting. I can't watch now, but I've been waiting for a Little Nemo improvement for a while. Gonna watch and vote as soon as I can. //Pretty nice. I liked the new movement in Stage 8. Yes vote.
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Nice improvement! Yes vote from me. :) If I am allowed to think out loud a little, I do however suspect that rest of the TAS could use some improvement as well. But it's very hard for me to tell how much time could potentially be saved, and admittedly I don't have many suggestions except the good old "optimize movements". My gut feeling tells me that maybe 1 to 10 seconds could be squeezed out, probably somewhere around 5 (but hopefully more!). Aglar managed to squeeze out 10 frames from level 1 some time ago: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=213048#213048 But as I responded then, this game is not edit friendly, so any improvements found are hard to edit in, basically forcing you to redo the TAS from that point. This also means that small improvements might get lost in future RNG and lag. Anyway, that's just a suspicion from my part, and I truly don't blame you for not doing it from scratch I also read the SDA post about the wall zip with delight, and thought that it should have a huge impact on the TAS. But looking through the TAS now again, just like you concluded, it might not be so easy to implement since it only moves you to the left... But again, nice job indeed! You should totally do Mickey Mousecapade next: http://tasvideos.org/842M.html
Alyosha
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Randil wrote:
Nice improvement! Yes vote from me. :) If I am allowed to think out loud a little, I do however suspect that rest of the TAS could use some improvement as well. But it's very hard for me to tell how much time could potentially be saved, and admittedly I don't have many suggestions except the good old "optimize movements". My gut feeling tells me that maybe 1 to 10 seconds could be squeezed out, probably somewhere around 5 (but hopefully more!). Aglar managed to squeeze out 10 frames from level 1 some time ago: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=213048#213048 But as I responded then, this game is not edit friendly, so any improvements found are hard to edit in, basically forcing you to redo the TAS from that point. This also means that small improvements might get lost in future RNG and lag. Anyway, that's just a suspicion from my part, and I truly don't blame you for not doing it from scratch I also read the SDA post about the wall zip with delight, and thought that it should have a huge impact on the TAS. But looking through the TAS now again, just like you concluded, it might not be so easy to implement since it only moves you to the left... But again, nice job indeed! You should totally do Mickey Mousecapade next: http://tasvideos.org/842M.html
I did try to improve the movement of the other parts of level 8, with no success (I ended up just patching back in your original inputs), so the odds that I could improve the previous levels seemed rather low. I did look briefly at mickey mousecapades, but I couldn't even get the first snakes in the first room into the starting position you got, despite many different combinations of resets and start presses. Maybe I will return to it after doing Flashback.
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Doing updates of old runs is cool. If I'm not mistaken, that's what Randil used to do anyway (especially with storybook games like Uninvited). I haven't gotten a chance to check this run yet, but I wanted to have a little off-topic comment about Mickey Mousecapades. In the discussion for that movie, somebody suggested a major route change in the first stage. I just wanted to make sure you'd seen those posts before going too deep into a run of that game.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
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Looks nicely done. Nightmare Land is the most interesting part of the game anyway.
mklip2001
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Ok, I finally got to see this. I get a gut feeling like you should still be able to boost with the morning star a little more, especially in the third nightmare level (instead of riding the lizard the whole way). But it's quite a bit faster than the published run, and it's plenty entertaining. Good job!
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Alyosha
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mklip2001 wrote:
Ok, I finally got to see this. I get a gut feeling like you should still be able to boost with the morning star a little more, especially in the third nightmare level (instead of riding the lizard the whole way). But it's quite a bit faster than the published run, and it's plenty entertaining. Good job!
Do you mean the first nightmare level? He is hardly used in the third. I tested all the possible options I believe. Trying to get the second available lizard is definitely not faster. It may look like it should be faster to dismount the lizard after climbing the tree, but what prevents this is the time it takes for the dismount to occur and the fact that Nemo stops for several frames after each jump (while the lizard maintains his speed.) The dismount at the end does not cost any time. The combination of these factors makes keeping the lizard I believe 20 frames faster if I remember right. Also regarding Mickey Mousecapades, I see the trick that needs to be done, but I can't get the same (and fastest) pattern of the snakes in the very first room, I wonder if it might be emulation differences.
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I meant the third, with the spiked ceiling. I was curious why you didn't ditch the lizard for that part. I think you basically answered that question though.
Used to be a frequent submissions commenter. My new computer has had some issues running emulators, so I've been here more sporadically. Still haven't gotten around to actually TASing yet... I was going to improve Kid Dracula for GB. It seems I was beaten to it, though, with a recent awesome run by Hetfield90 and StarvinStruthers. (http://tasvideos.org/2928M.html.) Thanks to goofydylan8 for running Gargoyle's Quest 2 because I mentioned the game! (http://tasvideos.org/2001M.html) Thanks to feos and MESHUGGAH for taking up runs of Duck Tales 2 because of my old signature! Thanks also to Samsara for finishing a Treasure Master run. From the submission comments:
Shoutouts and thanks to mklip2001 for arguably being the nicest and most supportive person on the forums.
Alyosha
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Oh the spiked ceiling, yeah you get killed by the spikes about half way through trying to use the boost right from the beginning. The lizards ability/glitch to simply jump straight through the spikes is much more advantageous.
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Can we get an temp encode of this please. Im on mobile and cant view it in an emulator.
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Where is the temp encode please. We need one badly. Please make one asap.
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Dude, be polite. Nobody is required to do anything to help you out here. If the encoders are busy, then they're busy; you can always watch the TAS in an emulator.
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Spikestuff
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Derakon wrote:
Dude, be polite. Nobody is required to do anything to help you out here. If the encoders are busy, then they're busy; you can always watch the TAS in an emulator.
You're asking a lot. http://tasvideos.org/forum/realsearch.php?search_author=RStrongfox
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Spikestuff wrote:
Derakon wrote:
Dude, be polite. Nobody is required to do anything to help you out here. If the encoders are busy, then they're busy; you can always watch the TAS in an emulator.
You're asking a lot. http://tasvideos.org/forum/realsearch.php?search_author=RStrongfox
Hm, I thought that nick was familiar. Oh well. Maybe with repeated hammering some daylight will eventually make it through their skull.
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Oh well it was worth a shot. I guess nobody cares to encode. I for one can not watch this on mobile because the way to watch it in emulator does not work for mobile.
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You're impatient and the world does not revolve around you. Wait until the run is published.
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Post subject: Movie published
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This movie has been published. The posts before this message apply to the submission, and posts after this message apply to the published movie. ---- [2830] NES Little Nemo: The Dream Master by Randil & Alyosha in 21:53.29