Submission #1001: Acmlm's NES Quarth in 01:01.45

Nintendo Entertainment System
baseline
FCEU 0.98.12
3687
60
3184
Unknown
Quarth (J).nes
Submitted by Acmlm on 3/8/2006 3:36:05 AM
Submission Comments
  • Recorded with FCEU 0.98.15
  • Fastest time to clear the hardest level
  • 2 players
  • Luck manipulation
I've wanted to do this run long ago (soon after my first Tetris run) and tried it a few times back then (2:36 and 1:43), but I finally got around to do it again, with a large improvement over the old ones.
Quarth might be best described as a mix of a shooter and Tetris. You control a ship that moves horizontally at the bottom, and shoot incoming blocks or groups of blocks (adding tiles to them) to give them a rectangular shape and make them disappear. Each level scrolls at an increasing speed until you reach the end, and you lose if a block reaches the line floating above the ship.
In this run, 2 players unite in tag mode to clear the hardest level (9) together. (a full run of all levels would just be the same thing 10 times, since only the autoscrolling speed changes)
Luck is heavily abused all the way through to only get the simpler block sequences, saving a lot of time since I can push the scrolling (holding Up) more often. Which buttons I press, when and how long (at any time) all affect what I get, but it's still hard to get exactly what I want, for a few reasons:
  • Luck manipulation might be needed while I'm moving and shooting, which gets in the way
  • There's at least a few dozen possible block sequences, and some are bigger than others
  • I can't see what I get until it scrolls in
What I got might not be quite optimal, but still made a huge difference ... the run would have been about twice as long without this, and you'll easily notice how much harder it normally is if you try the game by yourself.

adelikat: Quality movie, entertaining game, and good response from voters. Accepting for publication.
Last Edited by on 1/1/2022 6:13 PM
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