Submission #10138: zggzdydp & scrimpeh's NES Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse "Alucard path" in 23:59.612

We're back with another Castlevania 3 movie. This time, it's Alucard's turn to go fast. This run saves 2892 frames, or around 48 seconds over the previous submission thanks to applying current tricks as well as using Alucard's bat form more effectively.

Once again, zggzdydp did the vast majority of input for the run. The run therefore wouldn't exist without him.

Alucard's signature ability is his bat form, which is completely busted for speedrunning. It can rapidly scale high ledges. The bat form normally always costs hearts to use, but by exiting the bat form on the first possible frame, you can exit the bat form with no heart loss. It can also be activated on staircases, which allows you to get off a staircase easily. Finally, the bat form also moves faster than regular walking speed.

The strategy for most levels then becomes to get as many heart drops as possible to maximize the amount of time in the bat form. We are much more aggressive with getting hearts than in the previous run, allowing us to fly for much longer times.

For my money, Alucard is the most difficult of the four characters for a TAS, by a considerable margin. Not only does the bat form have a lot of inertia while easily getting stuck on nearby blocks, but Alucard's attack does low damage and has strange spread-gun like mechanics, which are difficult to optimize. While you can skip the firing animation using crouching, similar to Grant's dagger on J, it doesn't save you from the huge start lag.

Finally, the bat form allows damage clipping through ceilings. You just need to get very close to the ceiling, take damage and morph into a bat. This is used numerous times for shortcuts, including a new shortcut in BLK A-02 that involves clipping into the top margin of the screen.

For all other tricks used, refer to the other submissions of the game for more detailed descriptions. I don't have as much to write about each individual stage as for the Sypha run, so here are some particular things I want to point out:

Input Copied from the Sypha run

We use a scroll glitch here to delete the end point of a staircase to make it to Alucard early. This was one of the first found uses of the scroll glitch.

Near the end of the level, we use a bat clip to go through the ceiling. You need to use the bat form to get close enough to the ceiling for it to work, but since we're waiting for the skeleton anyway, it works out. The number and position of the blocks Frankenstein drops is RNG and can significantly affect lag.

A new, much faster strategy is used for the second room. Otherwise, this stage really benefits from flying more with the bat. For the BLK-7 trio, we once again switch to Trevor for his higher damage output. The cyclops could be killed faster, but this strategy makes the ghost spawn in the optimal position, which saves more time overall. Similarly, the demon is killed near the center of the screen to make all the fragments disappear faster. This makes the fight end only 20 - 25 frames faster, because you're waiting quite long for the diagonal and vertical fragments to disappear anyway.

The bat form is used to stay near the top of the screen to reduce lag in the autoscroller. Depending on what frame you transform on, you may get different lag. In BLK A-02, we use a damage boost into the ceiling of the level to get to the staircase faster.

For Dracula, we use a similar strategy to the Sypha TAS by creating a raised platform in the middle of the arena. However, we actually walk forward slightly first to spawn the floor in the arena. This is to prevent Dracula 2's blood puke from wrapping around the ceiling, which would cause a lot of lag. This saves around 25 - 30 frames overall. The raised platform is then used in Dracula 3 to constantly hit him with crosses.

Dracula 3 can only be hit by one source of damage at a time and then has a long invulnerability time after each hit, so we need to stack our damage sources to hit him on the same frame. Input ends while two crosses are still out, which eventually finish Dracula off.

Finally note that the orb will either spawn left on the raised platform or actually drop down to the floor below, depending on the final subpixel position of one of Dracula 2's fragments. By killing Dracula 2 on different frames, we can influence the subpixel position to make sure the orb spawns on the left side, which allows our early input end.

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Excellent run! Loved the glitches and love the amazing time saves!

Accepting over [3357] NES Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse "Alucard path" by zggzdydp in 24:47.73.

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