Hiya!
My 2020 TAS of Hammerin' Harry is something that I've remained proud of, even as I drifted away from the hobby. When Colin and Mike kindly invited me back to give them a hand with finishing up our old Tonma WIP, I felt a sort of compulsion to look back into this game that I truly felt I had squeezed everything out of six years ago. It was pretty surprising to me that I found anything at all, much less nearly three seconds of improvement! Admittedly, almost all of my timesave here consists of things that I stumbled upon completely by accident, so it's not entirely a testament to my skill, but, well, it is what it is. Glad to be back.
In stage 2, we originally had to waste a little time here waiting for this elevator to lower down enough to let us jump onto it.
However, in the course of testing out some unrelated ideas, I noticed that this elevator became reachable much sooner if we jumped here on the platform below it -
Apparently, doing this scrolls the screen up just enough to cause it to spawn ahead of time, even though it remains out of view; and bonking our head on the ceiling stops us from having to delay jumping onto the ladder. This saves 19 frames.
(note: it could have saved 23 frames, but this wouldn't affect the run's length overall.)
I also use a different motion to fall off of this ladder at the end, owing to a better understanding of their mechanics. It saves one frame.
In stage 3, I take a slightly different approach to fighting this miniboss. I trade killing him a few moments later for being able to spend more time moving to the right, which is what should be the priority in this situation. It's faster by two frames.
Now for the big guns. In stage 4, a different RNG enemy pattern causes two of these secretaries spawn at once when we enter the room, which is relevant since you need to kill nine in total to open the elevator door. It saves 40 frames!
This came as a surprise to me, because, to be completely honest, I had no idea this game had RNG of any sort. Everything is basically completely deterministic no matter what you do. However, this was a research failure on the part of six-years-ago-me, because this is very much a known thing in the RTA speedrunning community for the game. It's just so negligibly important that I missed it being mentioned. It turns out there's exactly one other place in the game where RNG has an impact, for the purposes of this run -
How far left or right these yellow guys spawn at the start of stage 3. That, as far as I can tell, is it. There are some other places where things might show up in a somewhat different spot, but not in a way that matters to us or that is very visually apparent.
Anyways, after learning of this, I did my best to trawl through videos of the game and test for all the possible enemy spawns in these two spots myself, to figure out if I could save any more time. Sadly, I could not! What I chanced upon seems to be the best available setup in both stages. It's definitely possible that I missed something, and maybe you could have the second yellow guy in stage 3 show up in a spot where you can kill him with a single jump directly over the boxes, or get the red guy in stage 4 to be further to the right without affecting the secretary spawns, but if you can, I wasn't able to brute force it into place, and there exists no video of anyone getting either to happen online. Also, if you got both of those things to miraculously occur, it would save a grand total of three frames. So, for now, I'm satisfied with saying that this is the best we can do.
That 40f we shaved off also opens us up to something else earlier in the stage, though. Because all the secretaries after the first one spawn on a fixed global timer, we have a little leeway to waste time, and we can use this to do more lag reduction here than in the last run by turning back and forth however we so please.
Since the secretary timer doesn't advance during lag frames, this is our best option for improvement. I manage to cut out 19 lag frames, bringing our total secretary-related timesave up to 59 frames. Very nearly a full second saved in this one stage, but not quite... how sad.
Oh, actually, I forgot to mention it before, but I also drop through this platform at the start of the level a bit more optimally, saving another two frames.
61 frames total... hm, that still feels off, doesn't it?
Well, good news. Completing the stage with an extra second on the timer actually adds a frame to the countdown at the end, rounding us out to a perfect 60. A whole second! Yay! Good job, team.
In stage 5, I ground away at reducing the lag on this screen for quite a while, reaching the next area a whopping zero frames faster. I mean, there's less lag now, at least.
In the water area, I do the same, actually taking off six frames of real time. Better result.
I also skip grabbing the medicine that comes out of the breakable box here, because damage boosting just isn't necessary for the final boss. All you have to do is jump to avoid him hitting you, it doesn't lose any time at all. Feel kind of silly for missing that the first time around. 21 frames.
Now, for my third bit of happenstance. On the final boss, there is (apparently!) a moment 37+10n frames after he takes a hit on the ground where a downwards hammer smash will deal double damage. This means that by throwing out the third hit 29 frames later than would otherwise seem optimal, he just dies. This saves 52 frames.
Frankly, I have no clue why this is the case. It's baffling to imagine that it's an intentional mechanic, but there's nothing special going on with his animation on those frames, there's nothing unique about his state, the fact that it needs a half a second to start up but then stays perfectly consistent every 10 frames after that, I just don't know what quirk of coding could lead to something like this. I accidentally cloned way more frames than necessary while I was splicing the fight back into place, and that's the only reason I ever found out about it. Fate, perhaps? Who knows.
Anyways, with all said and done, it's a 161 frame improvement. Not the flashiest changes, but I had a lot of fun getting back into things after so long. Hope you enjoyed!
Darkman425: Claiming for judging.
Darkman425: Hey, a 161 frame improvement is still an improvement. Reading over the submission notes show that these were also hard fought improvements with the discovery of RNG being a factor in this game at all. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard as an improvement to [4130] NES Hammerin' Harry by Bloopiero in 06:45.90.
despoa: Processing...