From Wikipedia:
Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, known as Batman of the Future: Return of the Joker in Europe, is a scrolling beat 'em up video game developed by Kemco and released by Ubi Soft for the Game Boy Color, PlayStation and Nintendo 64 in 2000 and 2001. The game is based on the animated film of the same name, which in turn was based on the TV series Batman Beyond. Players act as the new Batman Terry McGinnis, who takes over the position of the retired Bruce Wayne and fights against the Jokerz gang led by the recently revived Joker. Throughout the game, Batman fights the villain's cronies, who steal tech components from various laboratories and corporations in Gotham City. Joker uses them to take control of a missile-shooting satellite, which he plans to destroy the entire city with.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: BizHawk 2.11
- Takes damage to save time
- Plays on Normal Difficulty
- Uses a patch
Patch
On every emulator, this game runs way too fast, and I mean it runs at double the speed it should be. In order to get around this I used a patch for the game that forces the gameplay to be capped at 30fps to make it closer to how the game would behave on console (the menus in the game are still too fast but nothing I can do about it).
Without the patch, the game would look like this:
I'll replace this link with something more permanent later.
Comments
Stage 1
We start with using the Defensive suit as one attack on it does an absurd amount of damage that basically makes it the fastest suit in the game. I guess you know what they say: a good offense is a good defense.
So for this game, doing the crouch move while jumping for some reason makes Batman move very fast, and this will be the main movement for the game.
The game can only have two enemies on screen at a time, so fighting enemies fast is important to keep the spawn cycles going.
In the room before the boss fight, there is a despawn we can do where we prevent a 3rd enemy from spawning and can reach the door quickly. It's very tricky however and seemingly requires careful movement and camera positioning.
Seemingly the boss of this level has always started with the stomp move on Emulator, but rarely does it on the first move on console. At least according to the RTA community. Also when you do the elbow attack on a boss or enemy while they are in an attack animation, you will do two hits on them instead of one.
Stage 2
This stage doesn't have much going on. The room before the boss once again has another despawn move where we prevent a brown minotaur from spawning. As for the boss fight, some enemies will take a high or low amount of damage per hit, I made it so I did all high hits on the boss so he will go down before doing an attack pattern. Usually after 4-5 hits, bosses will automatically go into an attack animation.
Stage 3
Shortest stage in the game as basically all the enemies can be skipped with the sneak ability. Not much to note here.
State 4
We get the nimble suit, and I had discovered if you glide to the edge of platforms, you get an insane amount of speed, sadly this doesn't have very many use cases so it's only shown off here.
Stage 5
The RNG in the game is determined as soon as each level starts, meaning I choose to manipulate the key for the door in the first room to spawn at the enemy rather than in a box. It Also means for the roulette, I pick the far right room to have the boss fight in.
The Twin boss fight doesn't do anything as you just have to destroy the machine which is very easy to do.
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Dropping this. I'm a little burnt out right now. I thought this patching would have been simple, but it just isn't running.
nymx: Claiming for judging. (Found out that Windows 7 once agained failed me. Now using Windows 11).
nymx: After realizing that it was my OS that caused this failure before, it's no wonder I've been wearing myself out trying to figure this crap out. Well, I have already reviewed this from before, but it appears that this was sync verified by InputEvelution after I dropped it. So...my analysis is this: Compared against a speedrun, I only see that the differences is mostly precision timing and knowing ahead of time where action is needed. Other than that...this is a very well optimized run, in every aspect, leaving the human effort behind by roughly 1 1/2 minutes. So basically, this looks to be a perfected speedrun.
Accepting to "Standard".
McBobX: Processing...