Submission #10458: alexheights1's ZXS Mutant Fortress in 12:38.704

A post-apocalyptic Contra clone from 1989. The story is about finding a stolen truck.

You can skip the long loading time with this savestate: UserFiles/Info/639147122952271839 (You may have to rename the file extension to .state to load it.)

Run right. Kill boss. Win game. Like Contra but simpler.

Mutant Fortress is a nicely programmed game that does not lag even with 5 enemies and bullets on screen.

There are 5 enemy slots. Enemies spawn endlessly until all slots are filled. If we defeat an enemy, then a new enemy will spawn immediately. The player is constantly chased by 5 enemies that spawn from random positions, so the game is quite difficult.

There are 3 levels with bosses. The first two bosses are the same but they have different graphics.

Weapons: rifle, flamethrower, laser, rocket, the B.

The player has 3 stats: health, radiation, ammo.

Hazards: mines, beartraps, sandpits, radiation.

Radiation causes damage over time, so we want to avoid it. We start each level with some radiation that slowly reduces our health. It can be stopped by picking up a radiation shield.

Health is refilled between levels, but we can also avoid damage without losing time.

The B can kill everything instantly, so we use that on bosses, except in the 3rd level because it wastes too much time to collect the B.

With random player movements we can manipulate luck so that enemies spawn behind us. We can then safely carry 'the B' all the way to the boss without needing to exhaust the weapon or health on regular enemies.

Regular enemies are automatically deleted when a boss appears. It is not possible to delete enemies faster with our own weapons.

The player can't move left or right during a boss fight, so the last fight may look weird because of that.

It takes 583 frames to get the B in the third level. It takes about 111 frames to defeat the boss with rifle instead of the B. So the rifle route is about 472 frames faster. Laser/flamethrower passes through the boss and does not allow rapid fire like the rifle. Weapon locations are always the same and I have never seen a single lag frame in this amazing game, so I can't think of any way to save time other than some undiscovered glitch or the human element.

You could increase entertainment with different moves or secondary goals like min/max score/jumps, so I am okay if this movie is obsoleted with one that does some secondary goal even if the framecount is the same. This TAS is coincidentally almost minimum score and almost pacifist.

You can spam 'the B' to make enemies die 3 times instead of dying just once. You can glitch into the ground in some sand pits. You can die during boss fight and still finish the level if the boss also dies at the same time. None of these oddities save time.

13657 level 1
19296 use the B
22909 level 2
28571 use the B
32241 level 3
37996 end input

Framecount per level:

Level 1: 5639
Level 2: 5662 (slower because of more sand pits)
Level 3: 5755 (slower because we don't have the B)

1633 HP
106E Ammo
09CB Boss HP

Suggested screenshot frame: 19302 (first boss visible for 1 frame)