Remember ALF TAS? It's back! Intolerable.
This run saves 6.7 seconds over NitroGenesis's TAS by doing more than is necessary and way more than this game deserves. So, without further ado, let's launch this furball into the sun... er, moon? Whatever.
Overview
- Emulator: BizHawk 2.11.1 (core: Genplus-gx)
- Firmware/BIOS: SMS BIOS 1.3 (USA, Europe) [SHA-1: c315672807d8ddb8d91443729405c766dd95cae7]
- Goal: Get rid of Alf (beat the game)
- Uses intentional deaths & luck manipulation
What Now, ALF?
This time, we're getting LUCKY! The cat. Because it's faster. Also, we're getting lucky! For dumb reasons. Because it's faster.
Cat Route
Once again, we grab the cat on our way thru the kitchen in order to chase off the rat in the basement. This avoids us having to deathwarp coming out of the caves for the 1st time. You see, in the old catless route, prior to ladder skip, we would do a 2nd deathwarp to get from the right side of the house to the left, which would make it decidely faster than the cat route by a full second. But ever since ladder skip, we don't earn enough lives to allow that, so cat route it is. Now, since we have extra lives to spare...
darbian deathwarp
Coming back from the swim, there's a random chance for the agent to spawn on the right side of the living room (and even slimmer chance for a fast one). We can jump to hug the right edge and turn to get a quick death out of the house.
Bat Handling
We've saved as much as we can via reroute, so now we need to get crafty. The bats in the cave have a regular respawn behavior. A new bat will spawn in when one leaves the screen, so there are always two in play. However, the direction and speed at which they fly off from a salami whack is quasi-random. The rng counter advances for every hit, and it's possible to hit the same bat multiple times before it goes off-screen. Each whack is a minor frame loss, but that's acceptable as long as we can manipulate the spawn of the last bat to be in position to kill us immediately after we collect our prize.
Lag Reduction
There's quite a bit of noticable load lag in this game, particularly on enemy spawns. This lag is incurred when enemies load in, but additionally, when enemies reload going in the opposite direction. This pattern can be seen with enemies that normally spawn from either side of the screen, depending on rng. The obvious course of action is to manip the rng to either make enemies respawn in the same direction or prevent the spawn entirely.
Streets
The agent spawns can be prevented, but not the biker spawns, so we keep those moving left. But, the main source of lag on the streets is hidden in the 2nd deathwarp. By not scrolling the screen to the right coming out of the shop, we prevent the agent from fully loading in (guess), and avoid a 0.5 second phantom time loss.
Air & Space
Jet flight patterns are normally not a problem, but we can nudge a little to get them flying in the same direction to avoid the lag. However, once we leave the atmosphere, the lag situation becomes a bit more nebulous. There's a ~15 frame load spike at the moon which is unavoidable, but the rest just happens here and there depending on the weather. In this run, lag was minimized to around 1 frame every 11 seconds using manual inputs, which is good enough IMO. For reference, this effort saves ~10 frames over the previous TAS.
Around the House
In certain rooms (really just the living room and kitchen), an agent can randomly spawn, causing a notable lag spike as they load in. In these cases, the approach is to delay by frames before entering the room in order to nudge the rng and delay/prevent the spawn. This is only done as needed and generally saves only a few frames over the entire run, but it's worth mentioning.
Anything else?
- Saved 8 frames in the water using more optimal movement to grab the treasure.
- Sacrificed 5 frames to do glitched Alf walk after the darbian deathwarp. Totally worth it!
Summary
Time Gains (approx.)
- cat -1.80s
- deathwarp -1.95s
- caves -1.75s
- lag reduction -1.15s
Potential Improvements
- More lag frames to trim? Some seems unavoidable, like the 5 frame load spike in the 2nd street trip. Some seems coincidental, like the 6 frames of lag accrued in the space ascent. There's probably way more that's marginal and tougher to identify.
- While the manipulated final spawns in the caves are optimal, these areas should not be considered fully optimized, at least not the 2nd trip. However, the spawn manips are non-trivial, so any lag or incidental delays (due to extra salami whacks) are considered secondary.
Acknowledgments
- Credit to both ALF TASers, Twisted_Eye & NitroGenesis, for indirectly introducing me to this game and thus fueling my madness.
- Praise to the realtime speedrunners for all the inspiration. Certainly darbian, for obvious reasons, but also to runners like LadyErianna who always be ALFing.
Challenger: Claiming for judging.
Challenger: Nice to see another improvement to this game, bringing Lucky back, handling the weird lag behavior and some small gameplay optimization.
Accepting over [4209] SMS ALF by NitroGenesis in 04:52.39.
"Happy! Lucky! For all of you!" (Quoting a catchphrase from one anime whose is one of my favorites, though this is a mere coincidence)
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