Submission #1175: nesrocks's NES The Battle of Olympus in 10:40.78

9:12 (or 33064 frames) improvement over previous published movie.

Why so much faster? because of 2 things: left+right and skipping the sandals.

Left+right allows you to run really fast to the right. The memory address $0053 shows the character's horizontal speed.
Normal speed limits are 24 when going to the right, and 232 (meaning -24) when going left. But if you hold left+right while your speed is higher than 16, it will increase by 2 points every frame, without stopping at 24. The maximum speed while going to the right is 127. The maximum speed going left is 128 (means -128).
So, if you're at 127 and press right (adding 1) or left+right (adding 2), you'll imediatelly change directions. This was abused all the time.

Finding ways to get through the game without the sandals wasn't trivial. I had to quite often step on walls or get damage from enemies to get that extra pixel higher. It also resulted on a different route on some levels, comparing to Arc's run.

Left+right also allowed to go through a wall in Tartarus (the later rocky level).

Up+down was used at a point on the last level to break the way the staircase works. The trick works on any staircase, and it can result in screen zipping, depending on the position. Unfortunatelly, it was only found to be usefull at that part.

Another trick: to avoid the screen scrolling when i reach the edge of it, i just have to keep jumping. This is usefull to be able to push the side of the screen as if it were a wall, so i can use left+right to go left too.

Collecting olives was faster at the forest, right after going through the Hydra. I didn't collect before because death results in losing half the collected olives.

The Graeae (red wizards) may seem sloppy. That's because they can only be hit after they fully materialize (while they are blinking they can't be hit). Also, the only constraint is the moment the last one dies.

Also, while calling the pegasus, it wasn't always possible to get on it without a hoping or 2 (or 3). That's because without sandals i couldn't go high enough. Suprisingly, when geting on it without hoping wasn't possible, it didn't matter how many hops I did, as long as I called the pegasus as soon as possible. So, it was faster to sometimes hop 2 or 3 times than hoping once (by waiting 1 or 2 frames to call it).

All in all I tried to make the run very varied instead of doing the mandatory repetitive tasks always in the same manner (hitting bosses, collecting olives).

How to improve? Better olive catching (good luck with that), and on the first half of the movie, I didn't choose which direction to exit through doors, and also I didn't use a technique to change directions faster, consisting in stabbing (to change speed to 0) and imediatelly jumping, to allow to change speed value. This avoids having to decrease the speed by walking. Also, when going to the side of the screen (a door), the entering animation can be skipped by jumping at a certain frame. Most of these were only used on the second half of the movie. If all these are perfectly optimized it may improve the movie by about 6 seconds.

I hope I didn't spoil everything in the run, and you can find a suprise or two :)

I wanna thank Bisqwit for help testing tricks, optimization techniques, hex-editing and encouragement. Also Morrison for encouragement. Various tricks described by Bisqwit: Battle of Olympus Tricks The left+right effect seem to have been first noticed on these boards by Zero7. Thanks go to him for pointing it out!

NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots of this movie and placed them here. Here goes!