- Completed as quickly as possible
- Takes damage to save time
- Uses death as a shortcut
- Abuses programming errors
Blaster Master - Enemy Below looks, sounds, and feels like a fanmade version of that top-notch NES platformer, Blaster Master, but, believe it or not, it is a bona fide legitimate sequel on the Game Boy Color put forth by Sunsoft. The game cannot compare to its predecessor, but nevertheless it is a good attempt to succeed its glorius first-half, and there are in fact some improvements to the game, including a number of secret weapons to make the game easier (all avoided in this movie, but, hey, you can replace the grenades with a shotgun for one!).
Storywise, basically, well, bad guys reappear and they recreate their worlds, and Jason and his big ol' tank Sophia are called back in to wipe them out all over again. SOME of the bosses are new, and the level layouts are all new, but otherwise a very, very large amount of the game will be pleasantly nostalgic, from the music being the same and gameplay being just about the same. The tank is a little clunkier than before (making icy Area 6 a real pain), but even all the little enemies are back, and sometimes with new tricks.
TWO MAJOR DIFFERENCES in this game:
1. You're given unlimited continues, but only one life per continue--each death takes you to the Area's first entrypoint or to the Area's checkpoint if you passed it. This provides some excellent shortcuts, and, in all, 20 DEATHS are used. Whew.
2. The bad news is that to get to the boss catacombs you have to explore the other catacombs in the Area for a key (two keys in Areas 6, 7, and 8). This considerably adds to the movie's length, but how does this movie end up being shorter than the NES BM's TAS?
Glitches
One thing that makes this game more fun to TAS than the NES version is the ability to do some glitches! Using these simple little lapses in programming that are unable to be reproduced on a gameboy without screwing up your d-pad, I was able to skip Areas 2 and 7 entirely, save for having to travel through 2 to get to 3 and 8.
Pressing left and right at the same time will cause the tank to flip upside down, like as if you were walking on the ceiling using Wall 2. This can lead to some faster falling thanks to the altered bounding box, but more importantly, when used with Hover or Wall 1/2, you can, in select locations, glitch through a wall or ceiling for a big ol' shortcut! I also found out that while you are crawling over a block using Wall 1, there is ONE frame where Jason can jump out of Sophia, leading to a couple of interesting uses in Area 8 when combined with the left+right glitch.
One other glitch I found at just the right time is that you can enter Sophia while on a ladder. This allowed me to not get killed by a worm or lose a lot of time going around it! Yay!
Oh, and for those of you who think that the BM glitch of taking damage to temporarily walk on water is here, sorry, all of the instant death squares are treated as solid damage squares in this game.
Area by Area notes
Area 2: Those blue arrows prevent the tank from driving forward--he needs the Engine upgrade retrieved, conveniently from the boss of the area, a snake-like creature that would've been tough to TAS-fight. Fortunately, Jason, I guess, comes with an engine upgrade. Unfortunately, the drop is too far. Fortunately, by using the L+R glitch, I fool the game into letting Jason out of the tank while on the arrows! Great shortcut right there.
Area 3: Hover, gained from the boss here, is one of the only stats not carried over through death, so while it's always useful to stop upward momentum so that I can jump again faster, it's time consuming to grab hover points, so this only happens when I absolutely need to grab hover.
Area 4: Yes I needed to backtrack after getting the key; doing a continue would take just as long to get back there AND I wouldn't have any hover--Later, it took a lot of tries to be able to hover onto that ledge, but that cool looking timesaver gets followed up with slow moving and jumping because of Jason's inflexibility. I seriously can't do the next parts any faster, sorry.
Area 5: The tank DOES kinda get scooted around by the corners of blocks like Jason does, but it loses time to do so, while Jason actually gains time from it. --Also, I just happened to pick up some homing missiles, and didn't find out until later that they actually stayed with me after death, so I occasionally use them to pop a couple baddies. Jus' cause.
Area 6: This place just plain sucks. It's very difficult to optimize this area's icy floors, but thankfully the ice inside the catacombs is a bit more forgiving.
Area 7: This Area sucks even MORE do to the doors transporting you around seemingly randomly. Thankfully, I don't have to come anywhere near here!
Area 8: Yes, I had to get the hovers, otherwise glitching isn't possible.
Other notes
There are 7 secret items in the game which I avoid...I wonder what they're like?
...Okay, I'll admit, this movie is improvable, I discover, after rewatching at the very end after getting the fullest grip on the game. However, except for one possible 100 frame improvement in Area 6, nearly all of the other improvements put together would only yield about 30 frames of movie, and none of the errors are even visible to the viewer. And we all know how fun desyncing is upon hex-editting, so they are still there in the movie, one stray frame of lag at a time.
But I'm happy with the movie altogether, and hope you will be too. Enjoy!
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