Felix the Cat TAS by Randil
This is a 1228 frames (20.47 seconds) improvement over the current run of this game, by Walker Boh.
Technical information:
- Emulator used: FCE Ultra 0.98.16
- Aims for fastest conpletion time.
- Takes damage to save time.
Game desctiption:
Felix the cat is a simple platformer, and there isn't much that needs to be explained. I will, however, give a very brief introduction to the game, so you know what's going on in this run:
The goal in each level is to reach the end of the level before the time runs out. Felix can jump, duck, and also attack. You can also pick up cat-coins in the game, just like coins in Super Mario Bros.
Every 5:th, 15:th, 25:th, etc., coin you pick up, will turn into three milkbottles. These will give you some extra points. Every 10:th coin you pick up, will turn into a heart. If you pick up this heart, you will transform. Each new transformation has a better attack power than the previous.
Besides normal "land-levels", there are also some water levels, boat levels, and flying levels in this game. These don't really need any explanation.
Comparing this run to the current one:
The normal levels (non-boss level) were very hard to improve. The only thing you can do to cut of some time, is to reduce lag, which there really isn't much of. On most levels, I'm probably exactly as fast, or just 1-5 frames, faster than Walker Boh. This is because there isn't anything you can do to move faster. So the real timesaver in this run is the boss fights.
The bosses, on the other hand, were improve quite a lot. By transforming myself once before the boss, and once in the boss' room, I was able to kill all the bosses in less hits. This saved about 2-3 second for every boss, besides the last boss, who was killed about 10 seconds faster than in the current run.
The reason why I get hit before the boss dies, is because if you're still transformed after beating a boss, your hearts (in the top left corner) will count down, wasting several frames.
A few miscellaneous notes:
- In the flying levels, the airplane movies slightly faster than the other forms. This is why I transform into the airplane on the flying levels, even if there's no boss on that level.
- Another optimization thing, is to walk on platforms when they're moving in your direction. This was used as much as possible in this run.
- You can actually become invulnerable to enemy attacks if you attack in mid-air right before you're about to get hit by the enemy. This doesn't save any time, but is quite a nice trick. This is why I sometimes attack without hitting anything, because if I didn't attack, I would get hit by the enemy and die.
- Sometimes the game lag's when a heart turns into three milkbottles. I try to avoid this as much as I can in this run. The lag is usually only 3-4 frames, and it can be avoided by getting the milkbottles of the screen as soon as they appear.
The making of this run:
This run was fairly easy to make, with this being such a straighforward game. Bosses were played with frame advance, to ensure that I hit them as soon as possible. All normal levels were played partially with frame advance, and also on normal speed, on the easier parts.
I used FCEU's "Memory Viewer" function some in this run. I found that the RAM's memory address 0008 tells you your position. This was used to compare strategies, and was a pretty useful tool.
Another tool that I used was Maximus' TAS movie splicer. I used this when I found a mistake in one of the previous levels, but didn't want redo the whole run, so I just redid that specific level, and then copy-pasted the other levels to that movie.
Thanks to:
- Walker Boh, for his run of this game. It was really good for comparison.
- Guybrush, for making the first 2 levels of this game together with me. Me and Guybrush made a WIP of this game a long time ago, and I used that WIP's level 1 and 2 in this movie, because they were so optimized. :)
That's about it, I hope you enjoy this run! And if you don't, at least be happy about that another Famtasia run got obsoleted. :P
Truncated: We already have a published version of this game, and this is faster. If we didn't have a published version this would probably not fare very well... but this is no fault of Randil, so this will be accepted.
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