Submission #1669: Randil's NES Kid Niki 2 in 09:06.88

This run is 900 frames faster than the currently published run of this game. Improvements come mostly from picking up speed shoes in the last levels, but also faster boss fights and overall optimized movements. More details can be found under the "Improvements" section below.

"Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 2" is the sequal to the game "Kid Niki", and was never released outside Japan. The game is very simple, you make your way through 8 levels, and meet a boss at the end of each level, except the last level which is full of bosses.

Your weapon is a shuriken, which you can attack with both horizontally and vertically. You can also transform to animals in this game, if you have picked up at least one fruit. This is however generally useless, except if you want to reach places you can't normally reach, like when I pick up the speed shoes on the last level.

You can pick up something called speed shoes in this game. This shoes will increase your speed from 1 pixel per frame to 1.5 pixels per frame, which is very nice. I pick these up as early as possible on every level.

The first 7 levels have only been improved by 149 frames in total. But although they haven't been dramatically improved in terms of time, I think they look a lot better anyway. For example, I don't take any damage unless it saves time to do so. This means that this time I don't take any damage on the level 2 boss, level 3 boss or the level 5 boss, since it didn't actually save me any time.

Some normal TAS-tricks that I didn't use in the published run have also been used this time, such as jumping down ledges, increasing my vertical momentum when I reach the end of the ledge. This saved quite a few frames at the end of level 7.

I kill more enemies and pick up more items, making me finish the game with a score of 40 700, compared to 35 750 in the published run.

This game is very easy to TAS, especially if you're using Memory Watch. If you attack when in air, your speed won't be affected, regardless of if you're attacking, up, down, left or right. I haven't encountered any lag at allin this game, so that isn't anything to worry about either. The only thing I had to focus on on the levels was sticking to the highest possible score goal and trying to make things as entertaining as possible without loosing time.

Boss fights were really easy to TAS time this around, compared to the published run. By looking at the RAM-address for the boss' invulnerebility time, I knew exactly when to hit him without having to test my way through. Besides this, I hit the boss on the first possible frame. All bosses have a longer invulnerebility time before the last hit, that's why I hesitate before dealing the final blow.

I doubt that I can improve this significantly unless a new trick or shortcut is found. The game is just so easy to TAS that there isn't much room for creativity. This game is very edit-friendly though, so if something is found it will probably just be edited in. Well, enjoy the run! :)

NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots of this movie and placed them here. Here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.

adelikat: Accepting for publication as an improvement to the published movie.

adelikat: Processing.