About the TAS
- Emulator used: Snes9X v1.43+ v9"
- Played on the hardest difficulty
- Aims for fastest time without taking damage
- Used cheat engine to monitor memory addresses for character x,y and boss health.
About the game
Super Turrican is an action platform game extremely similar to the Contra series (the last level is almost a direct rip off of the old NES Contra games). It's a very fast paced game with a nice soundtrack. I chose to make a TAS of it because of the difficulty of the game, the action involved and the fast fluid movements. I chose to take no damage out of personal taste. The reason behind this is that it is in my opinion, that the run is more entertaining seeing a difficult game being beaten without getting hit, it shows mastery of the game. Also, taking damage wouldn't save too much time in this game as you lose momentum and get knocked back when hit. There are a couple of instances where it would help slightly like getting hit mid air to reach a platform but it isn't anything significant and wouldn't be any more entertaining than what I have already done.
A few notes about the mechanics of the game
- You can only use the morph ball technique as long as you still have power for it, underneath your life bar. You move much faster with it, so obviously I try to use it every chance I get.
- If you get hit while using the morph ball, most enemies will make you bounce back and you cannot give any input until it has bounced a couple of times. The advantage to this is that you can be shot through enemies since very few things can hurt you in morph ball form, I used this a couple of times to move through enemies blocking a path, so there may be a couple of times where I move back to touch an enemy so that I can be launched through the ones ahead of me.
- The Turrican is equipped with a beam that can freeze enemies, it can be used infinitely and sometimes it even allows me to kill enemies faster because certain enemies take less hits to destroy if frozen.
- Certain enemies can be jumped on top of and it will give you a bounce, you can hold down jump to get a maximum bounce or touch nothing and bounce slightly. There is no in between, it's an all or nothing thing. I use this a couple of times to reach ledges that will save me time in later levels.
Author's comments
- Stage 1 - Pretty self explanatory, I took the top route because it's faster then moving all the way to the right and having to zig zag my way up. There is an area near the top where the wind blew me back not allowing me to make the jump until the wind subsided.
- Stage 2 - Self explanatory once again, tried to use the morph ball as much as possible to get through the level quickly.
- Stage 3 - I went out of the way slightly to grab the invincibility because it allowed me to get through that small passage faster than shooting through it since there wasn't any room to jump on the enemies.
- Stage 4 - Had a lot of fun with this one because I was forced to fit into tight places like when I froze the bomb over head at the beginning, bounced off the enemy barely avoiding the falling bomb (which have very strange hit boxes, you can be an entire character length above them when they are falling and still be hit). This is also the first stage where I used the morph ball to move through enemies near the end.
- Stage 5 - Very short stage compared to the rest, I like how it came out because the stage is beaten very quickly.
- Stage 6 - Another fun stage to do, once again I had to squeeze in a few places, went a little out of the way to grab an invincibility so that I can make the jumps much faster since the enemies were at the edge of the ledge, the boss was annoying mainly because it takes so long before you can even hit him.
- Stage 7 - Didn't like the snow stages much because you have to build momentum to get going and the annoying snow balls getting in the way, it doesn't seem as quick as the other stages because of this but it still turned out nicely.
- Stage 8 - Probably my 2nd least liked stage, it's a linear stage and having to make jumps and rebuild the momentum I lose from jumping. There is a ledge in the stage where there was a wind pushing me back towards the end.
- Stage 9 - This one was pretty neat, you catch the up drafts when jumping I had done this stage without using the umbrella monsters because I didn't realize they could be used as ledges, ...V_V. I later discovered that the updrafts will come faster if you reach a higher ledge, so I was able to make them appear faster and ultimately ended in this stage being completed very quickly.
- Stage 10 - Another fun stage, probably the longest, lots of tricks used here by freezing the enemy. I grabbed the bomb that was out of the way for the last boss fight, the bomb knocks off about 25 life (monitored using cheat engine) from the boss, so I may have lost some time getting it but it saved time at the end.
- Stage 11 - Hated this stage, it's an auto-scroller so you can't speed it up, was bored half the time trying to keep the movie entertaining. Basically everything in between the carts is a pit, I did find a small ledge you could stand on down there, so I did =P.
- Stage 12 - The final stage, I liked the stage very much because the invincibilities were all within reach along the way down as were the bombs and power-ups, stage went very smooth considering most of it is going down as the morph ball so it is completed pretty quickly. The last boss was pretty boring, I tested all three weapons and the blue laser shooter seemed to be the strongest when monitoring the bosses life through cheat engine. Pretty boring fight, but the rest of the game makes up for it.
Hope you enjoy it, I had a lot of fun making it.
Bisqwit: Submission ID changed (deleted a dummy submission from between), propagating changes to forums with this dummy edit. Next time, do wait for the submission replace.
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.