Kid Chameleon is a game with a large number of warps and teleports; with these you can either skip large portions of the game or get dragged through vast numbers of the game's difficult and frustrating levels. This run chooses the latter.
Goals
- Enter as many levels as possible without repetition
It is impossible to enter all the levels in the game in a single play-through even with re-entering the same levels multiple times. Allowing re-entering only adds 5 relatively uninteresting "Elsewhere" levels and most of them require you to immediately replay the prior level but choosing the second of two side-by-side teleporters. I felt that this would hurt the entertainment value of the movie enough to justify leaving them out.
- Ignore delays caused form unavoidable score tallies
"Unavoidable" in this case references Under Skull Mountain 1 where you can proceed using either a flag or a teleporter. Taking the teleporter gives a longer in level time but avoids the score tally entirely (making it faster in real time). Score tallies are minimised when it doesn't cost time to do so.
- Aims for fastest time
I aimed for the fastest real time, i.e. including helmet transformations and lag, though there was no point where this required more than a couple of in-game frames to be sacrificed for lag reduction.
Techniques and Tricks Used
- Ducking extends your hitbox to both sides allowing you to touch flags earlier and to displace yourself forwards off the bottom of slopes, and in one case use a slope on block past the end of a telepoter to stop myself when moving too quickly to do so otherwise. You can also use this to boost backwards off walls of disappearing blocks, allowing you to trigger then without loosing your speed Note that teleporters always use your standing hitbox so ducking at them doesn't save time generally.
- You can walk on air (or over terrain that would otherwise slow you down) by ducking every other frame. Your speed is locked to whatever it was when you began but you only move every second frame so it is often slower than jumping.
- Pressing the opposite direction on certain frames while jumping allows you to increase your average jumping velocity slightly.
- Jumping as you smash blocks with berserker lets you destroy three blocks instead of two and doesn't reset your ability to smash (which you only gain after holding forwards while moving at 1px/frame or faster for 16 frames) and allows you to accelerate in the air instead of on the ground (which is faster, though you speed is capped lower in air so this isn't true generally).
- If you land moving faster than your maximum velocity and release the forwards d-button you will gradually slow down instead of snapping instantly back to the speed cap. You also decelerate slower on slopes doing this.
Thanks to Truncated, emu, Josh the FunkDOC and nifboy, who found several of the tricks and optimisations I used while TASing this game, and also to Saxman for his level viewing/editing software.
Truncated: Well, everyone seems to agree that this submission is awesome with cream on, so I will accept it. It will be published in a new category.