After reading over Aqfaq's previous submission text and seeing that he thought there were improvements to this already short and simple game, I decided to make an attempt at improving his work. This is an 11 15 frame improvement to the previous movie.
"11 15 frames is all you were able to squeeze?", you say? "You must not have spent much time on this!". Don't let the rerecord count fool you, it's actually close to double what is represented due to me working on separate movie files and testing different routes, etc. The mechanics of the game are very simple: Rolan can move a half block or one full block, and can do nothing while he is moving. When he's stopped, he can swing his sword, use the pickax, and pick his nose (not shown in this movie). Due to this restrictive movement set, TASing this game is all about luck manipulation, and very little about movement (except for the last boss, I'll explain later.) And just in case there are questions, I'll break down everything I discovered by room.
- Room 1-11: Unchanged. In room 12 it is possible to skip the second set of armor (Enemy A), but due to having to wait for the second enemy to drop the health means (only) a single frame is possible to be saved. Yet I pass this opportunity up, for reasons that will become clear soon.
- Room 13: Save 11 frames due to not stopping to kill an enemy.
- Room 14: Waste 15 frames for better set-up for next room.
- Room 15: Gain back all those frames, plus 3 others by slight manipulation of the ghosts.
- Room 17: Lose two frames. I frankly do not know why this occurs, but it happens during the pick-ax drop. No matter how I tried, the fox enemy appears at the same time as in Aqfaq's movie, but dropped the ax two frames slower. I also tried getting the ax from the other two foxes, but they drop power spheres (another weapon).
- Room 18: Pac-man kid!
- Room 19: It's possible to save 11 or 12 frames by not killing the ghost. However if I don't, the health drop in room 20 doesn't appear!
- Room 20: Remember Enemy A? If I don't kill that enemy, the energy drop in this room doesn't appear!
- Rest of rooms - Virtually unchanged.
- Boss- The majority of savings come from the boss. I discovered a neat trick to damaging the boss as fast as possible. Normally, when he's being spammed to death, you are only able to register a hit by swinging your sword every 8th frame. However, two frames after an initial attack, you're able to damage him again, and again 7 frames after that. This pattern is able to be repeated every 10th swing or so. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to gain a lot of time because of his quick attack pattern, and having to avoid taking a hit so that I can deliver the last hit while inside him. He starts with 255 HP at memory address C23E, however the first strike only damages him to 253, and the final hit is delivered when only 1 HP is left. Also, throughout the boss I saved 2 frames of lag, making a grand total of 1 frame saved in-game, 12 frames saved during the boss, and 2 frames saved due to lag.
I wish that I'd been able to make this a more different run than previously, but because the character actions are so restricted, any sort of luck manipulation is nearly impossible because of the time it takes to move to/kill an enemy. If someone more adept at RAM watching can figure out exactly how the randomness of the item drops works, there is the possibility to save another ~15 frames by not killing the ghost in room 19 and one or two other single frame savers. However, I tried several different combinations of enemy deaths, and at least one of the last two energy drops always failed to show up during each scenario.
Anyway, I hope someone enjoys the improvement of this quicky glitched game. Let me know if you have any questions.
mmbossman: I reworked the boss fight and managed to squeeze another 4 frames out, bringing the total savings to 15 frames. I also replaced the submission file to reflect these changes.
Nach: Accepting as improvement to existing run.
sgrunt: Processing.