- Emulator: Mupen64 rerecording v2
- Abuses programming errors
- Plays at hardest difficulty
- Takes damage to save time
- Manipulates luck
Turok 3 is a bloody first-person shooter with indians (native Americans) as main characters. This sequel takes place in kind of futuristic environments, but there's some jungle too. There's not so many dinosaurs as in the prequels, mostly just weird mutants and monsters. This came out late at the N64 era, so I think the programmers were in a hurry because there's a lot of bugs. For example, once when I was playing the game normally, I fell through the ground and died. You can also walk through doors often before they have fully opened.
The game desyncs a lot, so if you TAS it, you have to play back the whole movie from the beginning to be sure that it doesn't desync. You can use fast forward though. Generally it desyncs after less than 30 seconds. I used the 'antidesync' Mupen, but it didn't seem like it desynced less.
Before I actually start the game, I turn off auto-aim to be able to do headshots more easily. I also put on high resolution because it makes the text look better. I use Danielle because she can jump higher and has the grappling hook, so she can take shortcuts which save several minutes. Joseph walks a little faster, but most shortcuts don't work with him. Like in several other N64 FPSs (like Goldeneye), strafing simultaneously while walking forward is faster than just walking forward, so I do that all the time.
There's a lot of small shortcuts (see the video annotations) and a few major sequence breaks. On Chapter 3 for example, you can just jump on top of the dam, instead of proceeding the game normally by collecting pump fuses and filling the dam with water. On chapter 4 there's a way to skip the Warlord miniboss. The biggest sequence break is probably one on chapter 4 which allows me to skip the entire lava section of the level by jumping down from a high place and slowing down my landing with the grapple beam (otherwise you would die). By the way, the beginning of chapter 4 is a remake of the first level on Turok 1.
For more detailed explanations, smaller shortcuts and such, see the annotations on the videos:
Times for the levels:
| Chapter 1 | 7:35 (ingame time is: 6) |
| Chapter 2 | 7:32 (ingame time is: 12) |
| Chapter 3 | 6:43 (ingame time is: 18) |
| Chapter 4 | 6:43 (ingame time is: 24) |
| Chapter 5 | 13:10 (ingame time is: 36) |
Chapters 5 is twice longer than the others because it's the last level, and I didn't find any major shortcuts, like on level 3 and 4 (btw, the times for 3 and 4 are not a spelling error, they just happened to be the same length). For some reason the ingame time is always much slower (like in Super Metroid for example). The time probably doesn't run in cutscenes, but I doubt that alone wouldn't take away 5 minutes.
Times for bosses
| Boss 1: Oblivion Gunship | 0:08 |
| Boss 2: The Xiphias | 0:21 |
| Boss 3: Opisthor | 1:06 |
| Boss 4: Alpha Fireborn | 0:06 |
| Boss 5: Oblivion | 1:42 |
| Boss 6: Joshua | 0:03.3 |
The shotgun is the most powerful weapon for the earlier bosses. After I get the Razorwind there's a trick you can use to kill the bosses faster than in hell. By aiming the razorwind behind the boss, it can get stuck, so that it razors him to death in just a few seconds. The Oblivion boss fight still takes a lot of time though, because he has to recharge his health and I have to let him attack me a few times before it's possible to do damage to him.
The frame count in the m64 file is slightly wrong. It says that it's 150333 frames, but it actually stops already at 150297 (41:44.95), slightly before the last boss is dead.
-
cpadolf: Accepting for publication.
OmnipotentEntity: Encoding.