- takes damage to save time
- manipulates luck
- glitch abuse
Time to prepare your barf bags, for here comes... a speed-TAS of Mortal Kombat 4 for GBC!
In my honest opinion, this is one of the worst fighting games ever made, if not the worst. Everything about the game is a travesty. From the unresponsive controls to the horrendous presentation to the piss-poor enemy A.I. to the slowdown to the random freezes, the game manages to suck in practically every aspect imaginable. It's even worse than Mortal Kombat Advance, and that's saying a lot.
I'm having strong doubts if you could ever make a good, entertaining playaround for this game - starting from the fact that it's torture to experience any part of it with any of your senses - but at least a speed-TAS of it is mercifully short. A large part of the run's brevity comes from a glitch in Scorpion's teleport punch, doing multiple times the damage it should if you're close enough to your opponent. A fight can at best end in only three hits. However...
A fast fight also needs something more. For one, the teleport punch damage varies due to the bizarre hit detection this game has. I couldn't always help it. Also, you need to take some damage per round to prevent the "Flawless Victory"-message from showing up, which wastes over 2 seconds each time. So, enemies had to be manipulated to quickly hit you at some point during the barrages of teleport punch.
As for manipulation techniques, I mostly used blocking and d-pad presses after a teleport punch. Another way to manipulate things is to wait frames in the Kombat Kode-screen before a fight starts. I found I had the most difficulties in manipulation in the first two fights.
This run is admittedly not perfect, but I think it is good enough for a first-edition TAS. It's a great improvement in strategies and precision over my test TAS, at least.
feos: This is such an awful game people especially enjoyed the shortness of its run. Wow. The submission met 66% of Yes votes unexpectedly. However, this is not enough of a gap to get to Moons (people are uncertain if this content is really good, or just odd). How much superplay does this run present? I see no superplay here. The only fun thing to me is the "Finish him" move. Let this be a good Vault run rather than a bad Moons run.