Submission #4139: heldtogetherwithtape's GG Mega Man in 14:31.19

Mega Man (for the Game Gear that is) TAS by heldtogetherwithtape

Dr. Wily is at it again, trying to take over the world with a group of robots. However, this time around he ran low on funding to build new robot masters, so in an effort to avoid maxing out his expense account, he decided to recycle some of his previous robots and set up his new castle in Quick Man's stage. It's up to Mega Man to defeat them again and save the day!

Mega Man for the Game Gear, as mentioned above, uses robot masters that appear in other games similar to how the Game Boy Mega Man games do. However, unlike the Game Boy games that have their own unique stages, the Game Gear game takes the robot masters and their stages, and leaves them relatively unchanged. Dr. Wily doesn't even get his own stage in this game, instead they copied in Quick Man's stage from Mega Man 2. Like most Mega Man games, it starts out with a level select for the robot masters (In this case they are Stone Man, Napalm Man, Bright Man, and Star Man) and once they're defeated you get to move on to Dr. Wily's stages (Which happen to be Wave Man's, Toad Man's, and Quick Man's stages). Also like most Mega Man games, there are some abusable glitches to help speed things up, mainly in Stone Man's stage (see Stone Man's stage comments for details).

The route for the pre-Wily stages I chose was Star Man -> Bright Man -> Napalm Man -> Stone Man

I decided on going with Star Man's stage first from some 12% speed test runs that I had done before my initial 12% speed test run. Star Man's stage was the shortest of the four stages, so I chose the shortest first stage in order to have boss weapons for the subsequent stages. Much like Star Man's Mega Man 5 stage, this stage features some fun low gravity in order to make jumps a pain in the butt to do effectively. After the first walker robot, I take damage across the length of the spike pit in order to slide across as much of it as I can. The fight goes by fairly quickly with charged buster shots, only taking damage at the very end of the fight where it won't affect the length of the fight. I do that for pretty much all of the fights in order to be as close as possible while delivering the final hit.

Bright Man's stage starts out by immediatly breaking the lighting of the stage by a well timed kill of the fireworks bot and the flying lightbulb. This causes the lighting to stop transitioning part way through and makes it so that killing the flying lightbulbs or the fireworks bots won't affect the lights. The grasshopper sections show off Rush Coil for the first time in order to save time there by making my own platforms. Rush Coil is also used to save time at the ladders by jumping off of Rush at his highest point. Bright Man's fight consists of some very simple jumping and dodging, until he kills him self by landing on Mega Man.

Napalm Man's stage almost would have had some zipping in it had it not been slower to do so. In the room with the sand falls, for some reason one of the helicopter Joe's had glitched graphics, I have no idea why though. Napalm Man's boss fight was really boring to record, all I did was turbo the shoot button and the blinking light killed him for me. I really don't have much to say about this stage.

Stone Man's stage contains some fun abuses of Rush Coil, probably most notable are the ceiling clips and the screen wrap. I discovered how to enter the ceiling back in August of this year by jumping randomly off of rush underneath the first ceiling in Stone Man's stage. More specifically, to enter the ceiling you need to jump off of Rush ~3 frames from the ceiling while holding left or right(it can vary a frame or two depending on how far from the ceiling the floor Rush is bounding from is) You will land on rush and he will proceed to push you up into the ceiling. From there you can press jump again to jump through the ceiling, or press left to start zipping to the left. You can zip to the right if the ceiling is only one block thick, however, I wasn't able to find anywhere I could do that and save time. From there I discovered that if the ceiling is thin enough, you can clip all way through it instead of just zipping leftward. About half way through the stage, after the ceiling clips and the zip, I switch to the Star Crash in order to protect myself from the annoying flying robots in the above ground section, since they are hard to get rid off or dodge without losing time with just the Mega Buster. Since the Star Crash protects all sides, it makes the bots from above less of a problem too. The final glitch used in this stage is the screen wrap into the pre-shudder room. The wrap is simple to do, just place Rush Coil on the ledge by the ladder, jump on Rush, and ride him all the way up to the top of the ladder. This triggers the room transition, but keeps Mega Man at the top of the screen, letting you slide across the flat area above the top. Stone Man's fight ends almost as soon as it starts.

Ugh, this stage. I didn't like this stage very much, the bubbles and the auto scroller ruined it for me. It felt like there was a ton of waiting periods. In the jet-ski section I went for max kills, I think pacifism there wouldn't be as entertaining. There was a ton of crazy jumping needed in order to pull off max kills too, so that made it feel less monotonous. The game designers decided to make Wave Man only weak to the Mega Buster, and as a result, Stone Man's weapon never gets used in this run.

Toad Man's stage was a bit of a stalling point for me for a couple of reasons. The first was because just as I was getting to it, my college classes started up and ate up most of my free time. Then I got a part time job maybe two or three weeks into the semester, which ate up the rest of my free time. It wasn't until winter break that I had the motivation to pick this run up again. The water hazards in this stage made things both fun and annoying to do. The rain and wind in the first section of the stage made jumps annoying to do because of the hangtime needed to jump acrossed the smallest of gaps. The currents, while not as annoying, made it difficult to plan out my shots in order to a path for myself because they'd give Mega Man enough of a speed boost to where he'd outslide the buster shots and reach the enemies before the shots would. Towards the end of the stage in the underwater section, I take damage in order to slide across the spikes, much similar to how I do in Star Man's stage. Toad Man's fight was a little bit of a stopping point for me. Because of the Water Wave's inability to be used while not on the ground, I tested out using charged Buster shots against Toad Man instead of the Water Wave. From my test, it ended up being .44 seconds slower to use charged Buster shots, so the Water Wave actually gets used.

Quick Man's stage serves as the final level of the game, with a changes to it. The Force Beams in Quick Man's stage no longer kill in one hit, allowing Mega Man to take two hits from them before dieing. Quick Man is also not present, and getting to the shudders triggers a guided scene that takes you to the next part of the stage. Once you get to the second area of the final stage, it's just a hallway with a turret and a teleporter at the end. The teleporter leads to the final fight against Dr. Wily in his fancy teleporting capsule. The Wily Capsule isn't extremely weak against the Rain Flush, so charged Buster shots are used instead because they deal 4 damage instead of 2 to Wily, so that makes both Power Stone and Rain Flush completely useless in this game.

MISSION PERFECT!

I had a ton of fun workin on this run, even at it's most tedious points. I don't know if I'll make another TAS after this, but who knows, maybe I will someday. I will acknowledge that there are some improvements that could be made towards the very beginning of the TAS, however, by the time they were brought up I had just finished Toad Man's stage, and at that point I didn't want to go all the way back to the start of the run and potentially restart because of changes to enemy and boss behaviors due to the RNG.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Noxxa: Judging.

Noxxa: This movie appears sloppy in many places, as has been noted as well as shown by multiple audience members. This movie demonstrates it's possible to save 194 frames on the bossfight with Star Man alone, just by using a more consistent strategy. This shows there is a fair amount of improvement possible, and the run currently appears too sloppy to accept. Rejecting for this reason.