This is a movie of a game based on a movie about movies. Neat.
Game Objectives
- Aims for fastest time
- Manipulates luck
- Genre: Platform (a pretty bad one)
- No damage
General Info
Most of what can be said about this run is better put in the soft subtitles, so I'll try and be brief here.
This game's main mechanic is collecting movie tickets to do various arbitrary and wholly unexplained things throughout the levels. All of this done by out hero, Jack Slater (woo).
Jack has two attacks: punches which deal 1 HP of damage, and roundhouse kicks which deal 2 HP damage. Guess which one I want to use. Regardless, the roundhouse kicks have an animation that puts Jack in a position to get hit easily. (Spoilers: getting hit NEVER saves time in this game, trust me.) I'll get into why this is important in a second.
There are two types of enemies in this game. Mullet thugs, which have 6 HP and have three different attacks (two of which they'll never be doing in this TAS). The second is these bat-wielding ushers (?) that have 1 HP. Believe it or not these guys are introduced much later than the mullet thugs. In the mullet thugs' case 3 roundhouse kicks are always optimal to use, but I have to manipulate their RNG to allow Jack to kick them 3 times without taking damage. This is a theme in Scenes 1 and 7 as you'll see.
A final bit of general movement info is Jack's jumping. Jumping must be kept to what is absolutely necessary. Running and jumping on its own has no penalty, but landing keeps Jack on the ground for 10 frames. Minimizing jumps was a huge priority in the platforming sections, obviously. There's also a point where once Jack reaches a certain distance in his jump, he'll fall straight down. This is a minor note but I figured I'd mention it.
Small Optimizations Throughout the Platforming Scenes
- If you have to jump and start running in the opposite direction you were running before, it's faster to turn while in mid-air than it is to turn on the ground.
- I make sure to run through barriers on the first frame they are taken down.
- Some tickets are out of range at first and I made sure to grab them the first frame that they are reachable.
- I manipulate the luck of enemies to allow Jack to attack them without taking damage.
Driving stages
- I aim to attain a booster that constantly boosts me 1 extra ppf (essentially a 50% movement boost) as soon as possible
- I manipulate object/ticket spawns to do this. This includes destroying cars that yield a ticket to not only obtain said ticket, but also manipulate the spawns.
Possible improvements
There are two thugs that kept giving me problems. One at the end of scene 1 and one in scene 7. I had to waste time dodging a punch in order to get three kicks in. Changing or delaying my attack or walking up to those enemies slower to change their patterns ended up being a few frames slower than what I ended up doing, or put me in a position to take damage. Ducking doesn't work for dodging a punch or the thugs' ground fireball attack (I don't let them do this at all in this TAS) and forcing them to use their gun and waiting for them to finish that attack, while dodgeable, would end up being much slower given how slow that attack his. So my best option was to run away from the punch slightly and kick them like I did. I actually restarted this TAS 3 times and redid scene 7 twice due to this being a problem in previous attempts.
As far as the driving stages, I think scene 6 is fine as it is (seeing as ticket drops were stupidly easy to get right at the beginning) but scene 3 I wish I could've destroyed less cars. Maybe there are possible improvements in the future as this game is examined more and RNG can be controlled more precisely. Given what I know now, though, the slight stops do justify themselves by getting the booster as soon as I do. The booster in scene 3 saves about 8.5 seconds and I lost a little less than 3 seconds to stops for destroying cars.
Other Comments
Since this is my first submission I want to say thank you to ForegoneMoose, nitsuja and Cpadolf. They were some of the first TASers I watched which ended up getting me into TASing in general.
I also have an .srt file for subtitles..
feos: Accepting to Moons.
RGamma: Publishing...