Submission #4966: Jules's Genesis Superman in 14:32.54

This TAS obsoletes the current movie by Highness by 4011 frames, or 1 minute and 6 seconds.

(Note: this game has a lot of flickering sprites that don't show up here. Sorry about that.)

Superman on the Sega Genesis is a 1992 game made by Sunsoft. Despite good music and graphics, the game is astonishingly difficult and has awful collision detection and controls. It was not well regarded upon its release and these days it is generally ignored in favor of Sunsoft's better movie-licensed games. The game features both platform and autoscroller levels spread out over 5 "rounds". Superman's powers are not used much in this game, which was a frequent target of criticism. I had never played this game before I chose to TAS it but since I'm done I can now say that the negative reviews are totally right. This game is really not good. Between this and Superman 64, it appears poor old Superman has quite bad luck with video games.

I decided to take up this game because I felt like improving another run to further improve my TASing skills. Running this game seemed right as the current run is nearly 12 years old, nobody else had ever tried to improve it since the publication, and the game looked like it could be a good challenge to beat optimally. This game isn't super tricky to TAS but there are often moments where the clumsy controls really get in the way and make it hard to complete levels as fast as possible. I ended up redoing many segments of this run even if only to save a handful of frames just because the run kept looking unoptimized when I'd play it back even if it really wasn't.

Generally, the biggest improvement over Highness simply comes from far tighter play. This game doesn't really lag and there's only a few instances that require luck to be manipulated, so I didn't expect much to come from those areas. However Highness' movie is full of tiny mistakes throughout. They aren't that noticeable (for the most part) but definitely start to add up as you go through the game with some being bigger than others. I also made an effort to control Superman far more aggressively, taking much more damage in boss fights to inflict more damage faster.

Round 1: If you've watched Highness' movie you'll notice that I punch more enemies instead of jumping over them. This saves quite a bit of time because Superman's running xspeed is much faster than his jumping xspeed and it happens throughout the run, saves quite a bit of time. For the most part this level was quite simple. The boss is being hit on the first frame every time, even though it doesn't seem that way because for some reason the enemy blinking animations last shorter than the actual invincibility periods in this game.

Round 2: No, avoiding damage in that green pool of acid isn't possible. There's a weird moment in Highness' movie where he stops to slowly break two doors in order to free a group of children. This isn't needed to beat the level, it just gives you bonus points, so I skip it. Sorry kids! The miniboss just needs his health depleted to a certain amount before fleeing. I was able to defeat him after only one jump, over Highness who needed two. The subway station is damn near impossible in real time. I mean, just look at all those enemies, even a TAS looks like it's struggling <_<. Highness got bad luck on the boss. In his movie the boss briefly hops offscreen and Highness can't hurt him. I managed to avoid it.

Round 3: The autoscroller sections speak for themselves. That moment where I walk through the level slowly is just me goofing off because my spin meter has to fill up again before I can progress, so I figured I'd have a casual stroll, lol. The boss is incredibly uninteresting, it just flies around shooting lasers that are easy to dodge, and like many other enemies in this game it has way too much hp.

Round 4: This level kind of speaks for itself because it's entirely an autoscroller save for that miniboss. The boss fight is a little tricky. I chose to defeat two of the cannons at once, in my tests I discovered it came out faster. The time-saver comes from the fact that destroying two cannons and then focusing on two more means you do not have to deal with dodging the other two cannon's projectiles while killing off the others, allowing for a more aggresive approach.

Round 5: The final level! Some time was saved by avoiding damage at certain parts, and those green lizard things were destroyed much faster, but overall not much to say. The autoscroller sections aren't really great here because they retain the physics from the previous section rather than the ones in round 4 so slick movement is nearly impossible. The final boss was defeated much faster in this run. He teleports away for a while and three of his clones fly around the screen before you can hurt him and this takes a while. I destroyed him after only four of these, while Highness took longer. It accounts for over 1/4 of the total improvement.

Well, I'm pretty glad that this is over. Although I found this game fun to TAS at first, it definitely became taxing by the end, and I'm glad that I can now focus on games that don't horribly annoy me :D This game is in the Vault, but I still like TASes of it. I think if more people knew how hard this game was they'd be more receptive to its runs. :P

Special thanks to Highness for his work on this game!

Samsara: Judging.

Samsara: Accepting as an improvement to the published run.

sheela901: I'm going to take this one.