Submission #5003: Alyosha's NES Konami Wai Wai World in 30:49.59

Wai Wai World is a Japan only platformer by Konami which features characters and elements from their previous games. The game is notable for it's two player mechanics allowing you to change which character you use in real time to match the situation at hand. The current run is a 362 frame improvement over the old run by fuzi2, primarily from extensive lag reduction.

The route in this run is essentially unchanged from the original. It was already quite optimal in terms of general strategy and detailed routing. Basically, the cape is gotten first in order to get the attack damage power up right away, which makes all characters deal double damage. After that it's just a matter of getting everyone and beating the game.

I originally thought it would be pretty easy to go through fuzi2's run and make corrections similar to my usual style. But that was completely wrong and I ended up redoing pretty much every non-trivial part of the run. Even though it looks rather similar to the original, this run is none the less a significant modification, not to mention on a more modern emulator.

Edge clipping: Positioning your character just right will allow you to clip onto an edge and jump over it, this allows the level with the cape to be completed first.

Boosting: In tight corridors, you can get a boost with a careful character switch.

Back jumping / walking: with one blank frame, you can instantly turn around to attack or jump while still moving in the other direction, useful throughout the run. A variation of this is that if you change characters while holding the opposite direction, your new character will appear while facing that direction.

Jumping through ceilings: If you stack your characters and jump high enough, the character on top will clip a little bit into the ceiling above you, you then have 1 frame to jump again and get through the ceiling.

Luck manipulation: Any action changes RNG, and it is very easy to get what you want, just punch or jump a few frames before the item spawns to change it. Very critical for getting health drops.

Despawning enemies: Often times you can save lag by despawning enemies. If you defeat an enemy and can keep the item they drop on screen, it will take up a slot and prevent other enemies from spawning. This is an extensively used trick. Almost any time you see an item left behind it is to despawn other enemies.

Spawns and attack patterns: These can be manipulated similarly to health drops, just jump, punch and kick until you get what you want, although the options here are more limited.

The stages are all similar. Find a key to rescue your trapped friend in each level (except the first where no key is needed.) The boss has the key so beat them, rescue your friend, and exit the level. Some stages have hidden teleporters which save a lot of time and backtracking.

Stage 1: Many lag frames saved, probably the most difficult part of the run.

Stage 2-6: I gained and lost frames pretty much everywhere. Emulation differences sapped a lot of my savings, as screen transitions often took 1 frame longer. I did save a good amount of time on the Moai Head boss though.

Stage 7: This autoscroller I tried to pull the jets back so you can see a bit what is actually going on. I also slowed down the constant flying around since it seemed distracting to me. I don't know how entertaining it is but at least I didn't just stand there!

Stage 8: I saved the most in this stage, different strategies for enemy despawns really added up.

Well this run turned into quite a challenging project. Having to redo pretty much everything for only about 6 seconds of savings was neither fun or rewarding. But this needed to be done and now it is!

Samsara: Updated the movie file with a file that reaches the credits.

Samsara: "Are you judging this, Samsara?" "Eh, Wai not?"

Samsara: Accepting as an improvement to the published run. Really impressive work.

feos: Вай вай какой харощий!