Submission #5419: coolpapa's NES Adventures of Dino Riki in 18:51.90

This is a playthrough of The Adventures of Dino Riki, for the NES. It's an autoscrolling shoot 'em up, so the main optimization for speed is in the boss fights. In the main levels, the focus is on dodging enemies and shots rather than killing enemies, aiming for a high entertainment factor.

This is a (hopefully) much improved play of Dino Riki. The boss fights have been optimized much better in this movie, and I have focused on trying to make the levels as entertaining as possible by showing lots of dodging and running around like crazy, rather than just standing and shooting at enemies. I think that the boomerangs, the weapon I use in this run, provide the fastest possible boss fights. The torch weapon (the next level up) only gives the advantage of letting you have one more shot on screen at a time, but those shots fire in a wide arc, with the direction of each shot not directly under the player's control. And since you can stand just a few pixels in front of the boss, the added projectiles aren't really helpful.

The first stage starts a little slow, since not a lot of dodging is possible until you pick up a few speed upgrades. At the beginning of the level, I jump around a lot, since the movement speed in the air is a flat 2 pixels per frame (independent of speed upgrades), while you start moving 1 pixel per frame on the ground (which increases with boots). The max speed is 4 pixels per frame, after 3 speed upgrades, which I get up to relatively quickly. Near the middle of the stage, there's a "platforming" section where you have to jump across a lot of lily pads. The game doesn't give you enemies to dodge while you do that, so Riki gets a little bored and starts singing along to the theme music. You should sing with him - he'll even count out your entrance (1...2...1,2,3,4!) In the second jumping section, I use a set of wings to fly over the water, so the game sends some enemies to dodge. (Downside is that you're back to that 2 pixels per frame in the air, so the dodging is a bit slower than usual.) You may notice I bounce off the water once at the beginning and end of the flight with the wings - for some reason if you have wings, the game lets you rejump the frame you hit the water or ground, when it reads you as not in the air anymore, but also not dying in the water yet - more on that later. Finally, this first boss fight I think might actually be frame perfect. I have 5 shots in the air as the boss is coming on screen - they all hit the boss, starting from his first frame of vulnerability. Then I fire a shot every other frame (starting as soon as the first shot hits) and they all hit the boss - the last one hits on the frame the shot comes out. (There's some trickiness to doing consistent damage to the boss, there are a few frames where he overlaps with the terrain in back, but if Riki is up against the terrain in a certain spot, you can still hit the boss - I think it registers the collision with the boss first and counts as a hit, even though the shot spawns in the terrain - somehow it works.) So I think that's as fast as it can go unless there is a way to control the torch weapon better and have 6 shots in the air as the boss is coming in that all manage to hit him.

Not a whole lot to say about this one. There are some new types of enemies, which create some new possibilities for dodging patterns. The hitboxes of the flames from the fire-breathing lion things are pretty weird, which I play around with a little. The boss here is pretty optimized - the issue is that he shoots flames from his mouth that block his shots, so I think just button-mashing through them is just about optimal. I do the same trick of having 5 shots in the air as the boss appears, and then just button mash through the rest. It might be possible to do some fancy dodging of the boss's shots and save a couple of frames, but probably not many.

This level introduces one of the most annoying enemies in the game - there's a ring of black spheres that circle around you and close in on you until you kill them. They're not too hard to kill with a decent weapon, but they're annoying since they simply can't be dodged (AFAIK). The third boss I am more confident is optimized - similarly to boss 2, he shoots flames that you have to shoot through to get to him. He shoots 5 shots in the time it takes to kill him, so only 10 frames are lost to those shots. Again, there's an outside chance that fancy dodging can let you avoid a flame rather than killing it, but that's AT MOST 10 frames that could be saved.

Stage 4 revisits all the environments of the first 3 stages, and makes you fight all the bosses again. 4-1 has more flying going on - this time I went ahead to show off the maximal weirdness of the wings. I actually just jump my way across the second stretch of water, skimming across the water with every jump, which only works if you have wings (even though at the end, I still have the wings!). The 4-1 boss is exactly the same as the first - I'm pretty sure it can't be improved. 4-3 has another brief musical section - this time Riki's tossing the boomerang sound effect into the mix, which kinda sounds like a hi-hat...if you're not picky. The final boss of the game feels like it could be improved. When he overlaps with the terrain in back, there are some frames where I could not figure out how to register a hit on him - this is when I back up and get 5 shots in the air for when he's vulnerable again - I just couldn't find a way around these frames.

There are a few points in the run where I fire an extra shot - I was going to edit them out of the movie, but I stupidly planned to do it at the very end, and then changing the first level screwed up the later RNG somehow. So please forgive a stray shot or two, and enjoy!

feos: Judging...

feos: Submission replaced with the one that has the final boss fight. Also trimmed the trailing empty frames.