Double Dragon for Commodore 64
Billy and Jimmy must fight the Black Warriors gang in ord...oh forget it. I think most of us probably know this game's premise.
This submission is a redo after a better strat for fighting Abobo was was pointed out. In re-working the original submission using that strat, I discovered a glitch that allows you to control the horizontal flight of Abobo's body after he gets hit. Specifically the control is available from the 13th frame to the 26th frame after the button press for hitting him. This glitch strat allowed me to position him in ideal locations for the next hit with minimal wait time between hits. Unfortunately this glitch doesn't work for other enemies. I then re-re-worked the run using the glitch strat to save even more time.
The following is from the original submission.
Port Info.
There are two licensed ports of Double Dragon on the C64; one published by Ocean and the other by Melbourne House. This run is the Ocean version. Both ports are generally considered mediocre to poor quality ports. From what I can find online, the Ocean ports seems to be the one with the slightly more positive reviews. These generally revolve around increased combat attack options. Unfortunately this port is one player only. From what I understand, the other has the 2-player co-op option. Perhaps I'll look into a TAS of the Melbourne House port for comparison.
TAS Notes
- BizHawk 1.13.0 with default settings.
- Game is a cartridge version.
- Aims for fastest completion.
- Game can only be played with either SFX or Music...this run uses music.
- Frustratingly, Billy can't access about 1/5 of either side of the screen resulting some waiting on enemies.
- Reverse elbows seemed to be the fastest way to KO opponents. Thankfully this and all other moves are available from the start.
- EVERYONE moves SLOOOOOOOWLY in this game.
- The few times it appears that Billy speeds up his walking from area to area seems to be related to lag frames. I could not reproduce this at any other points in the game.
- Sometimes knocking enemies off an edge takes longer than just beating them up because with how slow they walk, it takes forever for them to get in a position to be knocked off the edge.
- The final boss has no weapon and is the same character model as any other foe (Abobo excluded), he just takes more knock downs to KO. Further movement after his demise is necessary to complete the level and trigger endgame scene.
- ABOBO WEARS SUNGLASSES!!
Final Thought
This port definitely does not live up to the quality of other systems ports. It is what it is.
feos: I guess it needs me.
feos: It's a game with weird engine. I guess it's hard to make a smooth beat-'em-up game with nice mechanics on a system like C64. As a result, it's not obvious what action wastes time and what doesn't. So I went ahead and just tested myself the places where the run looks sloppy.
Last time my tests helped to find a cool glitch, this time what caused my suspicion was the place before the second boss. The player leaves two enemies (that take a lot of hits) on different sides, waiting for each of them every time, as they get knocked back after every hit. I thought about manipulating them to be on one side, and instead of waiting for both to close up, walking at them and hitting them at a higher frequency. The first test saves 98 frames. I consider it a major drawback for a game where most of the time you have no way to speed up the fights.
Rejecting for sub-optimality.