It's been a while since I've submitted something, so... here's something:). This tas improves the current movie by chupapi by 2954 frames. The majority of the improvement comes from faster movement in the tunnel sequence and a faster route during the final level but there are other minor tricks that I'll explain later.
Objectives
- Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.3
- Aims for fastest time
- Manipulates luck
Improvements
- In the jungle level there is a frame rule for when the animation for traversing screens begins (every 10 frames or so). If you try to move on a frame where movement is not registered your character will freeze in place for a few frames before the animation begins. Optimizing this frame rule, plus manipulating more enemies not to appear (jumping/turning around to shoot costs frames) saved about 3 seconds in this leve.
- In the sewer stage it is much, much faster to move by tapping up as opposed to holding it like in the published tas. Also by strategically pausing for a frame you can ensure that no enemies appear unlike in the current run which wastes time killing them.
- The movement in the final level is much improved largely by manipulating luck to get the enemies to shoot differently and away from the player. A new route is taken that reaches the final boss much quicker than the previous movie. Also I managed to kill the final boss without dying so unlike the previous TAS I can just walk to the end of the game without having to respawn.
Misc
Well, this game is still boring... but it's under 8 minutes now. I'd like to thank chupapi for his movie, also AKheon for finding some glitches which inspired me to try TASing it to see if any were implementable. Unfortunately not, but the run still ending up being much faster, so I guess everything worked out.
Noxxa: Replaced movie file with an 1133-frame improvement and accepting as an improvement to the published movie.
thecoreyburton: Processing.